Best Picture, Biggest Snub, Worst Nomination

* Denotes Worst Nomination Nominee

BEST PICTURE

Amour* - the only action in this movie is the struggle between its Frenchness and its indomitable boredom. France surrenders in the end, as one might expect. However, I submit that a crack team of Gurkas could execute a perfect double-envelopment on this movie’s boredom and still end up waving a white flag.

Argo – A pleasantly watchable film of no lasting significance

Beasts of the Southern Wild * - The late Christopher Hitchens said of jokes about George W. Bush’s intelligence that they are “the jokes that stupid people tell themselves.” I saw him tell this to a Bill Maher audience and they were devastated, because they all thought of themselves as smart, they all respected Hitchens, and they all liked “W is dumb” jokes. So I choose my words carefully at the risk of offending people I like. This is the movie that stupid people think is brilliant. But the setting is interesting.

Django Unchained – Let’s just keep on righting historical injustices with brutal violence, wisecracks, and carefully crafted Tarantino scenes. Next stop, Soviet-induced Ukranian famine!

Les Misérables – Automatic popular musical nomination. The movie’s OK, the musical sucks. The best characters all get killed off too quickly, the uninteresting twits survive, the good songs don’t last long enough, and the bad songs go on too long.

Life of Pi – Objectively a very good movie. Subjectively, it didn’t speak to me.

Lincoln – I walked out of the movie ready to name my first born Abraham/Lincoln Kahrl. So, yeah, I liked it.

Silver Linings Playbook * - To the surprise of everyone the year’s passably watchable chick flick is inexplicably nominated for not one but 8 Academy Awards.

Zero Dark Thirty – Plays out more like a re-enactment or police procedural than a movie. Well made, but critically lacking in character development.

WILL WIN: Lincoln.  The only real contender that I would be comfortable with winning otherwise would be Life of Pi.

SHOULD WIN: Lincoln. To be fair, Lincoln has its warts. It botches the opening and the ending, especially the assassination. But everything in between is an all-time classic.

BIGGEST SNUB:

Skyfall – The pitch-perfect Bond in every way except one. Strong Bond, great villain, great song, great opening, irreversible things happen, it looks great…the only misstep was the afterthought love interest.

BIGGEST SNUB NOMINATIONS:

This was a particularly tone-deaf year for Hollywood, but I’ve narrowed it down to the biggest snubs of the snubs:

Javier Bardem – Skyfall

Katherine Bigelow – Zero Dark Thirty

Joe Carnahan & Ian Mackenzie Jeffers – The Grey

Samuel L. Jackson – Django Unchained

Skyfall

BIGGEST SNUB: Javier Bardem. Best Bond villain ever. Best thing in anything this year.

WORST NOMINATIONS:

Amour

Amy Adams – The Master

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Silver Linings Playbook (Let’s just bundle up the bulk of the nominations)

WORST NOMINATION: Silver Linings Playbook

Amour has a scene with 30 seconds of the maid vacuuming. It’s one of the more action-packed scenes.

As for Amy Adams…at one point in my high school football career, the coaches experimented by switching me from corner to linebacker against a wing-t team with two 300-lbs guards. Predictably blown up by one of these behemoths, I ended up landing next to the tackled running back. The stadium announcer regrettably added, “Justin Kahrl also in on the tackle.” The point is, sometimes you don’t want recognition for landing next to someone else’s success.

Beasts of the Southern Wild has that setting I guess.

But the biggest disgrace is the surfeit of nominations thrown at Silver Linings Playbook. 8 nominations. 8. You know what else got 8 nominations? CASABLANCA!

There are two possibilities here:

The first is reverse sexism. Men are aware to the point of pride that their guilty pleasures are not art. Is it possible that enough women confuse chick flicks for art that this happened? Is that a thing? I mean, the Nolan Batman trilogy has way more to say than Silver Linings Playbook and yet it can’t even sniff a Best Picture.

The other possibility is that current Hollywood kingpin Harvey Weinstein produced both Argo and Silver Linings Playbook and decided to cock-slap America in the face by forcing everyone to pretend that his bubblicious is kobe beef…twice.