I’ll make this short and sweet. I think, perhaps, I’m just a grump but I didn’t love the new venture from Disney/Pixar, Up. To boil it down to basics, it’s a great film, a great family film and an incredible accomplishment for Disney/Pixar and animated films in general. It’s definitely the best family film I’ve seen in a long time but it’s still a family film, not too complex or complicated, nothing incredibly deep, but clean, simple and thoughtful fun. If that’s what you’re interested in, then this film’s for you.

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Continuing our power walk to the Oscars, Maria and I watched Precious over the weekend and I’d like to share some thoughts.

My initial thought—and it was Maria’s too—was finally. Finally a movie, out of all the Best Picture picks we’ve watched so far, that truly deserves a nomination. Precious deserves the Best Picture nod. Absolutely.

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Commercials and advertisements for this year’s Academy Awards are billing it as historic. Ten nominations for best picture, they say, because 2009 was such an incredible year for film. It’ll go down in the record books, they say. Monumental. I call shenanigans.

Like District Nine, the latest venture from the brothers Coen, A Serious Man, does not belong on the list of this year’s best films.

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Maria, my brilliant wife, summed up District Nine in this way: there were ten nominations for Best Picture this year at the Oscars. And that pretty much hits the nail right on the head.

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Since, The Hurt Locker is this year’s underdog for the Best Picture at the Oscars, Maria and I thought we’d give it a try this past weekend.

First impressions, going into this film, was that it was going to be a war movie set in modern-day Iraq. I pictured a kind of tactical-based combat movie, with a mix of interesting characters and meaningful drama say, like, Saving Private Ryan. Now Saving Private Ryan is good in its own right, but it’s been done. So I didn’t have incredibly high hopes for this film. But instead, The Hurt Locker was quite different from my expectations and quite good.

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