Sims

American Hustle is an infinitely superior film to Wolf of Wall Street (probably not an unpopular opinion outside of the Internet but oh well)

I didn't even think it was that great but no Leto is silly.

So did you all just like not watch Dallas Buyers Club

4th best movie of the year, u can all go away.

12 Years is still winning, race is still boring, nothing has changed, move along.

I have no idea why you all think AH is at equal odds or even a frontrunner to win BP. I see very little chance 12 Years doesn't win.

Ugh these are the most boring nominations in forever

lol but wait I thought Lawrence had absolutely zero chance of winning

Nolan would probably be in my top 25 or 30 but I'm tempted to keep him off my list completely as a way of ensuring he's not #1.

In before Christopher Nolan gets #1

lol okay

Terms of Endearment would probably make my all-time worst 50 honestly. I just hate literally everything about it.

Also FWIW Nyong'o seems like she would do better with critics than with the Academy and for Lawrence the reverse is probably the case. I'm still predicting Nyong'o to win but you're kidding yourself if you think Lawrence doesn't have a very real shot.

Not sure I agree with this. They obviously aren't quite as reliable as the guilds and Globes when it comes to predicting nominees, but they give a strong idea of which contenders have momentum and the visibility to be considered among the best of the year.

FYC for worst BP winner: Terms of Endearment (1983)

I'm assuming that we're assessing these movies solely on their own merits? In other words I'm guessing that we won't be taking into account how "deserving" they were in their particular year in comparison to other films.

SM3: D Shrek 3: D Pirates 3: B- (not really any worse than the second honestly)

Oops I forgot the "of America" part

OMG where is Miyazaki

Hope Blue Jasmine can actually manage a BP nom

Yeah obviously I wasn't crazy about the movie but DiCaprio's performance was its one outstanding aspect IMO. I'd rank Blanchett, Ejiofor and maybe one or two others slightly higher but he was great.

Uh, where did I say that I thought Scorsese was "recommending" this lifestyle? I'm aware that he's not. I do think if he wanted to make a critique of excess and hedonism (which, as I said, I believe he does) he could have done a much better job (and I think he actually has in other films he's done). Here it's just scene after scene of coke binges and other things that are supposed to "shock" me but which really begin to lose their potency by the 400th time they're shown. These scenes do nothing to advance the plot and very little to develop character (we get that these are selfish assholes very early in the film). LOL, believe me when I say I have zero problem with S&M. I probably should have clarified what I was saying in that sentence; I'm not talking about just the S&M or "violence" but the way that sex as a whole is depicted throughout the movie. But are you seriously going to tell me that Scorsese does not want us to have some sort of visceral emotional response to the S&M and the orgies and the rest of the sexual debauchery? Because to me it's pretty obvious he wants us to be either disgusted or amused by all the sex in the movie. But as with all the other forms of "excess" in the movie, the sex just becomes boring and completely irrelevant to any semblance of a narrative very early on. Yeah, after he was already screwing her. Before that she pretty blatantly says "no" and "I won't have sex with you" so there's really no denying the fact that it's a rape scene. And to clarify what I'm saying about the misogyny, I am aware that Scorsese probably thinks he's making some sort of commentary about the way women are being treated--and to an extent that is what he's doing. But there comes a point in the film where Scorsese's intention is irrelevant; he spends so much time reveling in women being beat up and shit on that it's just something the viewer is supposed to accept. Did you read my post? I have no "moral objection" or whatever to artistic depictions of sex or violence or drugs or anything. The difference between this and films like Goodfellas/Pulp Fiction is that those films know when to stop. They actually have a justification for their lengthy running times; for example, they don't spend what must have been a half hour on the characters' various Quaalude reactions in scenes that do very, very little to advance the plot or increase our understanding of the characters (like I said, we get that these are drug addicted shitheads about ten minutes into the film). It would be different if I felt like there was a point to all the time Scorsese spends on these types of scenes, but I don't. Pulp Fiction and Goodfellas do spend a ton of time depicting the drugs and violence of mob culture, but when they do they do it in a way that seems pretty indispensable to the film as a whole. I can't imagine Pulp Fiction without Mia Wallace's overdose but I can very easily imagine Wolf of Wall Street without any number of its scenes. Overall, you seem to be missing my point: I am very clear on what Scorsese's intention is (how could I not be when it's as subtle as a shovel to the face). But his intention doesn't really matter when the final product (in my opinion) does a totally ineffective job reflecting it.

Well, this was...hm. I'll start with the positives. DiCaprio really is fantastic, and this is coming from someone who thinks his standing on the Internet is immensely overblown. Several times I have found him to be merely serviceable in roles that others have praised him to high heaven for. Here, however, he goes all in in a way that I have never seen from him before. Between this and Django, it seems clear (to me at least) that DiCaprio should have been playing these sorts of slapstick villains all along. I wouldn't quite give him "best performance of the year" status (I'd put Blanchett, Exarchopoulos, and Ejiofor ahead of him), but he certainly deserves a lead actor nomination (although I have yet to see several contenders). The rest of the cast is also a pleasure to watch. Jonah Hill proved to me for the first time that he might actually have acting talent after all, and Margot Robbie has several excellent scenes as well. McConaughey and Dujardin are great in their small roles, and nobody really sticks out as a weak link. That said, the stellar performances are the only reason I did not totally loathe this film. For much of its completely unmerited 3 hour runtime, I felt as though I was watching Scorsese lose his mind and devolve into self-parody. I can't totally blame him, however, since the script is a meandering mess that no director could have possibly turned into anything more than an adequate final product. A full hour could have been removed from this film and absolutely nothing would have been lost in terms of either narrative or entertainment value. There are, to be fair, a few genuinely hilarious moments in this film--McConaughey's scene and Belfort's exchange with the FBI agent come to mind--but these are more than undercut by the far more numerous scenes that neither advanced the plot nor amused me in any way whatsoever. I suppose I should have known what I was getting into when the film began with a dwarf being tossed, but things really only went downhill from there. I'm sure someone will say that I have a stick up my ass or that I need to "lighten up," but I have no problems with raunchy/offensive humor if it's executed well. There is nothing clever about most of the humor in this film, however. It's simply scene after scene of puerile fratboy idiocy that loses whatever comedic potential it may have had about 5 minutes into the film. One might say that Scorsese is trying to make a point about excess and the depravity of the 1%, but excess really only makes an impression if we're given something to compare it to. Not only was I not amused by any of the countless scenes involving sexual violence or drug abuse, but I wasn't really repulsed or offended by them either; I was simply bored, waiting to see if this story had any sort of destination at all. Things improve slightly when the story actually begins to progress--a solid 2 hours into the film--but we're still forced to endure cliched nonsense like the shipwreck scene and, of course, one last Quaalude scene, another mildly funny premise that Scorsese milks far past its worth. The story that the film has to tell isn't particularly captivating either--we've seen it before, and it's no different from hundreds of other Wall Street slimeball narratives. Finally, the misogyny in this film cannot be ignored. Certain people here are going to tell me that I'm hypersensitive or overly politically correct or whatever, but the attitude toward women here is harsh even by Scorsese's standards. I mean, Belfort literally rapes his wife at the end of the film, but the viewer is supposed to think little of this since she suddenly is okay with it because it's "the last time." I will emphasize that I did not actually despise this film as much as I easily could have. There were a few points at which I almost completely lost interest in the film but my attention was quickly drawn back to the screen thanks to the animated performances. I will also give one last compliment to editor Thelma Schoonmaker, because the film went by rather quickly for a 3 hour bloatfest that had little actual narrative to tell. 5.5/10, C/C+

I would have put Orange is the New Black in comedy but that's just me.

Soooooo much better than SLP. Easily Russell's best. I didn't think the script was "messy" at all, I thought it was well paced, and every actor was excellent. Definitely one of the best of the year--either my #2 or #3 after 12 Years A Slave and Gravity. 9/10, A