Top Five Highlights of 2014-15 Oscar Season

Yesterday I unloaded most irksome bugaboos of the 2014-15 awards season in a flurry of list-ified rage. Venting is healthy, right? But if there's one thing healthier, it's accentuating the positive. So as my final word (I swear!) on the Oscar derby that ended almost a week ago, here are my five favourite treasures of the season:

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Guys, we need to talk about Best Animated Feature. Most years, this is one category that hardly requires discussion at all. If it isn't a slam dunk victory for one obvious frontrunner (which it almost always is), then it can at least be boiled down to a two-horse race with the also-rans far in the distance. This year was shaping up to be another easy call you could use to inflate your prediction accuracy, until the biggest shocker of nomination morning. Everyone enjoys griping about presumed snubs that ultimately don't affect the outcome of the awards race, but this is one snub that has truly blown the category wide open.

The cast of The LEGO Movie is stunned by its Oscar snub!

My Award Nominations: Best Animated Feature

I saw only six animated films last year, so it was easier for me to decide which one not to nominate (an easy choice, really). I suppose I'm being too generous in allowing five nominees for a category with so few contenders, but what of it? Only one will win (another easy choice), but the others deserve this brief moment in the limelight for merely existing. Animated movies are tedious and difficult to produce, after all. So here are my nominees for Best Animated Feature of 2014:

Review - The Tale of Princess Kaguya

Guess what: Today is Isao Takahata's birthday! What better day to review his latest film.

Apart from his 1988 masterpiece Grave of the Fireflies, the works of animator Isao Takahata have never had much exposure in North America. They may have less crossover appeal than other outputs from Studio Ghibli – the revered and beloved Tokyo-based anime company that brought us My Neighbor Totoro and Spirited Away, among others – because his are less dazzling in a fantastical sense.

Nevertheless, Takahata has built a superb resume over the last thirty years at Ghibli. So what a rare and special treat it is then, to be able to see his latest (and possibly last) feature in theatres: The somewhat slow but visually splendid The Tale of Princess Kaguya. The narrative itself is a simple one (perhaps too much so to justify this film's leisurely 140-minute runtime), but Takahata gleans from it several adult themes about the pursuit of happiness, truth and artifice, and the cyclic yet finite nature of life.

Sunday Top Ten - Depressing movies

“There aint no cure for the summertime blues,” sang Eddie Cochran in his 1958 classic. I hear ya, Eddie. And what better way for this cinephile to sing the summertime blues than with a list of his most depressing movies. Mind you, the definition of “depressing” is somewhat amorphous, at the very least variable for me. It's not simply a matter tear-jerking. Many of the movies that get my waterworks running I find possess an ultimately uplifting quality to them. It takes a different kind of film altogether to actually leave me feeling depressed, and none have done it better than these ten downers:

Some SPOILERS lurk beyond this point.