With Oscar season in full swing, the hot topic on every movie love’rs mind is whowill take home Hollywood’s most coveted award of the night, the Academy Award for Best Picture. With nine films vying for the top spot, three stood out as serious frontrunners for the award, which will air Feb. 24.
Quentin Tarantino’s controversial slavery-based “Django Unchained,” Kathryn Bigelow’s wartime thriller “Zero Dark Thirty” and Ang Lee’s visually stunning epic “Life of Pi.” Which film is the best of them all?
Riddled in controversy from the media, “Django Unchained” tells the story of Django, played by Oscar winning actor Jamie Foxx, a slave who is freed by a man called Schultz. Schultz is played by last year’s Best Supporting Actor winner Christoph Waltz, and through a series of arrangements and agreements helps Django become a bounty hunter to help him find his wife, played by Kerry Washington.
With Leonardo DiCaprio playing the charismatic villain, Calvin Candie, the movie’s all- star cast brings action, suspense and Tarantino’s signature elements of inappropriate and offensive humor and gratuitous violence to audiences in only a way Tarantino can.
Will it win Best Picture? Probably not. As wonderfully styled and envelope-pushing as this movie is, I don’t foresee it taking home the Oscar for Best Picture. I would not be surprised if Christoph Waltz did not repeat his win as Best Supporting Actor, which he is nominated for.
Based on the events that took down one of the most feared terrorists in the world, Kathryn Bigelow’s “Zero Dark Thirty” tells the story of the events that led to the assassination of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
No stranger to films centering on American war conflict, Bigelow is best known for her Oscar-winning picture “The Hurt Locker,” which told the story of soldiers in Afghanistan. “Zero Dark Thirty” follows the career of a CIA agent, played by Jessica Chastain, known for eating the “pie” in “The Help,” in telling the story of locating and killing bin Laden.
Will it win? Very likely. As mentioned before, Bigelow won two years ago for her epic “The Hurt Locker” and has struck gold again with this wonderfully suspenseful masterpiece.
Ang Lee’s “Life of Pi,” which is based on the book written by Yann Martel, is a visually stunning experience that is sure to please even the most casual of moviegoers along with aficionados of the silver screen. “Life of Pi” tells the story of Pi, a young boy whose life is suddenly changed through a series of natural disasters and who finds an unlikely ally in a tiger called Richard Parker. With its visuals rivaling those of “Avatar,”“Life of Pi” brings a rich, colorful experience to the screen that accompanies the just as vivid writing and storytelling.
Best Picture? This would be a surprise win. Although it has not received as much outward praise and accolades as the other two, I would not count this movie out.
