Agreed, he was robbed for Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon and Brokeback Mountain, which are far stronger films than Life of Pi in my view.

It's oscar bait, if awful films that pander to the academy like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close or Chocolat can get a nomination so can Fences.

Innuritu seemed to be going for something with the flashback sequences, but yes, it's attempts at being 'profound' were painful. Certain sequences veer dangerously close to 'pretentious'. And Iñárritu's direction is borderline self-indulgent. it's grandiose to the point of grandstanding.

La La Land cost less than 1/5 of Suicide Squad's budget though. Relative to budget, La La Land actually did better.

It was more of a drama that also happened to revolve around jazz music. But mainly I was far more invested in what was happening in it.

75% is actually rather low for a Best Picture winner. In fact it's one of the lowest of all time.

The movie is worth watching, but it's strengths really lie in the acting (Patricia Arquette I think gives the strongest performance in the movie) and that's where its nominations should have stayed.

I understand the point of the movie, but I just don't think that what it's going for works very well cinematically. The only reason it got nominations for directing or picture was its production gimmick.

The Handmaiden is also one of my favorite films of the year. But it's probably a bit too much for the still fairly conservative academy. Plus it's foreign.

For me, the worst recent acting wins I can think of was Russell Crowe in Gladiator (it shouldn't have won Best Picture either), which beat Tom Hanks in Castaway. I mean, does Russell Crowe even act in Gladiator, he just sort of squints and acts generically 'badass'. His work in the two years surrounding it, The…

Birdman might be 'self-fellating' but Boyhood is the cinematic equivalent of normcore.

I think Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon is a genuinely good Wuxia film that manages to transcend the inherent pulpiness of its genre, but a lot of Asian martial arts fans find it slow and boring.

True. There's another movie called Fearless that features a similar fight, but tries at least to maintain a degree of objectivity, without going on tirades like the one in Ip Man.

What rubbish. Piracy is just about people wanting access to material without wanting to pay for it, and it's the artists who lose out. You argument basically amounts to demanding, on the principle of ‘fairness’, that someone who is richer than you are should hand over to you part of their savings.

It should be said that a lot of this was due to Tom Cruse, who was at the time one of the most beloved foreign stars in Japan at the time. Plus, it was a foreign film that treated Japanese culture with respect (indeed, one could argue that it romanticizes it, in real life the Samurai for example had no problems using…

I have to admit I haven't. I'll add it to my list of films to watch :)

The comically evil boxer as well. I mean he openly brags about how he's going to kill every Chinese Martial artist at a press conference!

That was actually the film series I had in mind when making that comment, and I feel much the same way. As a Japanese person, I cant really object to its depiction of the Japanese occupation which is broadly accurate, but then Ip Man goes on a rant about how Chinese Martial Arts is about the philosophies which…

Oh, in that sense, no. I would say To Live but you already mentioned it.

To be fair he is far from alone. Mainland films often lay on the Chinese nationalism pretty thick.