@A-Dubya said:

@JustinJackFlash said:

@movie_nazi said:

@JustinJackFlash said:

A film winning the Best Picture over other more artistically deserving choices? At the Oscars?!! Surely not!

I haven't seen Green Book yet. And yeah, It probably isn't the best film of the year. I can imagine it laying on the sentimentality. But it does sound like an intriguing story. And I bet all this fuss is exaggerated. The best film never wins the Best Picture Oscar. Hell, most of the time the best film isn't even nominated.

THANK YOU! OMG, I've have been preaching this shit for years. If they think this choice is bad what about passing up Denzel Washington for best actor for Malcolm X for Al Pacino's Scent of a Woman performance (OO-AH!)? The Oscars are a friggin' joke mostly. A lot of the nominations are good but the winners are usually not the best ones that year. There is way too much politics involved and I am not talking about general social politics. I'm talking about Hollywood business politics. A person's brand shoots way up with a statue and there are a lot of machinations at play that leads up to the "winners" we are presented with. I always just use the Oscars to scoop up the nominees list and check out those films but never ever watch the awards show live nor take into account the winners.

Haha, all that wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. And that's probably a side we will never be privy too.

And yeah, Pacino also famously won simply because they'd turned him down so many times before. This kind of thing happens so often it's hard to take the Oscars seriously. Even if a film I genuinely love wins I take it as a hollow victory.

I don't think there is an awards show that can get things generally right and in a completely unbiased way. But the Oscars definitely isn't it.

The way they heavily lean towards conservative, box ticking films (Person with ailment, triumph against adversity, period setting, etc) over the inventive and daring. I find it so predictable and tiresome. And this is why the likes of Forrest Gump will almost always triumph over Pulp Fiction.

I actually thought Shawshank was the best film that year. Don't get me wrong, I love and own all three, but that was just a great year for films in my opinion.

That's a tough call. Obviously I also love Shawshank. I just used these two films because it's the most famous recent example of the Oscars rewarding the conventional over something that's more experimental in form. I'd probably say I prefer Shawshank but Pulp Fiction is the better film.

I think Shawshank is also conventional, but it's conventional cinema at it's very, very best.