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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