Attention = Quality

Don't believe me? Watch everything nominated for the best picture oscar.

Atonement is like Howard's End for teenagers. With it's MTV editing and insistence on ending in the 21st century. Director Joe Wright did interesting things with a script that cared about hitting plot points than giving depth or attention to its characters. Oh and if you've seen the preview for it more than once, you're in for very few surprises when you actually see the thing, it's like watching an extended version. And yet, Atonement is nominated for Best Picture. Michael Clayton similarly ruined itself when it got to the end and felt the need to explain all of its hitherto mysteriousness and treat the audience like a group of third graders who can't piece ANYTHING together. And yet it too is nominated for best picture. Juno, written by a stripper, chronicles the life of one person speaking through a dozen characters going through the falsest teen pregnancy in the history of false pregnancy. No one edited this script, and it is nominated for best picture. There Will Be Blood and No Country are real, solid films (one huge, one quiet), and full of oddities no one has given the proper attention to for the last twenty years. Fargo lost to the English Patient, cause...who knows. Blood Simple, Boogie Nights, Raising Arizona, Barton Fink, all of them were ignored, and yet any one of them is better than Chicago, American Beauty and Titanic combined. Talk and money drives the academy awards. It's why Gangs of New York was nominated, and The Aviator were both nominated and why they waited until all the checks had been cut to give the award to Return of the King and nominated the first two in the meantime. 2005 was the last time every film nominated was really excellent, though in my opinion they gave it to least interesting of the bunch, probably because it was hyped so much by its fans. Let's hope the talk doesn't do what it usually does and reward the least deserving film of the year.