u/Budget-Poem-2052

...And why is it Godfather Part II vs. Chinatown?

For students that went to international schools for undergrad (I'm American but did my undergrad in UK) will laws schools only look at the LSAC conversion, or will they look at your actual transcript as well? I'm especially worried about this because I received a First Class ( the highest grade classification in UK) but I"m pretty sure LSAC's recalculation is going to tank my score, because they calculate it differently from my Uni. It'll basically turn my grade average from a 4.0 to possibly as low as a 3.3, which is just insane. So will law schools still see the official classificaiton and take that into account?

It's been awhile since I saw a new movie that I thought had a genuinely amazing score. Even most movies where I hear people rave about the score, when I end up watching it I'm inevitably disappointed. I think part of the issue is that maybe filmmakers don't want truly memorable scores anymore, on the off chance that they might distract too much from the movie. As a result it feels like it's fashionable for pretty much all film scores to be minimalist, and not have any really memorable tunes or melodies.

For instance I remember everyone raving about the score to One Battle After Another and, even though I enjoyed the movie, I honestly don't think there was anything remotely memorable about the score---it was essentially just percussion scores. In some instances that might work in a movie's favor, but there's a part of me that misses the really sweeping, symphonic scores with iconic melodies (Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, etc.). Idk, maybe part of it is because I'm a musician, so I'm automatically a bit more scrutinzing when it comes to scores.. Does anyone else feel the same way? If not, tell me what I'm missing.

Edit: Looks like the Ludwig Gorannson fans are already downvoting me lmao

I know Criterion just came out with the new Kubrick set, which includes basically everything he ever made. But, is it likely that any other Kubrick movies are actually going to be added to the spine numbers as individual releases? Surprisingly few of his movies are actually in the spine numbers, and Eyes Wide Shut is the only one that's been added remotely recently. Anyone know what the chances are of stuff like 2001, Shining, or Clockwork being added to the spine numbers in the near future?

Is it just me or does it feel like Karsten always just talks a lot but says absolutely nothing? All of his videos he basically just gives very vague criticisms or praise and then manages to always just end up equivocating to whatever the general consensus of a film is. What do you all think? Am I just a hater?

In my opinion Edward Norton is the most overdue living (male) actor for an Oscar (yes, even more than Ralph Fiennes and Willem Dafoe). And on paper, it seems like the Academy would agree that he's approaching overdue territory. He's currently at 4 noms, and will be at 5 if he ends up getting nominated for the Invite this season.

But I'm curious why an overdue narrative never seems to take off for him and, honestly, never even seems to enter the discourse. I'm not even talking about winning the Oscar, since that's a combination of a lot of factors, and narrative often isn't enough. But what confuses me is that no one even really seems to talk about him being overdue, the way they do with other actors. When he was nominated for A Complete Unknown the season before last, there was essentially no buzz about him being overdue, even though he was the ONLY nominee in his category with any previous nominations (let alone three).

Even this season, I'm already noticing that people are describing Giamatti and John Goodman as being significantly more overdue than Norton, which just doesn't really make sense to me. No disrespect to either of them, I just don't think they're better than Norton).

So I'm just curious why he seems to be poison when it comes to an overdue narrative? The most obvious explanation is that he's burned too many bridges in Hollywood by being difficult to work with. But even that wouldn't explain why even Awards media tends to ignore his narrative. What are your thoughts?

In my opinion Edward Norton is the most overdue living (male) actor for an Oscar (yes, even more than Ralph Fiennes and Willem Dafoe). And on paper, it seems like the Academy would agree that he's approaching overdue territory. He's currently at 4 noms, and will be at 5 if he ends up getting nominated for the Invite this season.

But I'm curious why an overdue narrative never seems to take off for him? I'm not even talking about winning the Oscar, since that's a combination of a lot of factors, and narrative often isn't enough. But what confuses me is that no one even really seems to talk about him being overdue, the way they do with other actors. When he was nominated for A Complete Unknown the season before last, there was essentially no buzz about him being overdue, even though he was the ONLY nominee in his category with any previous nominations (let alone three).

Even this season, I'm already noticing that people are describing Giamatti and John Goodman as being significantly more overdue than Norton, which just doesn't really make sense to me. No disrespect to either of them, I just don't think they're better than Norton).

So I'm just curious why he seems to be poison when it comes to an overdue narrative? The most obvious explanation is that he's burned too many bridges in Hollywood by being difficult to work with. But even that wouldn't explain why even Awards media tends to ignore is narrative. What are your thoughts?

I'm gonna get downvoted for this, but Carbonara is honestly my least favorite Italian pasta dish, and I don't understand why people love it so much. I think it's too rich, without having enough flavor to justify the richness. I think the richness of the eggs tends to dilute the saltiness of the cheeese, making the dish quite bland. Has anyone tried puttanesca? It's so much better than carbonara, it's not even close. The other thing that I find funny is that the same people will make fun of pasta dishes with American influences, like spaghetti and meatballs, even though Carbonara itself contains a lot of American influence. The dish was largely invented/influenced by American soldiers stationed in Rome. For the record, I'm not saying this makes the dish worse, I'm just pointing out the hypocrisy of people who think they're such "authentic Italian" eaters for liking Carbonara, even though the same people will probably crap on other Italian-American dishes. I've cooked Carbonara multiple times, along with essentially every other noteworthy pasta dish, and it's still my least favorite of all of them. And, before anyone says "You just don't know how to cook it," I've had it plenty of times at resturants too, and it left me similarly unimpressed. There's honestly no way someone can try Puttanesca and say that Carbonara is better, unless they just have the tastebuds of a child, and are afraid of stuff like olives.

Making lists is a bit of a weird hobby that I have when I'm bored. I have a list of what I consider the fifty greatest works of literature, with the caveat of only ONE entry per author. Thought I'd post it here to see what people think of it. For the record, I tried to be fairly objective, however there are some instances in which my own personal biases poked in a bit. For instance, I'm aware that my list has a pretty noticeable preference for novels over poems and plays, as well as a noticeable affinity for 20th century fiction. Is it fairly similar to what you would have? Who are the most glaring omissions, in your opinion? I'm NOT claiming that this list is definitive or anything like that. I'm just trying to have fun here, but I made this post on another similar subreddit and it was received pretty hostilely, so I'm not expecting much lol.

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Don Juan by Lord Byron
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
White Noise by Don DeLillo
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tales by Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Odyssey by Homer
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Ulysses by James Joyce
Stories by Franz Kafka
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Plays by William Shakespeare
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Also, for good measure, here are a few others that almost made it:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Aeneid by Virgil
Candide by Voltaire
The Prelude by William Wordsworth

Making lists is a bit of a weird hobby that I have when I'm bored. I have a list of what I consider the fifty greatest works of literature, with the caveat of only ONE entry per author. Thought I'd post it here to see what people think of it. For the record, I tried to be fairly objective, however there are some instances in which my own personal biases poked in a bit. For instance, I'm aware that my list has a pretty noticeable preference for novels over poems and plays, as well as a noticeable affinity for 20th century fiction. Is it fairly similar to what you would have? Who are the most glaring omissions, in your opinion?

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
The Sot-Weed Factor by John Barth
The Adventures of Augie March by Saul Bellow
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte
The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
Don Juan by Lord Byron
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
The Divine Comedy by Dante Alighieri
White Noise by Don DeLillo
David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoevsky
The Name of the Rose by Umberto Eco
Middlemarch by George Eliot
Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison
Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
Tales by Nikolai Gogol
The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass
Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy
Catch-22 by Joseph Heller
The Odyssey by Homer
Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
Ulysses by James Joyce
Stories by Franz Kafka
Women in Love by D.H. Lawrence
The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann
Suttree by Cormac McCarthy
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
Paradise Lost by John Milton
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
In Search of Lost Time by Marcel Proust
Gravity’s Rainbow by Thomas Pynchon
Gargantua and Pantagruel by Francois Rabelais
American Pastoral by Philip Roth
Pedro Paramo by Juan Rulfo
Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie
Plays by William Shakespeare
East of Eden by John Steinbeck
Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne
Gulliver’s Travels by Jonathan Swift
War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
The Code of the Woosters by P.G. Wodehouse
To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf

Also, for good measure, here are a few others that almost made it:

The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas by Machado de Assis
Go Tell It on the Mountain by James Baldwin
Wuthering Heights by Emily Bronte
If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
The Leopard by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa
Stories by Flannery O’Connor
Tales by Edgar Allan Poe
Rabbit, Run by John Updike
The Aeneid by Virgil
Candide by Voltaire
The Prelude by William Wordsworth

I don't know how it is with STEM, but with humanities degrees in UK uni, it seems like there's very little grade variation, even between the top and bottom of a class. I graduated with a 71 or 72 average, so maybe I should just be happy that I got a first. But, honestly, it really bothers me that the rest of the students, even the ones that don't care and didn't do any work, probably still got within 5 or 10 percentage points of my final score. It sort of removes the incentive to work hard when you're basically GUARANTEED to get somewhere between a 60 and a 75. Is it just me, or does this bother anyone else? As I said, it seems like basically everyone gets over a 60, but no one gets over a 75 as a final grade.

Doesn't necessarily have to be the 5 spiciest. Just your five favorite cuisines that are largely known for being spicy. Mine would be Thai, Mexican, Chinese (esp. Sichuan and Hunan), Indian, and I guess Korean as a distant fifth.

I don't want this to come across as a shitpost, and if one of the books I'm about to mention is among your favorites, I'm sorry if this comes across as offensive. I just want to discuss a certain pattern, which isn't a big issue, just a mildly annoying one. It seems to me like there's a certain subset of maybe 5 or 10 books that people who aren't particularly well-read but want to SOUND like they are, always pick as their favorite book. Some of the frequent picks are Catcher in the Rye, Siddhartha, Animal Farm, etc. It tends to always be works that are literary, but also very short and written in a simple style, and usually with one overarching idea that you can often understand fully without even reading the book all the way through. For the record I'm NOT saying these books don't have any value. It's just a pattern I notice where people (often young men trying to impress women) want to seem like they read vastly more than they do, so they name a work of literary fiction that they read when they were a teenager. So let me just ask: What's a book that, when someone names it as their favorite, it screams to you "I'm not well-read but desperately want to sound like I am?"

There are two points I want to make. Part of this post is just about a general trend in the awards, but I also want to connect it a little bit to the upcoming season. It seems pretty likely, based on what little we know about the movie, that Digger will end up competing at the Golden Globes in the Musical/Comedy category.

Something to keep in mind though, is that in recent years movies competing in the M/C category seem to have an AWFUL track record for one specfic Oscar category--Best Actor. The last actor to compete in M/C at the Globes who went on to win Best Actor at the Oscars was Jean Dujardin for The Artist 2011. Based on this I think it's pretty clear that, for whatever reason, this categorization seems to spell bad luck for male actors. It's especially weird when you consider how frequently Best Actress Oscar winners competed in the M/C category. We recently had three Best Actress Oscar winners in a row that competed in M/C at the Globes (Yeoh, Stone, Madison).

But with male actors it honestly seems to be a death sentence for their chances of winning the Oscar. This past year a whopping THREE out of the five Best Actor Oscar nominees had been labeled as "M/C" at the Globes, yet the Oscar winner STILL ended up being MBJ, who had competed in the Drama category.

So, for whatever reason, there's clearly a pattern. Timmy was considered the frontunner at the start of this season, won the M/C Globe and CC, yet ended up losing steam. The same thing happened to Michael Keaton a decade earlier. Christian Bale was considered a borderline frontunner for Vice in 2018, until he lost both industry awards to Rami Malek. It's also worth noting that none of the performances I just mentioned are truly "comedic" performances, so I don't think it's the specific nature of these performances that caused them to lose.

So I'm wondering, if Digger does end up being a massive Awards player, but competes in the M/C category at the Globes (as it likely will), can we still reasonably expect Tom Cruise to be the Best Actor frontrunner? I know, as I'm writing this, a lot of die hard fanboys are going to get offended. I'm not making this post to diss Cruise or anything like that. I just think there's a VERY clear pattern with Lead Actors getting cursed after competing in M/C, and I don't think we can overlook it.

There are two points I want to make. Part of this post is just about a general trend in the awards, but I also want to connect it a little bit to the upcoming season. It seems pretty likely, based on what little we know about the movie, that Digger will end up competing at the Golden Globes in the Musical/Comedy category. Something to keep in mind though, is that in recent years movies competing in the M/C category seem to have an AWFUL track record for one specfic Oscar category--Best Actor.

The last actor to compete in M/C at the Globes who went on to win Best Actor at the Oscars was Jean Dujardin for The Artist 2011. Based on this I think it's pretty clear that, for whatever reason, this categorization seems to spell bad luck for male actors. It's especially weird when you consider how frequently Best Actress Oscar winners competed in the M/C category. We recently had three Best Actress Oscar winners in a row that competed in M/C at the Globes (Yeoh, Stone, Madison).

But with male actors it honestly seems to be a death sentence for their chances of winning the Oscar. This past year a whopping THREE out of the five Best Actor Oscar nominees had been labeled as "M/C" at the Globes, yet the Oscar winner STILL ended up being MBJ, who had competed in the Drama category. So, for whatever reason, there's clearly a pattern. Timmy was considered the frontunner at the start of this season, won the M/C Globe and CC, yet ended up losing steam. The same thing happened to Michael Keaton a decade earlier. Christian Bale was considered a borderline frontunner for Vice in 2018, until he lost both industry awards to Rami Malek. It's also worth noting that none of the performances I just mentioned are truly "comedic" performances, so I don't think it's the specific nature of these performances that caused them to lose.

So I'm wondering, if Digger does end up being a massive Awards player, but competes in the M/C category at the Globes (as it likely will), can we still reasonably expect Tom Cruise to be the Best Actor frontrunner? I know, as I'm writing this, a lot of die hard fanboys are going to get offended. I'm not making this post to diss Cruise or anything like that. I just think there's a VERY clear pattern with Lead Actors getting cursed after competing in M/C, and I don't think we can overlook it.

After seeing all the vitriolic reactions from fans to basically every TV series finale from the past 5 or 10 years, I'm genuinely questioning if it's even possible to make a series finale with positive fan reception. For the record, I'm sure some of these finales deserved the hate they got. Game of Thrones, for instance, was a bad ending by almost any objective metric. But even Succession, which I think had about as perfect a finale as possible, was lambasted in internet circles like reddit. So it really leaves me scratching my head.

Is Bradley Cooper the most over-nominated male actor in Oscar history? Even if we're ignoring other categories, he's already been nominated FIVE times for acting. This isn't meant to come across as an excuse to bash him, but does anyone else think that's a bit excessive? To put this into context that's only ONE nomination less than Daniel Day-Lewis, Anthony Hopkins, Sean Penn, Tom Hanks, and Michael Caine. It's also more than Christian Bale, Edward Norton, Gary Oldman, Javier Bardem, Johnny Depp, Joaquin Phoenix, and Philip Seymour Hoffman. And if I'm wrong, please tell me who you think the most over-nominated actor is.

Has anyone noticed that, for the last 10 years, there's a pretty consistent pattern where every even year has an overall bad selection of Oscar films, and every odd year has a good one? Think about it:

2025-- Generally considered a pretty good year

2024- Usually considered a weak year

2023-- Pretty good year

2022- I know a lot of people like this year just because of the EEAO sweep, but I think it's a pretty bad year other than Tar, which is probably the best movie of the 2020's

2021-- This is the one year that breaks the rule. A BAD, odd year

2020- Pandemic year. Not as bad a selection as it could have been considering the circumstances, but definitely not a great year

2019-- Very good year. Honestly, we might look back on this as the last truly great year for cinema.

2018-- A few gems like Roma and The Favourite, but still a bad year

2017-- Pretty good year. I don't think most of the films were great, but almost all of them were good

Before 2017, I don't think the pattern particularly holds, since I think 2014 is probably the best year of the 2010's (although 2019 gives it close competition) and 2010 is also strong. But I still think it's interesting how consistent the pattern's been.