Best Picture Marathon 2008

• Posted: February 23, 2008
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• Author: Christina
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• Filed under: film
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• Tags: best picture, entertainment, film, movies, oscars

Sitting in a movie theater for 12 hours, watching five movies back-to-back = bliss!

I am about to leave to meet my mom to go and take part in AMC Theatres'Best Picture Showcase. For those of you not in the US (or even if you are in the US, if you haven't heard about this before), this is what is becoming an annual tradition from AMC, where essentially, the day before Oscar night, movie fans have the chance to watch all five Best Picture nominated films back-to-back in one afternoon. For $30 you get unlimited soda and popcorn and a ticket to each movie -- plus you can come and go as you please. Sitting in a movie theater for 12 hours, watching five movies back-to-back = bliss!

My mom and I went last year and had a really, really great time. This year, with the Oscar's being so up in the air because of the strike, I wasn't even sure if we were going to go, but I got our tickets on Thursday and the first show is at 11 AM EST today. I'm very, very excited.

I know it might be lame for a 25 year old to spend the day at the movies with her mom -- but I don't care -- I love this shit. Both of my parents are big movie fans -- not necessarily in the same way that I am a movie fan, but fans nonetheless. My mom's tastes and passions are different from mine, but she can appreciate cinema as a form of art and appreciate it on a critical level in a way that makes it lots of fun for me to see things with her.

Last year the AMC thing was just a ton of fun -- they had movie trivia and Oscar trivia questions in between the movies (I won a t-shirt, a backpack and some other swag -- heh) and it was a great audience of movie fans who were excited about spending 12 hours in a theater. There was an extended break between the third and the fourth film shown so that you had a chance to leave the theater to get dinner, and AMC let us bring outside food into the theater because of the special feature. That in itself was cool. Plus, unlimited soda and popcorn. Gotta love that.

The Writer's Strike kind of had me hesitant to get as excited as I usually do about Oscar Season, but now that the strike is over and the show WILL go on, I'm getting more excited again. Plus, although I think that 2007 was a relatively weak year of film releases (especially compared to 2005 and 2006), the list of Best Picture nominees is both impressive and varied. I mean, I think Juno is totally, totally overrated (I liked it a lot, I just fail to see it as the second-coming; plus Ellen Page was great and all, but Best Actress? Don't make me laugh), but it's still a great, quirky very un-Oscar film and its success is inspiring.

I don't think Michael Clayton was the Best Picture of the year, but it was one of my favorite films to see in the theater and Clooney and Swinton were utterly fantastic -- not to mention the always incredible Tom Wilkinson -- the pacing of that film was absolutely perfect -- the tension building perfectly to the final crescendo. I'm looking forward to seeing that one again the most.

So I'm off to go do that. Quite frankly, I can't think of a better way to spend my Saturday.

Out.

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