Best Picture Oscar goes to …

I’ve now seen four of the five movies nominated for the Academy Award for best picture, which are the same movies whose directors have been nominated for their work. My choice for best picture is …

No, you’ll have to wait a bit.

I haven’t seen Frost / Nixon because I saw the original version. You know the one: starring Richard Nixon as the disgraced president. I’ve also read several of Nixon’s books, All the President’s Men by Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein, and a several-hundred-page collection of memos from Nixon’s Oval Office desk. After all that research I’ve come to one conclusion: Either Nixon was the most recent Republican president to be honest with the public about how the economy works, or the last to understand how it works.

Of course, he was also a crook. I don’t need to see the movie to learn the history, but I probably will anyway. It’s a tradition. Every year, my wife and I try to see every best-picture nominee before the award ceremony.

Before you read on, take note: If you don’t want to know the plot in any of these movies, stop reading now!

Yesterday we saw Milk, which was fabulous. Throughout the movie I kept asking myself “How come I’d never heard of Harvey Milk until the release of this movie?” Anyway, the acting is great, seems real, and the story reveals an important, still-emerging part of our history.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button was quite entertaining, but the longer I’m away from it, the more forgettable it becomes. It was quaint.

Slumdog Millionaire managed to portray some of the ugliest aspects of humanity while still fostering belief in the possibility of redemption.

But redemption is impossible for some people, even though we might wish otherwise for Hannah Schmitz in The Reader. Hands down, this is my choice for best picture.

Best Picture
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost / Nixon
Milk
The Reader
Slumdog Millionaire

Directing
David Fincher – The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Fight Club, Se7en)
Ron Howard – Frost / Nixon (A Beautiful Mind, Cinderella Man)
Gus Van Sant – Milk (Good Will Hunting, Finding Forrester)
Stephen Daldry – The Reader (The Hours, Billy Elliot)
Danny Boyle – Slumdog Millionaire (Trainspotting, 28 Days Later)