The 83rd Academy Awards: And the Oscar Goes To...

And the big night is finally here. For those of you keeping track, as usual, I made some Oscar predictions last month for all of the award categories. Now that the awards are finally being handed out, let's see how much I got right:

Best Art Direction: I just had a feeling about this one. The movie had a unique and amazing look and my gut told me that it would be recognized for it.
Predicted Winner: Alice in Wonderland
Actual Winner: Alice in Wonderland

Best Cinematography: Okay, my prediction was off with this one. But I'm glad to be wrong. This is the one that deservedit. This movie just had an amazing look that made it a pure joy to watch. I think this is just one of a couple awards that it will win tonight.
Predicted Winner: The King's Speech
Actual Winner: Inception

Best Supporting Actress: I knew it! I really believed that Melissa Leo would take this one. What a speech she gave! Guess she forgot that she was on live TV with that dropped F-bomb! And that Kirk Douglas... great choice to have him present the award. What a ham!
Predicted Winner: Melissa Leo for The Fighter
Actual Winner: Melissa Leo for The Fighter

Best Animated Feature: Toy Story 3. As usual, no surprise here. Pixar continues to dominate this category, and I don't see that changing anytime soon. And yes, they have another movie out this year: Cars 2. Will it be a lock for the this category next year. Tune in next year and we'll all find out. In the meantime, once again, good job and congratulations, Pixar!
Predicted Winner: Toy Story 3
Actual Winner: Toy Story 3

Best Adapted Screenplay: He wrote a great screenplay for a very powerful movie. Plus, he had all of the buzz and momentum behind him. figured he'd pull this one off.
Predicted Winner: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network
Actual Winner: Aaron Sorkin for The Social Network

Best Original Screenplay: Good for late bloomers! Nice speech. One more reason why it's going to be a very good night for this movie.
Predicted Winner: David Seidler for The King's Speech
Actual Winner: David Seidler for The King's Speech

Best Foreign Language Film: Oops! I was way off with this one. Thought it really would go to Biutiful. Guess things aren't so rotten in Denmark.
Predicted Winner: Biutiful
Actual Winner: In a Better World

Best Supporting Actor: Very cool to see this win. Thank you, Batman, for not dropping the F-bomb like your co-star from The Fighter.
Predicted Winner: Christian Bale for The Fighter
Actual Winner: Christian Bale for The Fighter

Best Original Score: Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross. Really expected this to go the way of The King's Speech, but looks like I was wrong.
Predicted Winner: The King's Speech
Actual Winner: The Social Network

Best Sound Mixing: Okay, I gave The King's Speech a little too much credit in this one. I should've seen that this was a no-brainer. Like I've been saying, Inception will carry several awards tonight. My only regret is that they will be in technical categories only. But they are well deserved.
Predicted Winner: The King's Speech
Actual Winner: Inception

Best Sound Editing: Ditto. Congrats to the makers of Inception.
Predicted Winner: Inception
Actual Winner: Inception

Best Visual Effects: It will be interesting to see if this movie wins anything else tonight. Unfortunately, because I believe Inception is only going to receive technical awards love tonight, I think that's all she wrote for Christopher Nolan's groundbreaking movie.
Predicted Winner: Inception
Actual Winner: Inception

Best Editing: Ok, that's another one I got wrong. Figured it'd be another feather in The King's Speech's cap, but was not meant to be. Congrats to David Fincher's editing team.
Predicted Winner: The King's Speech
Actual Winner: The Social Network

Best Original Song: And it's Randy Newman. Wow, he's having fun tonight, isn't he? As I always say, never bet against a Pixar film!
Predicted Winner: Toy Story 3
Actual Winner: Toy Story 3

Best Director: Okay, forget what I said last month. If you have any doubt as to who will win Best Picture, this award should give you a major clue. Good advice, Mr. Hooper. Always listen to your mother...
Predicted Winner: David Fincher for The Social Network
Actual Winner: Tom Hooper for The King's Speech

Best Actress: Good for you, Natalie! What a journey for this interesting actor. Honestly, I think her best acting is still ahead of her. Keep your eyes on this one.
Predicted Winner: Natalie Portman for Black Swan
Actual Winner: Natalie Portman for Black Swan

Best Actor: One more step along the way to a Best Picture coronation for this stirring film about the royal family.
Predicted Winner: Colin Firth for The King's Speech
Actual Winner: Colin Firth for The King's Speech

Best Picture: Very nice film. Glad to see it win. However, there were no surprises here. It was the hands down favorite and to be honest, I would've been surprised if any of the other films won.
Predicted Winner: The King's Speech
Actual Winner: The King's Speech

Now let's see how many of these that I got right: out of the 17 categories that I tracked and blogged about this year, I got 12 of them right. That's about 75%. Not too bad. But I'd like to get it up higher next year.

Well, once again, that's it folks. As always, I invite you to join me again next year - same time, same blog - to find out which films from 2011 will take home Oscar gold.

Until then, I hope you have a magical time at the movies. I know I will.

Look! Up on the Silver Screen! It's Superheroes!

(Or: We're 10 Years into the Current Comic Book Movie Boom – What's the Future of Cinematic Superheroes?)

This is a great time to be alive if you’re a comic book fan (and by the way, yes, I am one). Never have there been more choices for us from the burgeoning superhero movie genre.

As a kid, pretty much all that my sisters and I had to enjoy of our caped and cowled heroes were the Christopher Reeve Superman movies and the Tim Burton Batman flicks. Which, more often than not, meant that the choices for superhero fare were few and far between. And the few flicks that there were out there were almost always bad. Very bad. I remember always wondering why there were so few superhero movies (where was Spider-Man? Where was The Flash? The Justice League? And when are we finally going to get a Wonder Woman movie?)

It's always seemed to me that superhero movies were maybe (and that's a BIG maybe) rated just a little higher than cartoons on the respectability totem pole. Such fare (along with animation, in American culture at least) was (and is) typically relegated to kids' stuff. Unfortunately, it's often with good reason. Most superhero stories outside of the comics themselves have been told through animation and aimed at kids. Whether it was the Super Friends or Spider-Man and His Amazing Friends, most superhero antics have a history of being pretty juvenile.

And it hasn't really been any better for the live-action projects. While the old Incredible Hulk series was pretty good, nearly everything else wasn't. Most shows and movies suffered too much from bad writing and limited budgets to be taken seriously. And maybe those are the two biggest reasons why the genre has suffered so much over the years.

But that all changed back in the late 1970s and 1980s. A couple of really interesting things happened that I think forever changed filmed superheroes. One was the release of Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie (1978), starring Christopher Reeve as the titular hero. A modern retelling of the Superman mythology, the film was both a critical and commercial success, ushering in the age of the modern superhero movie - in much the same way that 2001: A Space Odyssey set the stage for the modern science fiction film (making later entries like Star Wars, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Alien, Blade Runner and others possible). In just the same way, Superman laid the groundwork for the Tim Burton Batman films, as well as other superhero films.

Another game changer for superheroes was that comics books themselves - and thus the superheroes they featured - changed. DC Comics gave itself a major reboot with Crisis on Infinite Earths and the revamping of some of its most iconic characters (namely Superman at the hands of writer John Byrne, and Batman through Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns). These reboots made the characters more adult, relatable and - oddly enough - more realistic.

About the same time, Hollywood, hoping to build upon the earlier successes of the Superman movies, delved deeper into the world of superheroes by producing Tim Burton's version of Batman, itself greatly influenced by Frank Miller's take on the Dark Knight. The movie was a runaway success and whetted the appetites of producers eager to make money off comic book characters.

The 1989 Batman movie was followed by three sequels. However, as with the Superman movies before them, each successive film decreased in quality following the second installments. Naturally, Hollywood wasn't deterred. If anything, it simply kept shoveling more entries of a genre it didn't understand or appreciate down our throats. Along with the Batman movies, other heroes featured in films included: Supergirl (1984), Dick Tracy (1990), The Rocketeer (1991), The Shadow (1994), and The Phantom (1996), among others. In some cases, the films attempted were so bad that they never even got a theatrical release, as was the case with the early 1990s attempts to bring Captain America and The Fantastic Four to the big screen, in 1991 and 1994, respectively.

Superhero movies flamed out quickly after early successes, and slipped back into the camp of, well, camp. (Batman & Robin, anyone?) Ironically, the early major successes with the superhero movie genre came from comic book powerhouse DC Comics (home of Superman, Batman, Green Lantern and Wonder Woman). And it was their major competitor, Marvel Comics (home to Spider-Man, the Hulk, Iron Man, Captain, America and the Fantastic Four) that couldn't get a decent comic book movie off the ground. That began to change, however, in the late 1990s, with the advent of the Blade movies, starring Wesley Snipes as the Marvel Comics vampire hunter who was himself half-vampire. These films came in the wake of successful comic book movies The Crow (1994) and Spawn (1997), both adapted from independent comic book labels.

The first movie in the franchise, Blade (1998), produced on a modest budget of $45,000,000, would go on to gross over $130,000,000 worldwide, and produce two sequels, Blade II (2002) and Blade: Trinity (2004). Marvel comics would strike gold again with the arrival of X-Men (2000), which was a surprise box office hit, also generating two sequels during the first decade of the century.

However, it was with the first Spider-Man film (2002), that Marvel proved that it had staying power. The film, well cast with Tobey Maguire as Spider-Man/Peter Parker, Kirsten Dunst as girl next door Mary Jane Watson, and Willem Dafoe as the villainous Green Goblin, captured the minds and hearts of audiences worldwide and eventually raked in more than $800,000,000 in total box office receipts, placing it among the top ten highest grossing films of all time.

What followed for the rest of the decade was an avalanche of Marvel Comics-based movies based upon heroes in capes and spandex, some celebrated, some decried. In addition to the X-Men and Spider-Man movies, new heroes to grace the silver screen included the Fantastic Four, the Hulk (not once, but twice, including the 2008 reboot The Incredible Hulk), The Punisher, Daredevil, Electra, and Iron Man.



Not to be outdone, the DC Comics camp rebooted Batman with the Christopher Nolan-directed Batman Begins (2005), a far superior vision of the Caped Crusader than the Tim Burton films. And following close behind came X-Men director Bryan Singer's reboot of the Man of Steel with Superman Returns (2006), an earnest, if flawed, vision grafted into the continuity of Richard Donner's first two Superman films, starring Christopher Reeve. Nolan's interpretation of Batman would go on to spawn an even more successful, and far superior, sequel, The Dark Knight (2008), which would gross more than a billion dollars worldwide, making it the most successful comic book movie of all time.

And there’s a lot more coming from both comic book publishing titans. Next year, we’ll be treated to a revamped (read: younger) version of the X-Men, as well as the initial offerings (or as the fanboys and girls out there know, the origin stories) for Thor, Green Lantern, and Captain America, the first films in what should be very lucrative franchises. And in 2012, we'll be treated to the long-promised superhero team up film The Avengers, featuring established screen superheroes Iron Man and the Hulk, along with Thor and Captain America.

Some critics decry the saturation of the movie market with all of this superhero fare. Isn't this enough, they say? Even some of the people bringing us these superhero movies are wondering that, as evidenced by statements in this article by the helmer of the upcoming X-Men reboot, X-Men: First Class, director Matthew Vaughn.

Seems to me, however, that the naysayers have it all wrong. For decades, the same thing has been said about the western, the musical, and film noir, none of which have disappeared from the your local multiplex. Sure, there aren't as many of them as there used to be, but people still line up to see them. Or maybe the makers of Chicago and Mamma Mia! or 3:10 to Yuma and True Grit are behind the times and don't realize that their genres are dead?

Or more likely, it's that people will always want choices in their nights out when they want to go to the movies and be entertained. And superhero movies are just one more choice for those of us who love movies. Which means that our caped friends aren't going anywhere anytime soon.

Which is fine by me. As far as I'm concerned, I say the more the merrier. At long last, comic book movies have finally achieved legitimate status in American pop culture, on par with romantic comedies, thrillers and traditional action movies.

Suffice it to say that superhero movies are here to stay, and it's about time.

That being said, now that we have a few superhero movies to choose from this year - and the next, and the next after that - my only question is this: just when ARE we going to finally get a Wonder Woman movie?!