Best Picture and Director 2005

1998 through 2007

What are your picks for Best Picture and Director of 2005?

Brokeback Mountain
24
32%
Capote
1
1%
Crash
3
4%
Good Night, and Good Luck.
4
5%
Munich
5
7%
George Clooney - Good Night, and Good Luck.
3
4%
Paul Haggis - Crash
1
1%
Ang Lee - Brokeback Mountain
27
36%
Bennett Miller - Capote
0
No votes
Steven Spielberg - Munich
6
8%
 
Total votes: 74

Big Magilla
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Big Magilla »

Mister Tee wrote:
mlrg wrote: If Million Dollar Baby was released in 2005 would it prevail above Crash and Brokeback Mountain?
I think it definitely would have. Million Dollar Baby didn't win in 2004 because it arrived late; it won because it was the most broadly popular of the three main contenders. In 2005, it would have been competing with two films that had significant backlashes -- Brokeback for its subject matter, Crash for its sledgehammer obviousness. It would have seemed the perfect middle-ground choice.
Responding to this quote from Best Actress - 2004, I have to say no again.

Million Dollar Baby benefitted greatly from the "will it or won't it succeed" hubbub of its sudden late-year release when it was suddenly moved forward from its intended 2005 release. That it succeeded, gave it great momentum in a year when there were no strong favorites and, yes, it was a better film than the competition. That would not have been the case in 2005 in which there were at least five better films, only two of which were nominated - Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck. Left out of the mix were A History of Violence, The Constant Gardener and The Squid and the Whale, all of which were better than Capote, Munich and Crash.

Although both Capote and Munich made my ten best list, they did so further down. Munich benefitted strongly from its year-end release as Million Dollar Baby had the year before.

Brokeback Mountain was the overwhelming favorite, having won the preponderance of pre-Oscar awards and the Best Director Oscar. Crash was a hometown favorite filmed on location in Los Angeles when few films were anymore. There was no middle ground. If there were, Good Night, and Good Luck would have been that. Box-office was not a factor in 2005. If it were, Walk the Line would likely have been the popular choice.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by FilmFan720 »

I'm playing catch-up with some of these posts, so pardon me dredging up years that have been beaten to death already by this board.

Looking at this slate a decade later, I had forgotten how good this line-up was (and how utterly disappointing that final outcome really was). I voted Brokeback here in both categories, but to me the victory of Crash isn't as much beating Lee's film but beating all of these films. The filler this year was excellent, and in the year before or after this, I probably would vote for Good Night and Good Luck or even Munich if they were offered. I even like Capote more than many here, finding the darker, quieter take on the In Cold Blood saga a fascinating debut from a film who has continued to offer interesting work down the line. It is really disheartening to find four films I really like or even love in a line-up and then see something like Crash beat all of them at the end of the day.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Sabin »

The Best of Youth was one of the great moviegoing experiences I had in Chicago while I went to Columbia. Just an incredibly worthwhile trek I took to the Gene Siskel Center both days.

I'm intrigued by Uri's reaction to Munich. There's really nothing I can say to argue with it, but Munich is the film that has come to mean the most to me of these nominated films. Nothing at all against Brokeback Mountain, which is more a film of pieces to me. Heath Ledger's incredible performance. Michelle Williams. That ending. A few scenes here and there. If it never quite devastates as a whole, one's memory of Brokeback Mountain supplements its weaker spots until it becomes the romance of the decade. So, give it Best Picture everywhere but here. Crash winning Best Picture has likely done more to immortalize it than winning the Oscar could have.

The best stretch of filmmaking Steven Spielberg ever had started with A.I. Artificial Intelligence and ended with Munich. Excluding The Terminal (or maybe I'm wrong?), there is more for cinephiles to return to in these five movies to chew on than in any other span of the mogul's career. Now with War Horse and Lincoln, he's Old Man Spielberg and something has changed in his work. I like Lincoln more and more every time I see it, but there was a curiosity and innovation in his work ten years prior. A playfulness? There are scenes in Munich that are better than anything else in anything nominated in 2005, uncommonly gripping, sexy, moral, polished. The first time I saw it, Munich was almost too much for me. I felt it lost its footing as it went along, but by design it's built to make you almost forget one gets so far off track, to where impetus feels like a distant memory. For five years, Steven Spielberg was the most underrated filmmaker alive. Munich isn't A.I. Artificial Intelligence, but it stands on a different platform than anything else.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by ITALIANO »

Mister Tee wrote: (it was shown in Italy that way, wasn’t it?)

It was actually conceived as a TV mini series, but after it was shown at Cannes, and was so well-received there (and even won some important prize), RAI - our national tv channel, which had produced it - decided to show it first in Italian cinemas - two parts, each about three-hours long. It was a big hit. Only later in the same year it was finally shown on tv (four episodes), again to a wide audience. And this is why it could be nominated for eleven Davids (winning six, including Best Picture) and for eight Silver Ribbons (winning seven, including Best Picture). Now that I think of it, Italy could have submitted it for the Best Foreign Film Oscar (they chose the less impressive I'm not Scared instead), but it's possible that its tv origins didn't allow that. Anyway, great movie - one of the best Italian movies of this new millennium.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Mister Tee »

Well, at this point it’s obvious I’m never going to find time to do this year properly, so let’s try a quick-and-dirty.

The Best of Youth is obviously a major achievement – an insightful, moving, decades-long chronicle through Italian history that’s bracing in a modern way but also traditional enough I could recommend it to my parents without hesitation. But I wonder if it’s fair to judge it alongside theatrical films, when it’s more like a mini-series (it was shown in Italy that way, wasn’t it?) Anyway, great piece of work, that dwarfs anything on the Academy list.

I also held very high opinion of Mysterious Skin, Look at Me, and Match Point (still my favorite Allen of this new millenium).

As I’ve said here ad nauseam, I didn’t think Crash was 100% dreadful; there were parts of it that were at least trying to deal with touch matters in an interesting way. But Haggis’ heavy hand eventually became too much, between the coincidental second Matt Dillon/Thandi Newton meeting, every moment involving Sandra Bullock, the cleansing snowfall (such a Magnolia ripoff I couldn’t believe it), and, worst of all, the cheap manipulation of putting an adorable child in jeopardy followed by a ridiculous escape. If the Oscars had never touched this movie, I’d not have thought about it since, but it wouldn’t raise my bile, either. Thanks, Academy.

I just didn’t find much there there in Capote. What narrative force it had was largely derived from In Cold Blood, of which I had very strong memories almost four decades later and didn’t need reminding. What it mostly amounted to was two hours of watching a high-wire literary impersonation. I’m in the middle on Philip Seymour Hoffman’s work: what he does in impressive, but I find him straining a bit too much of the time. As others have said, I preferred the more at-ease (because he wasn’t trying to play someone so much unlike him) work Toby Jones did in Infamous a year later.

Munich had the misfortune of Tom O’Neil flogging it a year out as “the clear Oscar front-runner”. It also had a final half-hour that sputtered a bit (especially in that laughable sex/flashback scene). But for most of its running time it was a powerful, thoughtful work on the cycle of vengeance and what it does to all parties. Not Spielberg’s finest work, but a sign he may have a lot more left in him.

Brokeback Mountain had, for me, the misfortune (not unlike 12 Years a Slave) of being sold as so powerful and ground-breaking a work that it almost inevitably disappointed. As I said here when the film opened, I thought the film faltered at the start: I didn’t see the overwhelming attraction that would have made these two guys take such a (for them) dangerous leap (unlike, say, in Blue is the Warmest Color, where the intensity is clear from moment one). Once the characters leave the mountain, the story turns considerably more interesting, and I found it an intelligent and moving effort (if not the emotional wipeout I was promised). It’s a good, solid movie…but not the great one I’d hoped for.

So, I pick Good Night and Good Luck for both my votes. George Clooney really surprised me: I’d thought (based on Confessions of a Dangerous Mind) that he had some talent, but I’d expected whatever he made of the Murrow/McCarthy face-off would be in Quiz Show territory, at best. Instead, he really transported me to another era: capturing the exhilaration and also the fear of working in such an atmosphere to try and right an ongoing wrong. He got a great performance out of David Strathairn (my best actor choice), and captured the feel of the 50s as well as any movie I’ve seen. I’m not saying it’s a great movie – 2005, theatrically, didn’t offer any such – but it’s my favorite, so I’ll swim against the Brokeback tide and honor it.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Uri »

The Original BJ wrote:Of the big ticket options, I was very glad Munich scored the nomination over the rest of the candidates (Walk the Line, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, or, gulp, Cinderella Man). The script treats the Mossad missions with genuine complexity, not trite binaries, but as the politically messy, emotionally charged nightmares they must have been. And Steven Spielberg, of course, is a master at shooting the kind of suspense sequences the movie trades in, and, in this case, giving them proper emotional weight beyond movie-movie pleasures. It's a very worthy nominee, but I also remember that it was very hastily rushed into release to qualify for year-end prizes, and I thought the haste showed in some places. There were a couple spots where the exact particulars of the story lost me, and others that felt tonally dissonant with the rest of the piece (like that bizarre, sweat-filled sex scene). And you could probably argue that the final shot draws a comparison that's so obvious it probably didn't need to be made. As a result, I don't think this is Spielberg's most fully successful film, but it was yet another very worthy and ambitious effort from him.
Ang Lee, as usual, manages to portray a specific culture (the mid-century American West) far from his own with great humanity and detail.
Whenever a film like Munich comes along, I’m obliged to confront the issue of our ability to really get films (and other work of Art) that deal with cultures other than our own. Here in Israel it was rather dismissed, and rightly so, for its depiction of everything Israeli was, at best, clueless and at worst laughable. But then, indeed, there’s Ang Lee and his ability, as Jane Austen (aka Emma Thompson) famously said, to understand her better than she understands herself. No one, I guess, can deny Spielberg’s extreme proficiency as a film maker, so even if Lee can be no slouch at times too, I’d agree that Munich present a much more vibrant cinematic extravaganza than BM. Should this flamboyancy be evaluated on its own, regardless of “literary” merit? Could it? Yes, it is the tiresome, old fashioned form vs. content issue, but as a content oriented filmgoer I, personally, can’t avoid it.

And having Munich and BM as a trigger, is the fact that on one hand we have an American director dealing with a “foreign” story while on the other there’s the opposite scenario is crucial? I do believe there is something to it, but I’ll add that I found that the way the period aspect of each film was handled in similarly successful (or not) way, but then again, the past is a foreign country too. The most simplistic way to sum it up would be to make a very crude distinction – Lee is a grown up, Spielberg is, well, not. This eternal Peterpanism may have its benefits (Close Encounters is truly great), but for me, too often, the shear movie-making drive and even joy (although the latter aspect is descending as the years go by) of his films are not enough to make me turn a blind eye to the intellectual shortcomings of them. And to – again - hammer to death my old point, for me, a cinematic culture of which this particular creator is the epitome of not only commercial but also artistic achievement is, if not objectively wrong than at least subjectively unrelatable.

And that’s all from grumpy Cato the Elder for now.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Heksagon »

I may be the only one who feels this way, but for me 2005-08 was something of a low ebb in American films, as there were relatively few American films that I really loved during this time. This, of course, reflects on also on my opinion of the Oscar contests during this period.

The Academy did quite well to nominate my two favourite films of the year, Good Night and Good Luck - which gets my votes in this poll - and Brokeback Mountain. Capote and Munich are borderline good films, which I can live with considering I don't feel that there were a lot of good contenders this year.

But they ruined it all with the surprise Best Picture award to Crash. It was the worst moment I've ever had following Oscars. I'm still frustrated thinking about it. God damn it.

edit: typo
Last edited by Heksagon on Mon Nov 25, 2013 7:11 am, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Reza »

Voted for Brokeback Mountain and Ang Lee.

My picks for 2005:

Best Picture
1. Brokeback Mountain
2. Good Night, and Good Luck
3. The Constant Gardener
4. Downfall
5. A History of Violence

The 6th Spot: Munich

Best Director
1. Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
2. George Clooney, Good Night, and Good Luck
3. Fernando Meirelles, The Constant Gardener
4. David Cronenberg, A History of Violence
5. Steven Spielberg, Munich

The 6th Spot: Michael Haneke, Caché
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Okri »

I never thought 2005 was considered lackluster. A terrible actress category, to be sure, but almost everything else was aces.

Voted a straight Munich ticket.

I'm with Eric on Crash. Perhaps the worst film I've ever seen.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by The Original BJ »

One of the great filmgoing experiences of my life was watching the first three hours of The Best of Youth, racing to find something to eat quickly for dinner, and high-tailing it back to the theater because I couldn't wait to see what happened in the second half. Best movie of the year.

Under director, I'd go for Terrence Malick as my top choice, as I find The New World to be a visually gorgeous (surprise!) and emotionally heartfelt historical drama.

I'd also march for Junebug, a small movie but one that covers a lot of ground, and David Cronenberg in the directing category for A History of Violence, who I insisted up until nominations day would be at least a lone director nominee.

At this point, Crash has gained a far more infamous reputation than as the modest drama it seemed to be in spring '05. And yet, I'd never argue there was revisionism at stake -- I saw the movie on opening day and didn't particularly care for it, though I do think it's a more ambitious and interesting effort than the kind of Finding Neverland/Seabiscuit place-filler nominees that had filled out the ballot in recent years. Most of the storylines had some energy to them, and clearly the movie aims to tackle big ideas. But the execution -- in the writing department, amplified by Paul Haggis's sledgehammer-style direction -- left a lot to be desired. From the opening "let's explain the title of the movie" monologue, to the characters spouting aggressively racist epithets in a manner that just invites the audience to cluck tongues and feel superior, to scenes where the characters leap to bizarre conclusions (when Thandie Newton tells Matt Dillon that he pulled them over because he thought she was a white woman with a black man, I thought...HUH?) the movie feels fairly clumsy throughout. And that's before the worst scenes in the film, especially the "magic cloak" bit (which was manipulative not only for putting that adorable girl in jeopardy, but also wimpy for chickening out on actually dealing with the disaster that situation could have turned into) and my least favorite scene in the movie, the one where Ryan Phillippe gets in the confrontation with Terrence Howard who nearly gets himself killed instead of ALERTING THE COPS TO THE HIJACKER IN HIS CAR. Crash felt like a cockroach whose head just kept getting bigger all season long -- after the Globe nominations, I thought we had staved off the chance it would make the Best Picture list, much less win the Screenplay prize, much less...well, you know how that turned out.

Like Ray a year prior, Capote caught me completely off guard as a Best Picture candidate. I assumed Philip Seymour Hoffman would be a strong contender, but the movie as a whole didn't strike me as anything major. When it won the National Society prize, I realized I had severely underestimated it. I found the movie interesting enough in the way it examined a familiar story from a new angle, and I always enjoy films that focus on a unique type of relationship, as in the Capote-Smith bond in this film. But, overall, I found the treatment a little tepid, in the manner of many respectable but unexciting biographies. Bennett Miller doesn't really impress me visually, and even the much-ballyhooed Hoffman performance captured the eccentricity but not the charm of Truman Capote for me. I enjoyed next year's Infamous a whole lot more in almost every respect.

Of the big ticket options, I was very glad Munich scored the nomination over the rest of the candidates (Walk the Line, King Kong, Memoirs of a Geisha, or, gulp, Cinderella Man). The script treats the Mossad missions with genuine complexity, not trite binaries, but as the politically messy, emotionally charged nightmares they must have been. And Steven Spielberg, of course, is a master at shooting the kind of suspense sequences the movie trades in, and, in this case, giving them proper emotional weight beyond movie-movie pleasures. It's a very worthy nominee, but I also remember that it was very hastily rushed into release to qualify for year-end prizes, and I thought the haste showed in some places. There were a couple spots where the exact particulars of the story lost me, and others that felt tonally dissonant with the rest of the piece (like that bizarre, sweat-filled sex scene). And you could probably argue that the final shot draws a comparison that's so obvious it probably didn't need to be made. As a result, I don't think this is Spielberg's most fully successful film, but it was yet another very worthy and ambitious effort from him.

My votes would come down to Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck, both of which I found to be visually compelling and terrifically acted historical pieces with relevance that gave them real contemporary urgency. I didn't think George Clooney had to reach for parallels, but I think it's pretty clear Good Night is his take on the "with-us-or-against-us" political mentality of the Bush era. The movie is a richly detailed portrait of a time and place (and specifically, what it was like to work in news in that era, so different from today), and a pretty emotionally resonant account of one man's attempt to stand up to forces of tyranny that were attempting to squash any type of dissent. David Strathairn is just outstanding as Murrow, and Clooney's work is a huge step up from his debut film; the black-and-white photography -- full of smoky office interiors, painstakingly recreated news programs, and a series of close-ups that make the narrative feel even more high-stakes than it is -- is absolutely striking, the work of a clear filmmaker. It's true the movie is a success on a smaller scale -- it's only about 90 minutes, and most of that run time focuses on a few characters in only a few locations -- but I was pretty bummed such an intelligent, well-crafted effort went home completely empty-handed on Oscar night.

But I'll stick with Brokeback Mountain in Picture and Director, even though I didn't rate it quite as highly as many critics. I had been promised a movie that was earth-shattering, and I didn't think it was that -- in the filmmaking department, it was a classical piece rather than anything edgy, and the only thing really edgy about the subject matter was that it appeared in a movie with this budget and with actors that well-known. But that doesn't mean that it wasn't a very beautifully realized, powerful drama. At the time, I heard a lot of people in my real life say that the movie wouldn't have been as well-reviewed if it had been about a heterosexual romance -- maybe that's true, but isn't that like saying that Titanic wouldn't have been as big a box office hit if it hadn't been about a famous sinking ship? You can't really discount a movie's entire reason for being when evaluating it, and even though the movie wasn't wildly innovative, it still managed to tell the kind of love story we don't often see in mainstream movies, and that's worth saluting. The performances from all four leads are pretty wonderful, and Ang Lee, as usual, manages to portray a specific culture (the mid-century American West) far from his own with great humanity and detail. And visually, the movie manages a couple shots (like the fireworks bursting over Ledger, and that last shot of the shirts together) that feel almost as iconic as the movie's most oft-mocked line of dialogue. So, in a year I thought was very lackluster overall, Brokeback it is.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Big Magilla »

mlrg wrote:
Eric wrote:Crash has two votes. Good job, trolls.
thank you
I don't think Eric read your earlier comment. I think he was assuming that the two votes were from two people who voted without comment.
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by mlrg »

Eric wrote:Crash has two votes. Good job, trolls.
thank you
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Precious Doll »

Take out Brokeback Mountain and it's one of the worst lineups ever.

1. Mysterious Skin (Gregg Araki)
2. The Death of Mr. Lazarescu (Cristi Puiu)
3. Palindromes (Todd Solondz)
4. The Sun (Aleksandr Sokurov)
5. Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee)
6. Battle in Heaven (Carlos Reygadas)
7. Hidden (Michael Haneke)
8. The Child (Luc & Jean-Pierre Dardenne)
9. Sisters in Law (Kim Longinotte & Florence Ayisi)
10. Time to Leave (Francois Ozon)
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by Eric »

Crash has two votes. Good job, trolls.

01. Munich
02. War of the Worlds
03. Kings & Queen
04. The Sun
05. The Devil’s Rejects
06. Land of the Dead
07. The Joy of Life
08. Forty Shades of Blue
09. Ma Mere
10. Palindromes
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Re: Best Picture and Director 2005

Post by mlrg »

probably the only vote Crash and Haggis will get here are mine.
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