Get Adobe Flash player

Avatar vs The Hurt Locker

The Directors used to be married. James Cameron's "Avatar" is the most expensive and highest earning film of all time and his ex-wife Katheryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" is an independent film which made little impact at the box office. One is based on fantasy and the other is rooted in grim reality. With the films pitted against each other in 7 categories, this will be an interesting battle to watch.

More Info:
It’s ‘Hurt Locker’ vs. ‘Avatar’ for best picture
Hurt Locker v Avatar: The decider

10 Films up for Best Picture

In the summer of 2009 the Academy announced that 10 films would be up for the Best Picture Award in 2010 - double the usual number. This means less films get snubbed (like The Dark Knight in 2009) and more benefit from the surge in interest and resulting cinema ticket and DVD sales. At the very least it makes it a far more interesting race!

More Info:
Will having 10 best-picture nominees diminish Oscar?

First Woman to win Best Director?

Katheryn Bigelow has already given us a first this awards season - the first woman to win the Best Director Award at the BAFTA's. Now she looks set to repeat that first at the Oscars for her film "The Hurt Locker".

More Info:
[2010 Oscar Preview] Best Director

New Voting System

What will make the Best Picture Award even more interesting? A new voting system that nobody really understands. Instead of just picking their favorite film from the nominees, voters will rank their films in order of preference, and this will be used to determine the overall winner. Get it?

More Info:
How Oscar’s Voting System Really Works
Will the new Oscars voting system help Avatar or The Hurt Locker?

Jeff Bridges

Will Jeff Bridges finally win the Oscar that he deserves? His nomination for Best Actor for his role as a down-and-out country singer in "Crazy Heart" is his fifth at the Oscars. Many think that he is a shoe-in this year but there is an outside chance of Colin Firth picking up the Award after his win at the BAFTAs.

More Info:
Best Actor Oscar 2010: Who Should Win?

Who will win Best Actress?

Unlike most of the major categories at this year's Oscars, the Best Actress Award race is totally open. Sandra Bullock ("The Blind Side") and Meryl Streep ("Julie & Julia") are the slight favorites but Gabourey Sidibe ("Precious") and Carey Mulligan ("An Education") aren't far behind. This could be the most interesting race behind Best Picture.

More Info:
Lead actress Oscar race will go down to the wire

Best Foreign Language Film

So that is what we're all looking forward to on March 7th - it's going to be an interesting night with room for surprises and upsets. If you'd like more information about this year's Oscars in general, take a look at the links below for great overviews from some of the best Film websites out there.

The Envelope @ LA Times - A great resource for everything to do with the Oscars
Oscar.com - The official site of the Oscars. Full of information and will live-stream the Awards Ceremony.
Time Magazine - A guide to all the nominees in major categories
The Independent - A complete list of all the nominees across all categories

Tarek Abu-Esber - New Media

Have you ever had a movie-going experience that left you feeling you'd just taken a dizzying ride in a giant technicolour washing machine, full of fairytale life-lessons, washing powder advertisement visuals, and politely preachy political polemics? Me neither, until I bore witness to the astounding Cinematic oddity that is "My Name Is Khan". Surely a Cult Film in the making.

Karan Johar's new film is a sight to behold – even for Bollywood. It follows Rizvan Khan (played by Bollywood Movie God Shah Rukh Khan) from boyhood to manhood, as he learns to live, and love, with Asperger's Syndrome (think: Rain Man and Forrest Gump) in a world full of hatred and distrust. Journeying from India to San Francisco, Rizvan's personal Odyssey takes him through a search for happiness, the devastation of heartbreak, to the post-9/11 anti-Islamic hostilities, and the Katrina-esqe hurricanes of a fictional town in Georgia. Are you exhausted yet? No? So stay with us!

Along the way he finds love in the adorable form of Mandira (Shah Rukh Khan's frequent co-star Kajol Devgan), plus death, loneliness, courage, and heroism, culminating in an audience with the President of the United States! His mission: to tell the President, and the world, that Islam is not a religion of violence and terrorism. This theme is what almost elevates "My Name Is Khan" to the status of modern Indian classic, and you can't help but feel the pure intentions of all involved reaching out with this message of tolerance and peace. If only the film weren't so syrupy-sweet and cliched, more people might watch it and take heed - but this is not really the job of an entertaining melodrama, so let's just take the film for what it is: entertainment.

"My Name Is Khan" is a heady cinematic blend that hits you over the head like a 3 hour long hammer. It's four movies for the price of one!

The question is: does it work? And the answer has to be yes. Despite simplistic, childish dialogue and its blatant spiritual preaching (which I actually liked for the most part: at least it's honest in its intentions) "My Name Is Khan" is an irresistible, primary-colored epic of the heart, and makes no excuses for its often ridiculous approach. The main problem Western audiences will have with this film is the complete lack of irony, or directorial awareness that events, scenes and entire passages of dialogue are written with the subtlety of a big-budgeted Soap Opera (people familiar with Indian Cinema will digest this more easily). What saves the film from failure is the confidence it is all carried off with, including a truly enjoyable sense of humor and a charismatic performance from Shah Rukh Khan. Hi co-star Kajol Devgan is also eminently watchable, despite occasional lapses into high pantomime, which comes with the territory when you watch an Indian movie (and is absolutely part of the appeal of Bollywood in general).

As the audiences filed out of the Berlin Palast last night, I sensed bemusement, mockery, laughter and fatigue from the almost endless running time and comic book story-telling. But I for one wore a huge grin on my face. If you like your films to be as bizarre and multicolored as life itself, yet to bear no relation to reality as we know it, then you should consider giving "My Name Is Khan" a watch. But don't say I didn't warn you!

Ben Robinson - Education Programmer

Note: the views expressed here belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the opinion of DTFF.

As the end credits rolled on Michael Winterbottom's new film "The Killer Inside Me" (adapted from the 1952 Jim Thompson novel of the same name), the audience sat silent as the grave. On the soundtrack, a country and western ditty about 'Shame" warbled away gratingly. Which is what most of us felt about the film: a horrible shame. And then some of us started to boo. For many people I spoke to, this was the low-point of the Berlin Film Festival's selection. And it was no surprise that it went home without any Awards. In fact, many are now debating whether this film will actually receive global distribution, loathsome as it is. Thompson's novel has already been made into an equally ropey movie by Director Burt Kennedy in 1976, and we are no better off with this second attempt.

Following the psychotic misadventures of a small town West Texas Deputy Sheriff, Lou Ford (played by mumbling, monotoned Casey Affleck in an accidental career detour), Winterbottom takes us on a depressing journey through the brutal landscape of a rather unremarkable maniac. The story begins in yet another Hicksville, USA with nothing of interest to look at, and no characters to root for. The cinematography could have been bought off the shelf at Carrefour, and the Musical Score may have been borrowed from some anonymous "Movie of the Week" - it was that forgettable. Soon after this damp squib of an opening, we were plunged into a hell-hole of gratuitous violence and mean-spirited misanthropy. I never walk out of a movie, but 25 minutes in and I was itching for the exit. Unfortunately for me and my movie-going companion Ayse (who was watching through her fingers at the unfolding grimness onscreen), we stayed until the bitter end.

"The Killer Inside Me" trudges in the footsteps of dozens of superior Maniac movies. Winterbottom attempts to tap into this rich narrative vein, but fails to be anything more than an annoying mosquito at the picnic. Going back to 1960, Alfred Hitchcock introduced the notion of the intimate maniac with "Psycho". We may have been repulsed by the transgressive acts of Norman Bates, but we were fascinated by him too. In fact, in the infamous sinking car sequence, Hitchcock playfully dares us to empathise with Norman, if just for a second, as Marion Crane's car refuses to descend into the swamp and cover his murderous tracks. When it does finally sink, we find ourselves breathing an inexplicable sigh of relief. Hitchcock has manipulated our emotions, and let us momentarily look through the eyes of a psychopath. In the same year Michael Powell made "Peeping Tom", inviting audiences to kill a little time with a London serial killer who films his acts of lunacy with a customised deadly cine-camera. Cinema audiences, it seemed, had developed a taste for this brand of vicarious Thriller, and continued to feast on this psychotic Point-of-view for the next 40 years, in such films as Hatchet for the Honeymoon (1970), Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer (1986), White of the Eye (1987), Man Bite Dog (1992) and American Psycho (2000).

Unfortunately, Winterbottom's film comes nowhere near the originality of these previous films, and brings nothing new to the table. If anything, it resembles a Television Movie with an inflated budget and lacklustre, under-directed actors clawing in the dark for some kind of motivation to their characters' empty lives (rumour has it that Jessica Alba stormed out of the film's Sundance premiere in disgust). But Winterbottom's greatest crimes are it's acts of simulated violence, which are neither scary nor well-filmed. They are merely unpleasant and upsetting, and not in a good way (as the best Thrillers and Horrors somehow manage to be). The only two semi-decent characters in this film are dispatched in the most ugly manner possible, and with them goes the audiences' final portion of patience for Winterbottom's drab effort.

Michael Winterbottom is a versatile and prolific Director, and his achievements can't be denied. In his career he has hopped between comedic, musical postmodernism ("24 Hour Party People"), Science Fiction (in the unsuccessful "Code 46"), Middle Eastern drama ("A Mighty Heart") and Historical Epic ("The Claim") to name but a few of the genres he's dabbled in. But with "The Killer Inside Me", he has singularly failed to understand the needs and requirements of the Psycho-Thriller sub-genre. I find it hard to believe that he ever thought we would want to sit through this film and not despise it's cold-hearted, amorally bankrupt soul.

On the other hand, in seeking to get deep inside the mind of a brutal maniac with intimate accuracy, perhaps Winterbottom has succeeded completely. Let's be glad we didn't enjoy the experience. Because if we had, something really would be wrong with us.

Ben Robinson - Education Programmer

Note: the views expressed here belong solely to the author and do not necessarily represent the opinion of DTFF.