30 Days of Oscar - Starts Thursday

I thought I'd use this chance to explain how we will run our own version of 30 Days of Oscar.  I started doing this 2 years ago on my old site, and was even nominated for a Lammy award for it last year.  So we'll be continuing it this year (starting Thursday, after a last mashup tomorrow).  If you'd like to see some of the movies I've covered in the past, here is 2012 and here is 2011.  

The whole thing started in 2011 because I wanted to get a chance to write about movies that received Oscar nominations: both that I've seen and never reviewed , and new movies that I've never seen.   I think an awful lot has been written already about the current movies up for awards, and much more will be written as the various lead-up awards come to a conclusion.  But I like remembering other movies that got nominated at least.  You know there was someone somewhere that year saying they were robbed or robbed someone else of at least a nomination.  So I want to look at what they were nominated for, and what won in that particular year.  Sometime it involves looking at a movie's place in history, and sometimes it's about the competition in a given year.  There are definitely nominees that, had they come out in a different year, would definitely have won.  

The point was to fill some gaps in my own knowledge of award nominated films - I have seen 62 of 84 Best Picture Winners, 50 of the 84 Best Actor winners, and 47 of 85 (there was a tie one year) of the Best Actress nominees (definitely going to fix that this year!).  However, I have also used the opportunity to look at films I've already seen through the lens of an Oscar nomination.  The point was just to try to see what they saw that made them award worthy and to see who they lost to or ultimately beat for the award.  I realize that all of this is subjective, based on what I have and haven't seen myself.  The movie only needs to have been nominated for a single award to make it onto my list.  It can be from any year, and I will take any recommendations if you particularly like a rather obscure movie that was nominated. 

I have to say I find this experience extremely rewarding - both from the academic side of broadening my movie knowledge and from the chance to see really great movies.  Of the 60+ movies I've seen for this feature, I have seen very, very few I would even say I disliked and none that I would call bad.  So please join us every day, starting Thursday until the Oscars.  I will be doing much of the reviewing (Rachel's growing a human being, so she's a little busy), but there's a lot of opportunity to sway what we see.  Please feel free to comment and fill in the perspective with things we might not have known about the making of a particular film or its place in our cultural history, or your own personal history.