The official unofficial Academy Award season has sort of begun. It comes into being after the Toronto International Film Festival that just wrapped. This is when the studios begin to spend money on their movies, which could be anything from Gravity to Fargo, for example.
Except for one thing; there doesn't seem to be any of the movies, so far, that has really struck anybody as being special. One of them, The Imitation Game seems to be the front runner as of Toronto. FYI it's about Alan Turing who was part of the British decoding attempts during WW11.
I know a little about Touring, who was gay in a time when gay was illegal in England. But more important is that Touring was one of the earliest people to figure out those 1's and o's that led to computers.
He was one of the people who gave us laptops.
And what did England do for him; they arrested him for being gay and pretty much
destroyed his career. There's been a TV movie about Touring but the film version has a great cast with actor Benedict Cumberbatch who was the bad guy in Star Trek Into Darkness.Sounds like a possible winner right there.
Then there's The Judge with Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Duval and it deals with father and son and a criminal case.
So far that's it. At least for serious movies.
There's Reese Witherspon who hefts a giant backpack on a story about a woman trying to find herself in the wilderness based on a true story and called Wild. Here's a photo of Reese
for the ads and the backpack looks three times as big as her and I doubt she could carry even a daypack.Another movie, Calvary, is an Irish indie film about a priest and someone who wants too kill him. And Kristine Whiig has a movie called Welcome To Me. And Bill Murray's St. Vincent could bring him closes to the Oscar but he's tried it before.
The trouble with this is that there really isn't a great movie in them, the closest is the The Imitation Game, which seems to be the favorite of a mediocre list of these movies. I can't see a big blockbuster like Guardians of the Galaxy but if there's no big movie out from now to Christmas, it might take a position.
But it's early and anything can happen. I will want to see the Turing movie because it's a pretty good story and after all; Turing did give us the internet. And there might be surprises, Paul Dana and John Cusak are playing different years of Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys.
And there's Jennifer Aniston.
But seriously, there's also Richard Gere who plays a homeless guy. And I don't think he'll win but I bet he's nominated.
But lets see how it goes.
