Apparently it wasn't in this thread but I don't want to go looking for it. But somewhere after the Golden Globe nominees were announced I said that the exclusion of Milk as best picture didn't necessarily bother me since I didn't think it was a great film and could easily imagine that there were five better ones. At the time I hadn't seen any of the nominees.
Well, I've now seen four out of the five, and while it is certainly possible there were five better movies than Milk last year, none of those four are among them.
Slumdog Millioniare is just overhyped "dignity of the poor" pablum. Frost/Nixon is quality product telling an uninteresting story that only gains in interest when it stretches the truth it is based on. There's nothing particularly wrong with The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, but it just isn't exceptional beyond the CGI. Revolutionary Road is another entry in the artists' condescention that people living in the suburbs must be either self-loathing or self-delusional. Good movies have been made on this, even if it is vaguely insulting, but while well acted, Revolutionary Road adds nothing new and feels like Sam Mendes just returning to the trough of his greatest success. Interestingly the same could be said of Benjamin Button screenwriter, Eric Roth, who also wrote the very similarly structure Forrest Gump.
Anyway, so Milk should be up there based on waht I've seen so far, though the Wall-E and Man on Wire both probably deserve it even more (and will get nothing at the Academy Awards since they are ghetto consigned.
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