The 83rd Academy Awards: Chris' Review

My Guesses (winners in bold):

Best Picture - The King's Speech
Best Director - David Fincher (The Social Network)
Best Actor - Colin Firth (The King's Speech)
Best Actress - Natalie Portman (Black Swan)
Best Supporting Actor - Christian Bale (The Fighter)
Best Supporting Actress - Helena Bonham Carter (The King's Speech)
Best Original Screenplay - The King's Speech
Best Adapted Screenplay - The Social Network
Best Animated Feature - Toy Story 3
Best Art Direction - Inception
Best Cinematography - Inception
Best Costume Design - The King's Speech
Best Original Score - Inception
Best Visual Effects - Inception
Best Sound Editing - TRON: Legacy
Best Sound Mixing - Inception

UPDATE: For the categories I ended up choosing, I did pretty good. Two of my choices I got wrong would have been correct if I had gone with my gut and chose Inception winning Best Sound Editing over TRON and if I had not gone with my gut when I chose David Fincher to pull an upset over Tom Hooper for best Director.

Well, what started off well kind of crashed and burned. The best moments between the hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway were in the pre-taped montage at the start of the show. Franco looked exhausted at best and disinterested at worst. His best contributions were his tweets, which weren't even freaking integrated into the program. Want to get "youth" to watch, focus on the social aspect. Tweet, Facebook, come on people. Reach out the the audience and ask them to tweet with a hash tag such as #Oscar83 or #Oscar2011 - get them tweeting, get them watching so they can tweet, and so on.

Aside from that, it was pretty by-the-numbers. I now have some Oscar winning films to watch.

Kid in a Candy Store: Criterion Comes to Hulu Plus

I'm a few days late to the party, but I just discovered that quite a number of the films that are part of The Criterion Collection are available for those who have Hulu's subscription service, Hulu Plus. I've been hoping for something this "big" since subscribing to Hulu Plus. Before this, my most common complaint about Hulu Plus' service was its mediocre film selection. Films I'd never heard of not simply because they're obscure, but because they just weren't that good.

Due to this agreement, a select few films are available for free for regular Hulu users, and a library of over 100 films is available for Hulu Plus subscribers. In a surprising move, the films are now no longer available on Netflix's streaming service. I'm not sure if I've ever heard of an entire company pulling out of an agreement with Netflix before, so this is pretty big.

What makes me most happy about this move was after reading this on Hulu's blog:

For Criterion, thanks to our advertising partners, Hulu Plus subscribers will be able to watch the Criterion Collection free of interruption. (Any ads will play up front.) For those who don’t have a Hulu Plus subscription, each month we’ll still rotate a few Criterion titles through Hulu.com with our normal periodic ad breaks.

The Criterion Collection was originally set up by Janus Films and the Voyager Company in the 1980s. They were pioneers in releasing films as they were meant to be seen. Under this label, films were restored and released in their correct aspect ratio, likely to the annoyance of those people that "didn't like the bars on the tops and bottoms of the screen." Criterion was also the first company to ever release a film with a commentary soundtrack, all the way back in 1984. They did what no other company would even consider doing then, and what every company is virtually required to do for a movie's release today.

I certainly don't consider Criterion as the sacred cow some seem to consider it, they did a great job when no other film company cared. They were pioneers. However, they've had a few questionable choices of films chosen over the last few years (Armageddon and practically anything Wes Anderson put his name on?), and some of their uber-expensive releases seem superfluous in this day and age.

With that said, I will treasure this news and these films.