Quench
The Oscars
Quench brings you all the news from the 79th Academy Awards
What they thought…
It was a night that very much belonged to Martin Scorsese, who, for once, didn’t leave an Oscars ceremony empty handed.
After roughly thirty years of missed opportunities, with the glorious likes of Mean Streets (1973), Taxi Driver (1976), Raging Bull (1980), The King of Comedy (1983), Goodfellas (1990) and Casino (1995) all failing to secure Marty his shiny, naked man, it was starting to seem like it would never happen.
Everyone thought the nomination for 2004’s excellent Howard Hughes biopic The Aviator would be the one to secure the award, but Marty eventually lost that year to fellow elder statesman Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby.
tWe had believed Scorsese may secure the ranks of great directors who never got their due (such as Kubrick and Hitchcock), but the night of February 25th 2007 was the one to change that. Well done sir.
What we thought…
It’s great to see Scorsese finally acknowledged by the academy, after all, having being nominated and having missed out several times now, to deny Scorsese an Oscar win would be more than just disappointing, it would be a complete ‘fuck you’ from the academy.
Still, despite the politics that surround it, it’s pretty fair to say that The Departed’s three Oscars are all well deserved. Despite both Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima offering pretty stiff competion from the list of nominees, no-one here is complaining about The Departed taking the prize.
Forest Whitaker was immense in The Last King of Scotland and so his victory comes as no surprise (much like last year, with Seymour Hoffman blowing the competition out of the water in Capote).
Britain secured a nice success with Dame Helen Mirren’s for her role as The Queen in (surprise, surprise) The Queen, in a performance much more understated and quietly contemplative than Whitaker’s.
The major upset for us here at Quench film is that Pan’s Labyrinth didn’t win more. Being in the Spanish language, Pan’s Labyrinth, a film we’ve been going on about for months now, was never really that viable to win best picture (which we feel it deserved, the last occurence of this being at the 2001 awards with Ang Lee’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon) but we were utterly distraught when it didn’t even pick up best foreign language film.
Thankfully the awards it gained for cinematography, make-up (let’s face it, Click was never much of a competition) and art direction were some consolation.
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