BEST PICTURE
Winner: The Hurt Locker
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

BEST DIRECTOR
Winner: Kathryn Bigelow (The Hurt Locker)
James Cameron (Avatar)
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Lee Daniels (Precious)
Jason Reitman (Up in the Air)

BEST ACTOR
Winner: Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart)
George Clooney (Up in the Air)
Colin Firth (A Single Man)
Morgan Freeman (Invictus)
Jeremy Renner (The Hurt Locker)

BEST ACTRESS
Winner: Sandra Bullock (The Blind Side)
Helen Mirren (The Last Station)
Carey Mulligan (An Education)
Gabourey Sidibe (Precious)
Meryl Streep (Julie and Julia)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Winner: Christoph Waltz (Inglourious Basterds)
Matt Damon (Invictus)
Woody Harrelson (The Messenger)
Christopher Plummer (The Last Station)
Stanley Tucci (The Lovely Bones)

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Winner: Mo’Nique (Precious)
Penelope Cruz (Nine)
Vera Farmiga (Up in the Air)
Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart)
Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
Winner: El Secreto de Sus Ojos – The Secret of Their Eyes (Argentina)
Ajami (Israel)
The Milk of Sorrow (Peru)
Un Prophete – A Prophet (France)
The White Ribbon (Germany)

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Winner: Mark Boal (The Hurt Locker)
Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds)
Alessandro Camon, Oren Moverman (The Messenger)
Joel Coen, Ethan Coen (A Serious Man)
Bob Peterson, Pete Docter, Tom McCarthy (Up)

BEST ANIMATION
Winner: Up
Coraline
Fantastic Mr Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Winner: Geoffrey Fletcher (Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire)
Neill Blomkamp, Terri Tatchell (District 9)
Nick Hornby (An Education)
Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Armando Iannucci, Tony Roche (In the Loop)
Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner (Up in the Air)

BEST ART DIRECTION
Winner: Avatar
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Nine
Sherlock Holmes
The Young Victoria

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY
Winner: Avatar
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The White Ribbon

BEST SOUND MIXING
Winner: The Hurt Locker
Avatar
Inglourious Basterds
Star Trek
Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen

BEST SOUND EDITING
Winner: The Hurt Locker
Avatar
Inglourious Basterds
Star Trek
Up

BEST ORIGINAL SONG
Winner: The Weary Kind (theme from Crazy Heart) from Crazy Heart by Ryan Bingham, T Bone Burnett
Almost There from The Princess and the Frog by Randy Newman
Down in New Orleans from The Princess and the Frog by Randy Newman
Loin de Paname from Paris 36 by Reinhardt Wagner, Frank Thomas
Take It All from Nine by Maury Yeston

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE
Winner: Up (Michael Giacchino)
Avatar (James Horner)
Fantastic Mr Fox (Alexandre Desplat)
The Hurt Locker (Marco Beltrami and Buck Sanders)
Sherlock Holmes (Hans Zimmer)

BEST COSTUMES
Winner: The Young Victoria
Bright Star
Coco Before Chanel
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Nine

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Winner: The Cove
Burma VJ
Food, Inc.
The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers
Which Way Home

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT
Winner: Music by Prudence
China’s Unnatural Disaster: The Tears of Sichuan Province
The Last Campaign of Governor Booth Gardner
The Last Truck: Closing of a GM Plant
Rabbit a la Berlin

BEST FILM EDITING
Winner: The Hurt Locker
Avatar
District 9
Inglourious Basterds
Precious

BEST MAKE-UP
Winner: Star Trek
Il Divo
The Young Victoria

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Winner: Logorama
French Roast
Granny O’Grimm’s Sleeping Beauty
The Lady and the Reaper (La Dama y la Muerte)
A Matter of Loaf and Death

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
Winner: The New Tenants
The Door
Instead of Abracadabra
Kavi
Miracle Fish

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS
Winner: Avatar
District 9
Star Trek

….and there we have it. The 2010 Oscars belonged to The Hurt Locker which picked up 6 Oscars, including an historic win for Kathryn Bigelow who is the first female to win the best director Oscar.

What did you think of the results? Should Avatar have picked up more technical awards? Should Sandra Bullock have won the Best Actress award? Sound off in the comments section below!

Read similar posts to And the 2010 Oscar winners are… on Filmonic

Today the nominations for the 82nd Academy Awards were announced, and as expected Avatar picked up quite a few in a number of categories. Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz, Jeremy Renner, Morgan Freeman, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep also recieved nominations for their acting.

You can see the full list of nominations below:

Best Picture
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up in the Air

Actor in a Leading Role
Jeff Bridges – Crazy Heart
George Clooney – Up in the Air
Colin Firth – A Single Man
Morgan Freeman – Invictus
Jeremy Renner – The Hurt Locker

Actor in a Supporting Role
Matt Damon – Invictus
Woody Harrelson – The Messenger
Christopher Plummer – The Last Station
Stanley Tucci – The Lovely Bones
Christoph Waltz – Inglourious Basterds

Actress in a Leading Role
Sandra Bullock – The Blind Side
Helen Mirren – The Last Station
Carey mulligan – An Education
Gabourey Sidibe – Precious
Meryl Streep – Julie & Julia

Actress in a Supporting Role
Penelope Cruz – Nine
Vera Farmiga – Up in the Air
Maggie Gyllenhaal – Crazy Heart
Anna Kendrick – Up in the Air
Mo’Nique – Precious

Animated Feature
Coraline
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Princess and the Frog
The Secret of Kells
Up

Art Direction
Avatar
The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus
Nine
Sherlock Holmes
The Young Victoria

Cinematography
Avatar
Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The White Ribbon

Directing
Avatar
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
Up in the Air

Music (Original Score)
Avatar
Fantastic Mr. Fox
The Hurt Locker
Sherlock Holmes
Up

Visual Effects
Avatar
District 9
Star Trek

Writing (Adapted Screenplay)
District 9
An Education
In The Loop
Precious
Up in the Air

Writing (Original Screenplay)
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The Messenger
A Serious Man
Up

The winners will be revealed on March 7th in a ceremony presented by Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin.

Read similar posts to 2010 Oscar nominations announced on Filmonic

I love it when The Hollywood Reporter make these roundtable videos. Quentin Tarantino, Peter Jackson, James Cameron, Jason Reitman, Lee Daniels and Kathryn Bigelow (Cameron’s ex-wife) all sat together and had a discussion about movies and the movie business. Watch below:

Are you an insider or an outsider?

What’s the toughest scene to film?

What would you do instead of directing?

Read similar posts to Quentin Tarantino borrows some of Peter Jackson’s water on Filmonic

Precious has once again put me in the uncomfortable position of debating just how much I can really enjoy “inspirational” tales about situations slightly too horrific to be believable. Yet, simultaneously, the film that relies on the audience recognizing physical, sexual and emotional abuse in a way that falls just out-of-bounds for cinema stereotype. It’s a mixed bag that is saved by its performances even when the sloppy assembly of the film makes itself obvious.

Precious is the tale of Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a obese 16-year old living with her abusive mother (Mo’Nique). We pick up on her life in 1987 in Harlem right as she’s been impregnated by her rapist father for a second time and as she gets kicked out of her public school in lieu of a more specialized GED education at an alternate schooling center called Each One, Teach One. Her teacher, a lesbian named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) encourages Precious to write everyday in her notebook, a assignment that eventually leads to the poor girl coming into her own.

The film is directed by Lee Daniels, who brought Cuba Gooding Jr to Shadowboxer in 2005 (Mo’nique plays a character named ‘Precious’ in that film). Shadowboxer wasn’t the most masterfully constructed tale, so it’s not a surprise that Precious shows some strides forward in terms of character and storytelling. However, if one thing didn’t work for me in Precious, it was Daniel’s directing.

From the rape scene that focuses on sweat and fried food to Precious’ fantasy sequences, Daniels is visually inconsistent and doesn’t seem to trust his narrative to tell the story. There are points where Daniels’ little tricks work, like when the heavy-set, dark-ebony Precious looks in the mirror and imagines she’s a skinny white girl, but there are also a handful of cutaways and fantasies that don’t contribute much more to the story than the sparse voiceover.

It may seem like a weird aspect to point out, but: for a film that has such great performances, it plays like it was made by a director that didn’t trust those performances and instead had to make sure the audience is “getting it” with broad strokes when silence or minutia could have said so much more.

If we take a similar sort of cinema, really any of the countless movies where a child in an unfortunate situation finds a teacher that is able to connect to her, and start drawing comparisons, Precious starts looking a little too bold-faced in its intentions. Take a film like Half-Nelson, where the teacher is a white guy with a crack addiction and the student is an African-American female. They both bond in a quiet and realistic manner and the whole time we understand that both parties are in impossible situations and looking for companionship. Part of the problem with Precious, the character, in this film is that she takes so much abuse before she finally cracks that it makes the lesser abuse stereotypical and therefore less effective. Someone who gets frying pans thrown at them has a hard and horrible life and someone who has a seconds child by her father has a horrible life, but as soon as we get to the incest, the pans seem lesser. I know that’s horrible, but that’s how it plays.

There is a tipping point for Precious, another roadblock of life that eventually makes her emote (Hint: the movie IS set in the 80s when this roadblock was the talk of the nation…God, I can’t keep calling it a “roadblock;” it’s HIV). Up until that point, the brilliance of Gabourey Sidibe’s performance is the subtlety, even when that subtlety works against the shock we are supposed to be feeling.

I know it’s not fair to watch a movie then pretend you had seen something different, but Precious was a great drama when all it was showing me was the chronological progression of the main character. A scene where she steals a tub of fried chicken showed me more about the character than the fifth cut-away to a fantasy world where Precious is a celebrity with a whiter accent.

There’s a point in the movie where Precious is bringing a baby back to her mother’s place and the entire audience around me started turning up the tension, knowing that things were about to go horribly wrong. That’s about where I disconnected from the film. I realized that I was in a sold out theater with a full-balcony and at least half of the theater came to see a sixteen year old girl in the worst situation imaginable.

Lee Daniels could have turned Precious into something more like torture porn where the audience comes to see the horrors of the real world enacted on the unfortunate. Daniels also could have side-stepped some of the more extreme abuse and let these characters bounce off each other. What Lee Daniels did was land somewhere in-between, sometimes making a fetish of Precious’ fantasies and other times lingering on the abuse.

The bottom line is that Precious is a good film saved by fantastic performances from all its actors and actresses. It’s probably going to grab one of the Best Picture nominations and litter other Oscar categories with its cast. But like other films that exist to show a mainstream audience the worst of the “other half,” it sometimes swerves too close to exploitation of the minority experience. The end result is a film that will jerk tears out of you if you’re prone to opening your heart to inspirational cinema but will leave you feeling ambivalent if you’re judging the film based on what you see.

Read similar posts to REVIEW: Precious on Filmonic