With 6 days to go until the big show, let's play like we did with 8 days, and look at the Best Picture nominees with that particular number of nominations. Three movies received six nominations this time though they'll facing off less directly and only in the marquee categories at that. Nevertheless, remove the other nominees from the equation for this exercize and tell us who wins in these particular face-offs...
| HACKSAW RIDGE | LION | MANCHESTER |
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| Picture | Picture | Picture |
| Director | Director | |
| Actor Andrew Garfield |
Actor Casey Affleck |
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| Supporting Actress Nicole Kidman |
Supporting Actress Michelle Williams |
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| Supporting Actor Dev Patel |
Supporting Actor Lucas Hedges |
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| Adapted Screenplay | ||
| Original Screenplay | ||
| Cinematography | ||
| Film Editing | ||
| Original Score | ||
| Sound Mixing | ||
| Sound Editing | ||
MORE AFTER THE JUMP
Unlike the game we played with our 8 nominee films, we're not going to try to find Oscar twins here. That would be literally hundreds and hundreds of films to sift through (the lower the nomination count, the more chance of twins with the exact same set of nominations given that the less nominations a film acquires the more company it has in movie history. But I did briefly peruse a few recent Oscar years to look for twins. The closest I got was Spotlight to Manchester, though its off by one category (Editing instead of Lead Actor)
So for fun, because we're all about being generous with the goodies each day, here is what's happening at the 20:16 mark in each picture. Twenty minutes and 16 seconds into these movies here's what you get...
I just hope that when our Hal gets shot it's through the front of his jacket like a simple entry wound - not much mess. Artie got hit in the back, blew most of his gut and intestines out his front. Awful everywhere -- wrecked his uniform entirely.
In Hacksaw Ridge we're still in the super strangely directed pre-war Americana scenes where Hugo Weaving is breaking down at the dinner table angry with his son for enlisting in the war. This speech is gut wrenching (literally) and Mel will later make sure we see all those "gut and intestines" wrecking multiple entire uniforms.
[no dialogue, children screaming]
In the 20th minute of Lion, little Saroo is already lost in Calcutta and he's running from officers of some sort who are trying to catch the homeless children who live in the train and subway stations. He doesn't even speak Bengali so he can't communicate with the officers or the other lost children.
It's a gradual deteriotation of the muscles of the heart.
By the 20th minute of Manchester we're in a flashback to when the family is first receiving the news that Joe (the typically great Kyle Chandler), who has just died as the movie begins, has a faulty heart that will one day kill him. Though Lonergan isn't fond of poetic language the way some prestigious playwrights are (like, say, August Wilson in Fences which is also nominated for Best Picture) -- preferring every day vernacular and less heightened prose, this is still frank and brutal poetic foreshadowing of the condition of the whole movie as we'll learn over and over again how broken the hearts of all the principal characters are.
Do these snapshots remind you of how you felt about each movie or do they feel non-representative?