And The Nominees Are...

This amazingly cold month brings, along with hot beverages and warm blankets, the approach of one of the most important events regarding the cinematic world and the biggest awards ceremony of the year: the Oscars!

Today, we finally got to know the nominees for this year's show, so take a look:

Best Picture

American Sniper

Birdman

Boyhood

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Selma

The Theory of Everything

Whiplash

Best Actor

Steve Carell (Foxcatcher)

Bradley Cooper (American Sniper)

Benedict Cumberbatch (The Imitation Game)

Michael Keaton (Birdman)

Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything)

Best Actress

Felicity Jones (The Theory Of Everything)

Julianne Moore (Still Alice)

Rosamund Pike (Gone Girl)

Reese Witherspoon (Wild)

Marion Cotillard (Two Days, One Night)

Best Supporting Actor

Robert Duvall (The Judge)

Ethan Hawke (Boyhood)

Edward Norton (Birdman)

Mark Ruffalo (Foxcatcher)

JK Simmons (Whiplash)

Best Supporting Actress

Patricia Arquette (Boyhood)

Keira Knightley (The Imitation Game)

Emma Stone (Birdman)

Meryl Streep (Into The Woods)

Laura Dern (Wild)

Best Director

Wes Anderson (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

Alejandro González Iñárritu (Birdman)

Richard Linklater, (Boyhood)

Bennett Miller, (Foxcatcher)

Morten Tyldum, (The Imitation Game)

Cinematography

Birdman

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Ida

Mr Turner

Unbroken

Costume Design

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Inherent Vice

Into The Woods

Maleficent

Mr Turner

Foreign Language Film

Leviathan

Ida

Tangerines

Timbuktu

Wild Tales

Makeup and Hairstyling

Foxcatcher

The Grand Budapest Hotel

Guardians of the Galaxy

Original Score

Alexandre Desplat (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

Alexandre Desplat (The Imitation Game)

Johann Johannsson (The Theory of Everything)

Gary Yershon (Mr Turner)

Hans Zimmer (Interstellar)

Adapted Screenplay

Jason Hall (American Sniper)

Graham Moore (The Imitation Game)

Anthony McCarten (The Theory Of Everything)

Paul Thomas Anderson (Inherent Vice)

Damien Chazelle (Whiplash)

Original Screenplay

Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Nicolas Giacobone, Alexander Dinelaris Jr, Armando Bo (Birdman)

Richard Linklater (Boyhood)

E. Max Frye and Dan Futterman and Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher)

Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness (The Grand Budapest Hotel)

Dan Gilroy (Nightcrawler)

Best Original Song

Lost Stars, Begin Again

Grateful, Beyond the Lights

I’m Not Gonna Miss You, Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me

Everything is Awesome, The Lego Movie

Glory, Selma

Best Animated Feature

Big Hero 6

The Box Trolls

How To Train Your Dragon 2

Songs of the Sea

The Tale Of Princess Kaguya

Best Documentary Feature

Citizenfour

Finding Vivian Maier

Last Days in Vietnam

Salt of the Earth

Virunga

Best Documentary Short

Joanna

Our Curse

The Reaper

White Earth

Best Film Editing

American Sniper

Boyhood

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Whiplash

Best Visual Effects

Captain America: The Winter Soldier

Dawn of the Planet of the Apes

Guardians of the Galaxy

Interstellar

X-Men: Days of Future Past

Best Short Film, Live Action

Aya

Boogaloo and Graham

Butter Lamp

Parvaneh

The Phone Call

Best Short Film, Animated

The Bigger Picture

The Dam Keeper

Feast

Me and My Moulton

A Single Life

Best Production Design

The Grand Budapest Hotel

The Imitation Game

Interstellar

Into the Woods

"Mr. Turner"

Best Sound Editing

American Snipper

Birdman

The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies

Interstellar

Unbroken

Best Sound Mixing

American Sniper

Birdman

Interstellar

Unbroken

Whiplash

We can't say that these nominations were an absolute surprise for us, however, as usual, some options came surrounded with controversy and divided opinions.

As a proud fan of Wes Anderson and his majestic cinematography and visual style, I’m really happy to see that, with a total of nine nominations in the most diverse categories, he and his excellent The Grand Hotel Budapest are leading the awards.

Boyhood, from Linklater, was the magnificent result of 12 years of production, hard-work and commitment. After this long journey, we are reminded that after all, films can be timeless, absolutely deserving the recent spotlights. 

Again this year, there was speculation of racism and discrimination on the lists, reminded by the total absent of nominated black actors in any categories, and even the total absent of female directors in the Best Director nominations. After a film like Selma, it's hard to understand how, and why, this happened.

In terms of Best Actors and Actresses, we don’t have many surprises either.  Sadly, some of the bigger absents from this category were Jennifer Aniston (for her astonishing act on Cake) and Joaquin Phoenix (for his frenetic interpretation on Inherent Vice). It's ridiculous how, for the third year in a row (THIRD!), Bradley Cooper is once again nominated for Best Leading Actor. These kinds of awards intend to value new actor’s roles and interpretations, which means (or should mean) not giving the same places to the same people. For this reason, I’m not even going to start with Meryl Streep on this (she’s amazing and one of the best actresses ever, yes, but come on, in her life she got 19 nominations and won them three times, she’s good and she knows it already!). However, it was lovely to see Marion Cotillard nominated, as well as Steve Carell, for the Actors category.

The Best Directors list was also predictable but the Cinematography category has beautiful choices this year. The more technical categories were also interesting. As a Portuguese, I’m proud to know that the documentary portraying the work of one of our best photographers, Sebastião Salgado, is nominated for Best Documentary. Que orgulho, pá!

About the Animated movies, it’s interesting to see the options, specially the short movie ones. It’s strange the absence of Pixar on this one, and also the The Lego Movie, but we were rewarded with (at least) the nomination of The Tale of the Princess Kaguya and Songs of the Sea, like they deserved it.

Nevertheless, we have to say that the Best Original Song's list is one of the poorest of the last few years.  It’s sad to also know that, in such an important ceremony, Everything is New (from the Lego’s movie) is one of the nominees.

And oh well, after all, even with their pros and cons, the important thing is that we (finally!!) now have the nominees, ladies and gentleman! 

We have until the 22 February to catch up and choose our favourites! 

Medianeras (2011) - Review

Directed and Written by Gustavo Taretto 

Music/Soundtrack Credits to Gabriel Chwojnik

Award Nominations

IMBd's Classification/Review

Rotten Tomatoes Classification/Review

Martin is a phobic in the process of recovery. Little by little he manages to step out of the isolation of his one-room apartment and his virtual reality. He is a web designer. Mariana just broke up after a long relacionship. Her head is a mess, just like the apartment where she takes refuge. Martin and Mariana live on the same street, in opposite buildings, but they've never met. They walk through the same places, but they do not notice each other. How can they meet in a city of three milion people? Urban loneliness. Buenos Aires. What separes them is what brings them together.

Medianeras is the name normally given to building's walls that have no windows. These walls, normally called as blind walls as well. This happens as a consequence of the the proximity to the nearby building, in order to cut the visual contact between the neighboors. 

In this simple, yet so emotional movie, a symbolic metaphor of human relacions is felt in the way how we always have a blind wall in ourselves, sometimes so close to another person that feels as lost as we are. A window away to escape from loneliness... And we, so many times, don't even know how close we can be.

The argentin architecture is an important influence on this movie. With a huge variety of clean and geometrically symetrical shots, the audience is capable to imagine themselfs living in the enourmous city that Buenos Aires is, where the arquitecture, even being apparently ugly or even desorganized, reflects the type of lifes that we can find over there.

Anyone that lives in a big city, knows how Loneliness can be around us. We live in a society that, day by day, forgets that a hug can be stronger that some written words or a call. Strings of technology and virtual communications are getting more control, holding hands with that feeling you have, every night, when you get home, living with people that you probably don't even know their second names, and you just feel alone. 

In a big city like Buenos Aires, Mariana (Pilar Lopez de Ayala) and Martín (Javier Drolas) live that universal feeling that comes across when hundreds of people pass you by and you know you are all just independent soulds from each other, just colliding, without being connected, every day. These two lonely souls are neighboors and they didn't even know about each other. Their paths cross every single day and they don't recognize themselfs. This huge methaphor exemplifies the real world and our society, how we look but we don't see, how we can came across with love without even knowing it, everyday.

Tarutto reveals the anxieties and isolation in which Mariana and Martín live, as a consequence of some past relationships.

The director creates an ideal sequence of thoughts and exposes the particular fears and dreams of the central figures of the movie, getting us along and familiar with their lifes, having us cheering until the finally, perfect moment when the couple finally meets. 

Martín is passing through a depressed and isolated phase of his life. Being a web designer, he admits that since the first moment he sitted in front of his computer, he never went anywhere else after. 

Mariana finished a 4 year relacion and it's trying to put up the individual pieces left after the breakup.

Both actors makes us believe in their sadness, in their dispair against the feeling that completely broke their lifes. However, true love will find them in the end. The emotional commitment and feelings that the caracters transmite during the whole feature, are felt as true. The fact that the whole movie is in spanish, gives an extra strength to the passion to the story.

This fresh feature, with a soundtrack that flows with the cuts and sequences of images that appear, shows how Taretto's looks to our modern society, loosing faith in love but, in the end, finding it in a random corner, how Wallie appears in the middle of a huge crowd in our child books.

(Sugestion: If you loved this movie, you should see 500 Days of Summer)

Let's start, shall we?

Robert Bresson said in his Notes on The Cinematographer that, "Cinematography is a writing with images in mouvement and with sounds".
As a simple matter of fact, it is. You can call Cinema whatever you want. A business,  an illusion, motion pictures, a lie... Some souls sometimes call it a waste of time also. However, for me, Cinema is an Art. A way of not only see differents perspectives of life, but also a way to make you desire bigger things that your vision from the world.
After a good movie, you just want to see more, you want to know more, you want to understand more. That's what a good movie does to your life. Gives you enough strenght to look for new horizons, combines different worlds, cultures, people, in frames, just to show life passing by your eyes. And you, delightful, just need to go with it. From what it gives to you, Cinema deserves that utopic surrender from you.
You can call Cinema whatever you want. However, in this blog, it's going to be called Art.
Being a Film and Journalism student, I always had the idea of creating a film blog. I never gave the first step towards the materialization of this idea for personal reasons. Or we can call it lazyness.
However, things changed. For my love for Cinema, I changed my life, coming from my beautiful portuguese city to London, to discover this great big world that surronds films. Cinema deserves more from me then just to stare and keep my mouth shut, after the lights go out.
Being a 19 year old, ahead to my second year of university, studying Journalism, Film and Television Studies, I need to want more more. I need to write more. I need to respond to the glourious or tragic feeling that movies give to me.
Because of that, I created this blog. My goal with it is not only being egocentric, sharing my reviews and points of view from the big cinematic world, but also to inform and talk about what is going on, just around the corner, on the nearest theatre next to you.
My biggest dream is to be a film journalist one day, when I'm older and wiser. Until I get there, this is where I'm going to start my journey. Hope you're coming with me.

Welcome to We’ll Always Have Cinema!