It's About Damn Time!

Last night, I arrived home after a draining 6 hour bus ride from Maryland to New York, just in time to catch my most anticipated Oscar categories: Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Direction, Best Editing, Best Documentary and of course, Best Picture.

All of the films I have been whole-heartedly rooting for received nods: The Departed, Pan’s Labyrinth and Little Miss Sunshine. Pan’s Labyrinth deservingly left with Best Foreign Picture. This timeless film unexpectedly captured my heart 2 months ago. During post Franco-Prussian war Spain, a 12 year-old girl is thrust into a life controlled by an evil military general. The young protagonist, Ofelia, takes her audience on a journey through two worlds, one of dark fantasy and one of harsh reality that even adults have trouble digesting. In both realms she is a true heroine and rekindles the brave and uninhibited child in all of us. The characters in this film are like nothing I’ve ever seen before, brilliantly imaginative and at times terrifying.

Though I am a shameless Leonardo DiCaprio groupie I was delighted to see Forest Whitaker take away the statuette for Best Actor. He played the ruthless Ugandan dictator, Idi Amin, in The Last King of Scotland (a role far from Whitaker’s normally modest and soft spoken personality). This film struck a personal chord with me being that my family is from Uganda and were products of Amin’s tyranny. Whitaker not only acquired the regional Ugandan accent with perfection, he also captured the childish and random manor in which Amin ruled, down to the sporadic twitches and severe mood swings. However, I feel the film itself lacked focus on the South Asian residents who played a significant role in Uganda’s prosperity at the time (but that’s discussion for another post).

I am a devoted Scorsese follower and watch his films with an analytical eye, identifying his trademark moves and admiring his unique story telling techniques. His portrayal of underworld violence and alternative American culture has revolutionized cinema and is quite possibly the reason I decided to major in film. So knowing that he has been nominated six times for Best Director and never received an Oscar, kept me on edge throughout the ceremony (he has been passed for such amazing films as Raging Bull and Taxi Driver). I literally leaped out of my seat and let out a loud whoop when they announced his name, “…and the goes to, Martin Scorsese!” Baffled and obviously overwhelmed, little ol’ Marty and his caterpillar eyebrows stepped up on stage, held that golden statue in his hands and in his usual awkward humor asked, “can you double check that envelop?” The audience roared with applause and after 30 years of directorial genius Marty gave his first ever Academy Award acceptance speech. My eyes actually welled up. At this point I was on a high and even if The Departed didn’t receive Best Picture, justice was served. A piece of me wanted Little Miss Sunshine to win, a low budget comedy about a dysfunctional family on the way to a child’s beauty pageant. But when they announced The Departed for Best Picture I couldn’t have been happier. The ensemble for this film was absolutely superb. Nicholson, DiCaprio, Damon, Whalberg and even Alec Baldwin drove this gritty modern day Irish mob film and turned it into a masterpiece. Originally adapted from the Japanese film Infernal Affairs (also worth checking out), The Departed creates an intricate web of deceit, mistaken identity, questionable loyalty, reinventing the relationship between good and evil (definitely going down as one of my all time favorites).