The other being Bennett Miller's The Cruise. Both of them succeed in two ways most docs don't for me: 1. There's some genuine storytelling going on, i.e., it seems like the director did more than just pick a weird or dramatic situation and get lucky after pressing record; instead, their narrative has been carefully composed. 2. They're beautiful to look at. Most documentaries are drab or otherwise visually involving. That is most likely a result of the desired realism and / or the limitations of how they are shot, true, but it is still a visual medium, no?

Anyway, Up The Yangtze certainly is great to look at, and I get what the director said about trying to structure his film a little like Gosford Park.

>>BEST PICTURE
>>2.Up The Yangtze
>
>
>>BEST ACTRESS
>>4.Kate Winslet (The Reader)
>
>Didn't catch this yet. Hopefully I will tomorrow or Thursday
>night. How was Fiennes, Kross, Olin, Alexandra Maria Lara,
>and the cinematography?

Kross and Winslet dominate the screen. Both of them are great, with Winslet playing the more unordinary, difficult role. Fiennes and the rest kinda just show up and aren't given much to do.

>>SUPPORTING ACTRESS
>>4.Saffron Burrows (The Bank Job)
>
>I dig this choice a lot. She was great.

The Bank Job held up on my second time through remarkably well, as did her performance. If the Black Panther shtick didn't at times feel so superficially done, i.e., had it received the same level of grit and commitment applied to the heist, it might have ended up a genre classic. As it is, it's a solid flick, with some capable acting, especially from the surprising Burrows as this fully-realized woman, empathetic even, caught up in both sides of a bunch of shit.

>>5.Juliette Binoche (Flight of the Red Balloon)
>
>Was the kid the lead to you? Or was it a no leads, all
>supporting type thing in your book?

All supporting. I debated with myself if Binoche and girl from The Edge of Heaven* were better suited in the lead or supporting categories. Ultimately, out of convenience, I went supporting with both.

>>BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
>>4.Ira Sachs and Oren Moverman (Married Life)
>
>I figured the voice-over would've kept this from ranking.

I put five movies in this category, but I wouldn't have been upset if the latter three went unrecognized. It's not a strong recommendation. The story had enough wit, and the narration, distracting and largely unnecessary though it might have been, stylistically seemed to fit decently with the type of film it was. But now that I'm thinking about it . . . if I were read to read the screenplay for Married Life (because I can't that's one reason I've never liked screenplay awards), the narration likely wouldn't offend me as much as hearing it during the middle of a scene did. But if I were to read the scene in Juno with Dwight from The Office, for example, I probably would have been just as miffed as I was in the theater. So maybe narration isn't necessarily an example of bad writing but of bad directing (and the opposite would be true in Juno's case). At least, it offends me more when it is clumsily presented on the screen than when it is on the page (and there are surely examples of narration that helps a movie out on the screen more than it might have seemed possible in the script--Goodfellas?). I don't know if that makes any sense.

2008-Best-Picture-nominees-break-for-trivia: All five of the BP nominations this year feature either straight-forward narration or some other kind of narrative cheat: narration in The Reader, game show set-up on SM, fake documentary (ugh) in Frost/Nixon, deathbed story and journal reading (double ugh) in Benjamin Button, and the Harvey Milk-into-a-microphone-bit in Milk.

>Gonna rewatch The
>Grocer's Son in a bit to break the tie

That's one of eleven 2008 films sitting in my Netflix queue.

>the ending shots
>of the river and dam.

Very rarely, like maybe three or four times in my life, have I felt compelled to instantly rewind a scene after watching it for the first time. The last five minutes or so of Up the Yangtze, from when the family is moving some of their things to the time lapse sequence to the final dam POV shot, got an instant rewind from me. It was staggering not just to see the social and environmental drama up close, a family exiled and villages buried beneath a river, but the sheer power, that immensity of all this water, all this labor, all these politics was captured so simply, so confidently in that masterful methodical final shot.



*The pervert in me feels obliged to post this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=03X0HUB7HsA