Wow. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gets nominated for Best Picture. If this wins, it’s Crash all over again — proof positive that Academy voters are drooling morons. To be clear, Benjamin Button was only mildly annoying — it wasn’t aggresively stupid and bad as Crash was, but it suffered from missing every opportunity to go deeper. And it certainly doesn’t strike me as best picture material. If you’re going to go with special-effects laden movie for the category, why not Dark Knight or Iron Man?
Crash, of course, was much worse — a case where the voters were so easily impressed by supposedly deep themes that they awarded Best Picture to one of the worst films I’ve ever seen, a film so bad that I think someone finally “succeeded” with that 100-chimps-with-100-typewriters experiment. Actually I guess I’m insulting the chimps by comparing them to Paul Haggis.
Be sure to check out The Curious Case of Forrest Gump.
KEN WHEATON 
I didn’t think Forrest Gump should have won best picture the *first* time around. I mean…great film and all, but Pulp Fiction should have won.
Personally, I am irritated that The Wrestler didn’t even get a nomination for Best Picture. What horseshit this is.
This could be a case where, people think it’s a great film because they think they are supposed to think it’s a great film. I’m reminded of the true case of a “modern art” painting that museum patrons marveled at until someone pointed out that it was hanging upside down.
And I have to strenuously disagree with Tom. I thought Pulp Fiction was deserving enough of the screenwriting Oscar, but in terms of Best Picture, I thought it was one of the worst entries that year, except for maybe Four Weddings and a Funeral. PF was smug and self-aware, and hung its hat on a non-linear (and in my opinion, unnecessarily so) structure and Tarrantino’s quirky dialogue. Fourteen years later, I don’t think it holds up nearly as well as some of the others (although it does have that cult film status). For my money, the winner that year should have been The Shawshank Redemption.
In case anyone cares, here’s the info on that painting:
NORRIS AND ROSS MCWHIRTER’S 10 BEST ODDITIES
The Upside Down Record. “The longest period of time for which a modern painting has hung upside down in a public gallery unnoticed is 47 days. This occurred to Le Bateau, by Henri Emile Benoit Matisse (1869-1954) of France, in the Museum of Modern Art, New York City, between October 18 and December 4, 1961. In this time 116,000 people had passed through the gallery.”
“If you only see one version of Forrest Gump this year, make it…The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
Man, that’s great.
Hey…I just thought of something. If Benjamin Button wins and this copycat movie thing becomes a trend, maybe I’ll finally be able to sell those screenplays I wrote: Apollo 14, The Seventh Sense, and Giant Sinking Boat
for me, the whole academy awards thing lost it when Shakespear in Love won Best Picture. it was like a made-for-TV movie. it was so bad.
I always felt Alexander Payne’s Election was so overlooked especially compared to the totally annoying American Beauty – where everyone is a cliche. In Election, people looked like real people and lived in real houses and it was just so damn good.