Cinema Student

Predict the Winners 2008

2009-02-22T14:21:00.000-08:00

Picture - Slumdog Millionaire
Director - Danny Boyle
Actor - Sean Penn; Mickey Rourke in close second.
Actress - Tough category. They’re all amazing (except for Angelina, of course). I’m going with Kate Winslet, though. It’s her time.
Supporting Actor - Heath Ledger, no contest.
Supporting Actress - Viola Davis is the best, but Penelope Cruz is likely to win. Marisa Tomei in close second.
Original Screenplay - Milk or Wall-E (my vote)
Adapted Screenplay - Slumdog Millionaire
Animated Feature - Wall-E
Foreign - Waltz With Bashir
Documentary - Man On Wire
Editing - Slumdog Millionaire
Cinematography - Slumdog Millionaire
Art Direction - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Costume Design - The Duchess
Makeup - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Score - Slumdog Millionaire
Song - Jai Ho (My Fave)
Visual Effects - The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Sound Editing - Tough. The Dark Knight or Wall-E. Maybe Slumdog Millionaire.
Sound Mixing - Hard to Say. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button or The Dark Knight. Maybe Wall-E.
Live Action Short - I’m currently in love with The Pig; I really like New Boy, and I think On the Line has great potential to become a feature, however, I’m going with Toyland. You’ll just have to see it. See all of them.
Animated Short - I absolutely adore Lavatory - Lovestory, but no one can beat Disney & Pixar (usually). Presto.
Documentary Short - The Witness - From the Balcony of Room 306, I guess. Maybe Smile Pinki.

Nominations Prediction

2009-01-21T14:28:00.000-08:00

Oscar nominees will be announced early tomorrow.

This marks my first attempt to predict the nominees. (I will predict the winners the day before they are announced.)

Best Picture
Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Milk
Frost/Nixon
The Dark Knight

Best Director
Danny Boyle
David Fincher
Ron Howard
Chris Nolan
Gus Van Sant
Maybe Darren Aronofsky

Best Actor
Sean Penn
Mickey Rourke
Frank Langella
Brad Pitt
Richard Jenkins or Leonardo DiCaprio
(Clint Eastwood I HOPE!)

Best Actress
Meryl Streep
Anne Hathaway
Melissa Leo
Kate Winslet
Angelina Jolie or Sally Hawkins
Maybe Kristen Scott-Thomas or Cate Blanchett

Supporting Actor
Josh Brolin
Robert Downey Jr
Philip Seymour Hoffman
Heath Ledger
Dev Patel or James Franco

Supporting Actress
Penelope Cruz
Amy Adams
Viola Davis
Kate Winslet
Marisa Tomei or Rosemarie DeWitt
Taraji Henson

Animated Feature
Kung Fu Panda
Wall-E
Waltz With Bashir
Maybe Bolt

Art Direction
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Revolutionary Road
Changeling or Australia
The Duchess or Slumdog Millionaire
The Dark Knight

Cinematography
Revolutionary Road
The Reader (or Milk or Australia)
Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight

Costume Design
The Duchess
Changeling
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Revolutionary Road
Milk or The Dark Knight or Australia

Documentary Feature
Man on Wire
Trouble the Water
Encounters at the End of the World
Roman Polanski or IOUSA
Standard Operating Procedure

Documentary Short
n/a

Film Editing
Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Dark Knight
Maybe Wall-E

Foreign
Revanche or 3 Monkeys
The Class
Waltz With Bashir
Everlasting Moments
Gomorrah or The Baader Meinhof Complex

Makeup
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight or Hellboy II
Synecdoche, New York or The Wrestler
The Reader
Tropic Thunder

Score
Slumdog Millionaire
Revolutionary Road (I HOPE) or Milk
Doubt (I HOPE) or The Dark Knight
Wall-E
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Song
Wall-E
Gran Torino
The Wrestler
Slumdog Millionaire
Maybe Bolt

Animated Short
n/a

Live Action Short
n/a

Sound Editing
The Dark Knight
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Iron Man
Quantum of Solace or Slumdog Millionaire
Wall-E

Sound Mixing
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Quantum of Solace or The Dark Knight
Slumdog Milllionaire
Wall-E

Visual Effects
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Iron Man
Journey to the Center of the Earth or Hellboy II
The Mummy: Tomb of the Dragon Emperor or Cloverfield

Adapted Screenplay
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
The Dark Knight
Doubt
Frost/Nixon
Slumdog Millionaire
Maybe Revolutionary Road or The Reader

Original Screenplay
Burn After Reading (or Rachel Getting Married)
Milk
Vicky Christina Barcelona
The Visitor or Wall-E
The Wrestler

BLOG!

2008-12-09T22:35:00.000-08:00

WATCH THIS

Did I really just say what I think I said?

2008-09-30T19:51:00.000-07:00

The subconscious mind is fascinating isn't it?

How does this happen?

2008-09-23T20:27:00.001-07:00

I'm going months now without blogging! yikes!

ok, well, new semester has started. I've got photography and screenwriting.

Next week for screenwriting everyone has to give an oral presentation on their "provisional artistic identity" - the really deep stuff. Why we are who we are. There will definitely be a therapy session going on. I'm excited and nervous.

I want to allow myself to become vulnerable to complete strangers, but I'm afraid of what I'll find deep within my subconscious.

Taking this class is like taking Psychology over again. In case you didn't know, I was a psychology major before I switched over to film.

Find the light!

Am I the only person that didn't like Wall-E?

2008-07-17T21:11:00.000-07:00

I meant to post this when I saw the movie when it came out a few weeks ago, but what are ya gonna do?

Anyway, SO...

Wall-E. Stunning animation, loveable characters, and a pretty awesome reference to Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey, THEE science fiction film.

Like I've said before I'm not much of a sci-fi/fantasy fan, but I love Disney/Pixar productions, so I knew this one would be a toss-up. Little did I know that the film's premise had absolutely nothing to do with my reasons to despise this film.

Not only was the entire film a lecture on "going green" but a complete insult to the very customers that paid to see it. (What boggles my mind even further, is everyone I know saying how much they loved it!) The representations of humans from planet earth were all white Americans too fat to stand and too stupid to read, and the representation of planet earth is one city built by its own garbage.

Now don't get me wrong, I'm all for recycling and "saving our planet," but I certanily don't need to have the theme attempted to be subconciously fed to me by a kids movie.

D+

Gobble Chicken Gobble Chicken

2008-06-06T22:21:00.000-07:00

Sex IN the City?

2008-06-01T21:02:00.000-07:00

Long before Sex and the City ever came to TBS, I could never remember if the show was called "Sex and the City" or "Sex in the City" because both seemed to work.

Now, you don't need HBO or even TBS, for that matter, to get the name right. Further, you don't even need to have seen the series to enjoy four fabulous ladies in New York.

The film starts off with a recap of what you missed in six seasons and picks up right where it left off. No, the film doesn't seem just like a two and half hour extension of the show. It has so much more depth that a 22 minute episode ever could.

My deepest gratitude goes to the brilliant writer/director/producer Michael Patrick King for pulling off the greatest production I have seen since Titanic. (Sorry, not a Sci-Fi/Fantasy fan).

I was looking forward to the Sex and the City movie ever since the rumors started years ago. What I love most about the entire franchise is the writing. I knew that it was going to be great writing. I never doubted that I would love the film especially because the producers kept everything true to the show from the actors right down to the king, Michael Patrick.

So when I went to go see it at midnight Thursday night, I went in with the intention to not only enjoy the movie for the first time but to pay attention to the audience, and myself as an audience member. I asked myself questions such as:
Before:
What's the buzz?
What are my expectations?
After:
How did it make me feel?
Did it match up with my expectations?

The theater I was in had about eighty seats and was nearly at its capacity but not completely sold out. The majority of the audience was women in groups and the few men that were there, which was about 10 or less, were with a woman. I would say only about a handful of the women in the audience were in the same age group as the women portrayed in the film. The majority of the audience members were about in the same age range as me, twenties.

This film has given me new meaning to the word, Perfect. I used to think that there was no such thing as a perfect film, because I was always analyzing it from a production standpoint. Since I have considered the audience above anything else, I found that Sex and the City DELIVERS. The audience (myself included) laughed when they were supposed to laugh, cried when they were supposed to cry, gasped when they were meant to, and so on.

The Rocker, for example, which I had seen a pre-screening for just a few hours before Sex, I noticed myself being the only one laughing during certain scenes and not laughing when the majority of the audience was.

It was that night that I think that I learned the real importance of the audience. I read books that state, we do what we do all for the audience, we would be nothing without the audience.

How wonderful a production to already have an audience?

My hat's off to Michael Patrick King.

Semester's over

2008-05-09T10:05:00.000-07:00

and I got a 4.0!

I created a youtube account for the 89X Commercial Contest, and since then I've added projects that I did this past semester and also some from past semesters.

http://www.youtube.com/user/dorisedean

I still have one more documentary, but I'll have to split it up into two parts because it's about 13 minutes long.

I'm sorry about the poor quality my videos have on youtube. They seem to be better on myspace, but youtube is much more popular, so it'll have to do, I guess.

Last thing, the Moving Media Film Festival is this weekend and I'll have my music video showcased there. Saturday, starting at 6pm in the General Lectures Auditorium on Wayne State campus.

Starting Over?

2008-03-19T12:22:00.000-07:00

Well, I've been up to quite a bit. A couple of weeks ago, I entered an 89X Commercial Contest. I didn't get in the top ten, but ironically enough, the guy who wrote the script for mine got his own in the top ten.

Here's mine

Here's his

I just finished reading "No Country For Old Men." And I will leave you with some words from Cormac McCarthy...

"It's about knowing where you are. It's about thinkin you got there without takin anything with you. Your notions about starting over. or anybody's. You don't start over. That's what it's about. Ever step you take is forever. You can't make it go away. None of it... You think when you wake up in the mornin, yesterday don't count. But yesterday is all that does count. What else is there? Your life is made out of the day it's made out of. Nothin else. You might think you could run away and change your name and I don't know it all. Start over. And then one mornin you wake up and look at the ceilin and guess who's layin there?"

It's Been a While...

2008-02-28T17:13:00.000-08:00

and I apologize.

My excuse is that I've been so wrapped up with making a music video, that I've neglected everything else. Friends, family, and you guys.

Well, I'm still working on the music video and getting ready to do a commercial AND a documentary. I'll do my best to blog.

The one thing I haven't neglected was the Oscars! and how could I? I've loved the Coen brothers ever since I did my very first study (on them) for Intro to Film a couple of years ago. I saw No Country For Old Men on November 18, 2007, and even then, I claimed it was the best picture of the year. So, naturally, seeing them receive three of the most prestigious awards for their craft, I was ecstatic. All I could say was that it was ABOUT TIME!

Since I've been making a music video, I've also been watching a lot more. And I just go to the top favorites of all time in the music category and I ran across one of the best cinematographers I think I've ever seen and he's only 26?! His name is Aaron Platt. http://www.youtube.com/user/plattino

and finally, one of the best low-budget music videos you'll ever see, by my friends Tally Hall who produce everything themselves, I present to you:

"Good Day"

Get Ready, Mark Your Calendars, Go For the Gold!

2008-01-06T00:49:00.000-08:00

It's the most wonderful time of the year: Award Season.

Critic's Choice Awards: Jan 7 on vh1
People's Choice Awards: Jan 8 on CBS
Golden Globes: Jan 13 (we'll see, I guess)
Academy Award nominees announcement: Jan 22 at 5:30am PST
SAG Awards: Jan 27 on TNT & TBS

Welcome Readers!

2008-01-01T18:21:00.000-08:00

Hello. My name is Doris. and for as long as I can remember I've loved the movies. I study film now in loverly Detroit, Michigan. By my senior year, I will be expected to write, produce, direct, and edit my very own narrative short.

I've spent all of last semester doing nothing but writing about the films I saw in class and found that I learn so much more about several aspects of filmmaking I never knew possible.

This blog will not only be dedicated to my analysis and review of classic and contemporary film, but it is most of all, a celebration of the wonderful world of cinema.