By Andy Goldberg -
Around this time of year, many people look forward to gifts appearing mysteriously under a tree in their living room. But for US film buffs the best gifts are more likely to be appearing in their local cineplex.
With Oscar season just around the corner at the beginning of the new year, film studios are rushing their Academy Award contenders into movie theatres now in order to leave a fresh impression on the minds of Oscar voters. The result is a release calendar overloaded with the high-brow fare that is normally shunted to art-houses.
“It’s a shame that thoughtful films for adults can’t come out year-round,” director Jason Reitman (Up in the Air) lamented in The Wall Street Journal.
So while during the normal course of the year, Hollywood is consumed with blockbuster sequels and superhuman prequels, the attention of movie houses shifts dramatically in November to the kind of exquisitely crafted films favoured by the ladies and gentlemen of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
This change in mood, as certain as the change in seasons, has already yielded a bounty of treats. From the plantation horror of “12 Years a Slave,” to the extra-planetary thrills of Gravity, and from the heroism of Captain Phillips to the stoicism of The Butler, thoughtful film fans have had plenty to cheer about of late. The festivities will continue this weekend with Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, a biopic of the legendary South African leader, in which Idris Elba is already being touted as a best Oscar winner for his portrayal of the iconic fighter against apartheid.
The Oscar race heats up even more the following week as past winners jostle for space in front of cinemagoers. The brilliant Coen Brothers, who won Oscars for No Country for Old Men and Fargo, will once again wow the high-brow crowd with Inside Llewyn Davis, a fascinating look at the life of a singer-songwriter in the turbulent folk-music scene of 1961′s Greenwich Village.
Hitting cinemas a week later, The Hobbit, The Desolation of Smaug, directed by Peter Jackson, can never be ignored. But more likely to win the big Oscar prize is American Hustle, by the director of last year’s Silver Lining’s Playbook, David O Russell. The movie is a 1970s era true crime drama with an all-star-cast including Christian Bale, Amy Adams, Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence.
Tom Hanks makes his second attempt for the best actor Oscar this year, following up his role in Captain Phillips by playing Walt Disney in Saving Mr Banks. The film, by Blind Side director John Lee Hancock, about the making of Mary Poppins, hits theatres on December 20.
Martin Scorsese will be hoping to add to his surprisingly meager Oscar cabinet (best director in 2006 for The Departed) with The Wolf of Wall Street. Hitting screens on the last weekend of the year, it stars Leonardo Di Caprio in the true story of a high-flying stockbroker who falls into a life of fraud and corruption.
Meryl Streep is in theaters the same week starring in the film version of the prize-winning play August: Osage County.
The schedule is so crowded that many studios have decided not to play the Oscar game this year, choosing to postpone release till next year when they will have a better shot at finding an audience in a less crowded market.
Falling into this category are Grace of Monaco, starring Nicole Kidman as Grace Kelly, and Foxcatcher, a wrestling drama from Moneyball director Bennett Miller. George Clooney’s Monuments Men, about a group of soldiers on the hunt for masterworks stolen by Nazis was also postponed.
From main.omanobserver.om