 | Title: | The Curious Case of Benjamin Button |
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| Nominations: | Best Picture Art Direction Visual Effects Cinematography Screenplay, Adapted | |
| Plot: David Fincher’s The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, an adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s story, re-teams the director with Brad Pitt, who takes on the title role. What makes Button such a curious case is that when he is born in New Orleans just after World War I, he is already in his eighties, and proceeds to live his life aging in reverse. This sweeping film follows the character’s unusual life into the 21st century as he experiences joy and sadness, loves lost and found, and the meaning of timelessness. | ||
 | Title: | Frost Nixon |
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| Nominations: | Best Picture Screenplay, Adapted | |
| Plot: For three years after being forced from office, Nixon remained silent. But in summer 1977, the steely, cunning former commander-in-chief agreed to sit for one all-inclusive interview to confront the questions of his time in office and the Watergate scandal that ended his presidency. Nixon surprised everyone in selecting Frost as his televised confessor, intending to easily outfox the breezy British showman and secure a place in the hearts and minds of Americans. Likewise, Frost’s team harbored doubts about their boss’s ability to hold his own. But as cameras rolled, a charged battle of wits resulted. Would Nixon evade questions of his role in one of the nation’s greatest disgraces? Or would Frost confound critics and bravely demand accountability from the man who’d built a career out of stonewalling? Over the course of their encounter, each man would reveal his own insecurities, ego and reserves of dignity–ultimately setting aside posturing in a stunning display of unvarnished truth. | ||
 | Title: | Milk |
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| Nominations: | Best Picture Screenplay, Original | |
| Plot: After moving to San Francisco, the middle-aged New Yorker, Harvey Milk, became a Gay Rights activist and city politician. On his third attempt, he was elected to San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors in 1977, making him the first openly gay man to be elected to public office in the USA. The following year, both he and the city’s mayor, George Moscone, were shot to death by former city supervisor, Dan White, who blamed his former colleagues for denying White’s attempt to rescind his resignation from the board. | ||
 | Title: | The Reader |
| Nominations: | Best Picture Cinematography Screenplay, Adapted | |
| Plot: THE READER opens in post-WWII Germany when teenager Michael Berg becomes ill and is helped home by Hanna, a stranger twice his age. Michael recovers from scarlet fever and seeks out Hanna to thank her. The two are quickly drawn into a passionate but secretive affair. Michael discovers that Hanna loves being read to and their physical relationship deepens. Hanna is enthralled as Michael reads to her from “The Odyssey,” “Huck Finn” and “The Lady with the Little Dog.” Despite their intense bond, Hanna mysteriously disappears one day and Michael is left confused and heartbroken. Eight years later, while Michael is a law student observing the Nazi war crime trials, he is stunned to find Hanna back in his life - this time as a defendant in the courtroom. As Hanna’s past is revealed, Michael uncovers a deep secret that will impact both of their lives. THE READER is a story about truth and reconciliation, about how one generation comes to terms with the crimes of another. | ||
 | Title: | Slumdog Millionaire |
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| Nominations: | Best Picture Cinematography Screenplay, Adapted | |
| Plot: In Mumbai, the eighteen year-old orphan from the slums Jamal Malik is tortured by the policemen in a precinct accused of cheating a game show. Jamal, who has no education and works in a call center serving tea, is close to wining twenty million rupees in the show “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” hosted by Prem Kumar, giving precise answers to the questions and raising suspicion of fraud. The police inspector shows the videotape and after each question, Jamal tells parts of his childhood with his brother Salim, his crush for Latika and their fight to survive on the streets to justify each correct answer, guided by his common sense and past experience, and prove his innocence. | ||
 | Title: | Bolt |
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| Nominations: | Animated Feature | |
| Plot: For super-dog BOLT (voice of John Travolta), every day is filled with adventure, danger and intrigue at least until the cameras stop rolling. When the star of a hit TV show is accidentally shipped from his Hollywood soundstage to New York City, he begins his biggest adventure yet a cross-country journey through the real world. Armed only with the delusions that all his amazing feats and powers are real, and with the help of two unlikely traveling companions: a jaded, abandoned housecat named Mittens (voice of Susie Essman) and a TV-obsessed hamster in a plastic ball named Rhino, Bolt discovers he doesnt need superpowers to be a hero. | ||
 | Title: | Kung-Fu Panda |
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| Nominations: | Animated Feature | |
| Plot: “Kung Fu Panda” features Jack Black as Po the Panda, a lowly waiter in a noodle restaurant, who is a kung fu fanatic but whose shape doesn’t exactly lend itself to kung fu fighting. In fact, Po’s defining characteristic appears to be that he is the laziest of all the animals in ancient China. That’s a problem because powerful enemies are at the gates, and all hopes have been pinned on a prophesy naming Po as the “Chosen One” to save the day. A group of martial arts masters are going to need a black belt in patience if they are going to turn this slacker panda into a kung fu fighter before it’s too late. | ||
 | Title: | Wall-E |
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| Nominations: | Animated Feature Screenplay, Original | |
| Plot: The year is 2700. WALL-E, a robot, spends every day doing what he was made for. But soon, he will discover what he was meant for. From Academy Award-winning director, Andrew Stanton (”Finding Nemo”), “WALL-E” is the story of one robot’s comic adventures as he chases his dream across the galaxy. | ||
 | Title: | Changeling |
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| Nominations: | Art Direction Cinematography | |
| Plot: Angelina Jolie plays a woman whose son is abducted but retrieved; she suspects, however, that the returned child is not her kid. The woman must then confront corruption in the LAPD. The story is based on true events in 1920s Los Angeles. | ||
 | Title: | The Dark Knight |
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| Nominations: | Art Direction Cinematography Visual Effects | |
| Plot: Set within a year after the events of Batman Begins, Batman, Lieutenant James Gordon, and new district attorney Harvey Dent successfully begin to round up the criminals that plague Gotham City until a mysterious and sadistic criminal mastermind known only as the Joker appears in Gotham, creating a new wave of chaos. Batman’s struggle against the Joker becomes deeply personal, forcing him to “confront everything he believes” and improve his technology to stop him. A love triangle develops between Bruce Wayne, Dent and Rachel Dawes. | ||
 | Title: | Iron Man |
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| Nominations: | Visual Effects | |
| Plot: Tony Stark is the complete playboy who also happens to be an engineering genius. While in Afghanistan demonstrating a new missile he’s captured and wounded. His captors want him to assemble a missile for them but instead he creates an armored suit and a means to prevent his death from the shrapnel left in his chest by the attack. He uses the armored suit to escape. Back in the U.S. he announces his company will cease making weapons and he begins work on an updated armored suit only to find that Obadiah Stane, his second in command at Stark industries has been selling Stark weapons to the insurgents. He uses his new suit to return to Afghanistan to destroy the arms and then to stop Stane from misusing his research. | ||
 | Title: | The Duchess |
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| Nominations: | Art Direction | |
| Plot: Keira Knightley will play the 18th century aristocrat Georgiana, duchess of Devonshire. An ancestor of Princess Di, she lived an extravagant, profligate and promiscuous life of political and romantic intrigue, becoming an important powerbroker amid Britain’s ruling elite but also running up catastrophic gambling debts. She was alternately feted and reviled, and widely caricatured by the popular press. | ||
 | Title: | Doubt |
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| Nominations: | Screenplay, Adapted | |
| Plot: Set at a Catholic school in the Bronx, it centers on a nun who grows suspicious when a priest begins taking too much interest in the life of a young black student. Is she being overly protective or not protective enough? And can she work within the system to discover the truth? | ||
 | Title: | Revoloution Road |
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| Nominations: | Art Direction | |
| Plot: Based on the celebrated novel by Richard Yates, director Sam Mendes’ “Revolutionary Road” is the story of a young couple (Oscar® nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet) trying to find fulfillment in an age of conformity. Trapped in a world of encoded convention, they dream without faith, as lies and self-deceptions build to explosive consequences. | ||
 | Title: | Frozen River |
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| Nominations: | Screenplay, Original | |
| Plot: Takes place in the days before Christmas near a little-known border crossing on the Mohawk reservation between New York State and Quebec. Here, the lure of fast money from smuggling presents a daily challenge to single moms who would otherwise be earning minimum wage. Two women - one white, one Mohawk, both single mothers faced with desperate circumstances - are drawn into the world of border smuggling across the frozen water of the St. Lawrence River. Ray and Lila… and the New York State Trooper who ultimately brings the two to justice. | ||
 | Title: | Happy Go Lucky |
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| Nominations: | Screenplay, Original | |
| Plot:Poppy is a thirty-year old Primary School teacher in contemporary North London. She has great friends, a job she loves and a full life. The movie watches her confront the harsh realities of life and deal with them head-on, never losing her sense of humour. | ||
 | Title: | In Bruges |
| Nominations: | Screenplay, Original | |
| Plot:Bruges (pronounced “broozh”), the most well-preserved medieval city in the whole of Belgium, is a welcoming destination for travellers from all over the world. But for hit men Ray (Colin Farrell) and Ken (Brendan Gleeson), it could be their final destination; a difficult job has resulted in the pair being ordered right before Christmas by their London boss Harry (two-time Academy Award nominee Ralph Fiennes) to go and cool their heels in the storybook Flemish city for a couple of weeks. | ||
 | Title: | Man On Wire |
| Nominations: | Documentary Feature | |
| Plot:On August 7th 1974, a young Frenchman named Philippe Petit stepped out on a wire illegally rigged between New York’s twin towers, then the world’s tallest buildings. After nearly an hour dancing on the wire, he was arrested, taken for psychological evaluation, and brought to jail before he was finally released. | ||
 | Title: | Encounters At The End Of The World |
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| Nominations: | Documentary Feature | |
| Plot: Werner Herzog (Grizzly Man, Rescue Dawn) confirms his standing as poet laureate of men in extreme situations with Encounters at the End of the World. In this visually stunning exploration, Herzog travels to the Antarctic community of McMurdo Station, headquarters of the National Science Foundation and home to eleven hundred people during the austral summer (Oct-Feb). Over the course of his journey, Herzog examines human nature and Mother nature, juxtaposing breathtaking locations with the profound, surreal, and sometimes absurd experiences of the marine biologists, physicists, plumbers, and truck drivers who choose to form a society as far away from society as one can get. | ||
 | Title: | Waltz With Bashir |
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| Nominations: | Foreign Language Film | |
| Plot: One night at a bar, an old friend tells director Ari about a recurring nightmare in which he is chased by 26 vicious dogs. Every night, the same number of beasts. The two men conclude that there’s a connection to their Israeli Army mission in the first Lebanon War of the early eighties. Ari is surprised that he can’t remember a thing anymore about that period of his life. Intrigued by this riddle, he decides to meet and interview old friends and comrades around the world. He needs to discover the truth about that time and about himself. As Ari delves deeper and deeper into the mystery, his memory begins to creep up in surreal images. | ||
Below are movies with major nominations but no scene release at the time of posting.
 | Title: | The Betayal |
| Nominations: | Documentary Feature | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: The epic story of a family forced to emigrate from Laos after the chaos of the secret air war waged by the U.S. during the Vietnam War. Kuras has spent the last 23 years chronicling the family’s extraordinary journey in this deeply personal, poetic, and emotional film. | ||
 | Title: | The Garden |
| Nominations: | Documentary Feature | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot:The Garden has the pulse of verité with the narrative pull of fiction, telling the story of the country’s largest urban farm, backroom deals, land developers, green politics, money, poverty, power, and racial discord. The film explores and exposes the fault lines in American society and raises crucial and challenging questions about liberty, equality, and justice for the poorest and most vulnerable among us. | ||
 | Title: | Trouble The Water |
| Nominations: | Documentary Feature | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: Aspiring rap artist Kimberly Roberts and her streetwise husband Scott show what survival is all about when they are trapped in New Orleans by deadly floodwaters, and then seize a chance for a new beginning. | ||
Below are foreign films that do not have scene releases as of the time of posting.
 | Title: | The Baader Meinhof Complex |
| Nominations: | Foreign Language Film | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: Director Uli Edel assembles an impressive cast–including Moritz Bleibtreu, Martina Gedeck, and Bruno Ganz–for this adaptation of Stefan Aust’s nonfiction book. In Berlin in 1967, a horrific riot inspires a woman named Ulrike Meinhof to join forces with Andreas Baader to battle their government. The pair moves from activism into terrorism, as they lead the group known as the Red Army Faction, aka the Baader-Meinhof Group. | ||
 | Title: | The Class |
| Nominations: | Foreign Language Film | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: François and his fellow teachers prepare for a new year at a high school in a tough neighborhood. Armed with the best intentions, they brace themselves to not let discouragement stop them from trying to give the best education to their students. Cultures and attitudes often clash in the classroom, a microcosm of contemporary France. As amusing and inspiring as the teenaged students can be, their difficult behavior can still jeopardize any teacher’s enthusiasm for the low-paying job. François insists on an atmosphere of respect and diligence. Neither stuffy nor severe, his extravagant frankness often takes the students by surprise. But his classroom ethics are put to the test when his students begin to challenge his methods… | ||
 | Title: | Revanche |
| Nominations: | Foreign Language Film | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: A happily married couple becomes unlikely friends with a man whose life has been marked by chaos and violence in this drama from Austria. Alex (Johannes Krisch) is a small-time criminal who after a stretch in prison finds himself working for Konecny (Hanno Poeschi), who runs a grimy house of prostitution; unknown to Konecny, Alex is also involved with Tamara (Irina Potapenko), one of his whores. Wanting to raise some quick cash, Alex robs a bank in a nearby small town and hides out on a farm owned by his grandfather (Hannes Thanheiser) while he waits for the heat to cool down. Alex tries to keep a low profile while waiting for Tamara to join him in the country, and he’s troubled by boredom and despair, but his mood brightens when he strikes up a friendship with Susanne (Ursula Strauss), a cheerful and generous woman who lives nearby. But Alex’s new friend happens to be married to Robert (Andreas Lust), a member of the local police force. | ||
 | Title: | Depatures |
| Nominations: | Foreign Language Film | |
| Links: | IMDB - RT - MovieWeb - Homepage | |
| Plot: “Departures” follows Daigo Kobayashi (Masahiro Motoki), a devoted cellist in an orchestra that has just been dissolved and who is suddenly left without a job. Daigo decides to move back to his old hometown with his wife to look for work and start over. He answers a classified ad entitled “Departures” thinking it is an advertisement for a travel agency only to discover that the job is actually for a “Nokanshi” or “encoffineer,” a funeral professional who prepares deceased bodies for burial and entry into the next life. While his wife and others despise the job, Daigo takes a certain pride in his work and begins to perfect the art of “Nokanshi,” acting as a gentle gatekeeper between life and death, between the departed and the family of the departed. The film follows his profound and sometimes comical journey with death as he uncovers the wonder, joy and meaning of life and living. | ||
Another week to go before that day all lovers wait for - Valentine's Day. Every year on February 14th, couples the world over go out together, and take time out to make each other feel special. But if you’re planning to hit the cafes and restaurants in India, beware - we follow a somewhat.... different tradition ;-).
Over here it’s not just bouquets, they come with brickbats too. Welcome to the largest and most hypocritical democracy in the world - India. I've lived in southern India most of my life, and I'm sorry to say travelling in a public bus with one's girlfriend sitting (just sitting mind you) close by is made most difficult by people (including the bus conductor) who keep staring at you as if you've committed a sinful and illegal act. I say this because I’ve seen it happen to people a lot of times over the years. I wonder how such couples manage. Kissing in public is sure to get one in trouble. Once an actress here had her comments publicly decried for she had spoken about safe sex and the need for awareness on protection in society. However, political parties targeted her comments as derogatory of the "traditional Indian woman". Hypocrisy at its peak.
Whereas egregious and unlawful acts go unpunished, the moral brigades and police deem it fit to barge into private parties and stop people kissing. Recently a few women in the IT hub of Bangalore (now Bengaluru) were beaten by an obscure organization's members for simply being in pub - they'd supposedly denigrated Indian values by being there. Perhaps beating women in public's a new Indian value that these self-proclaimed guardians of Indian tradition had imbibed. Kissing in public is a definite no-go here thanks to the overzealous but otherwise useless police and subsidiaries of various political parties that take it upon themselves to enforce their own so-called "Indian morals".
With Valentine's Day coming up, we are sure to see a lot more such incidents. The police need to stop playing Big Brother, and concentrate instead on how to stop people killing each other, not on kissing each other.
No doubt many of you would have heard of the recent case of a married couple in our capital city New Delhi being picked up by the cops for kissing in public. They were later set free by a court in Delhi which lambasted the police for arresting them in the first place. Below is the report from the BBC's website on the scenario in present-day India:
A court in India recently dismissed criminal proceedings against a couple who were arrested for kissing. The BBC's Soutik Biswas examines India's tangled relationship with the kiss.
Look before you kiss in India. A smooch can get you in serious trouble in the world's largest democracy.
Earlier this week, a court in Delhi - ah, of all places, in the "happening" capital! - threw out the case against a young, married couple who were picked up by police allegedly for kissing near a railway station.
The kiss has been under threat in India for as long as I can remember.
Two years ago, an over-enthusiastic Richard Gere had the riot act read to him when he swooped down and clasped actress Shilpa Shetty and planted several kisses on her. The two, by the way, were at an event to tell lorry drivers about safe sex.
News television hyperventilated, serving up titillation and tattle in equal measure on the serial-kissing Hollywood actor. Some protesters burnt effigies of Gere; others shouted slogans demanding the death of the hapless Shetty. It took the Supreme Court to suspend an arrest warrant against Gere, and obscenity charges against Shetty.
Much earlier, in the early 1990s, I remember the public outrage after Nelson Mandela kissed actress Shabana Azmi when he came visiting.
Clueless
And when India's usually benign tabloids splashed grainy mobile phone pictures of a Bollywood couple - they were dating at that time - allegedly kissing some years ago, the star diva fretted and fumed and began legal proceedings against the paper.
Even marriage sometimes doesn't give you the licence to smooch - an Israeli couple was fined $22 by a court for kissing after getting married in a Hindu ceremony in Rajasthan. The priests had taken umbrage.
For clues to why Indians appear to be clueless about kissing, listen to a model-actress Udita Goswami.
 |  India's ancient past is littered with kisses, if literary work is any evidence 
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"I am not comfortable doing that. I belong to a traditional family and my values do not allow me to indulge in such acts."
But a kissing famine has led to a curious demand for it in the dark confines of the movie theatre - and become a passport to fame for some.
A Bollywood starlet's film some years ago was hyped as one in which she had kissed her dazed looking co-star 17 times. (It so happened that the kisses were the only memorable thing about the film.)
Since then kiss-starved audiences have been counting the starlet's kisses in all her films - one later film of hers was advertised as one with "99 slaps - 1 kiss" so that fans were not entirely disappointed.
A Bollywood dance girl kicked up a storm when she was smooched in front of the cameras by a little-known singer at his birthday party. She hummed and hawed about the "inappropriateness" of the kiss and the media and the kiss-hungry republic lapped it up.
India's ancient past is littered with kisses, if literary work is any evidence.
'Westoxication'
Vedic Sanskrit texts, dating back to 1500 BC, apparently contain the first mention of a kiss in writing. (A caveat from a researcher: "This does not mean that nobody kissed before then, and it doesn't mean that Indians were first to kiss.")
India's famous epic poem and one of the world's oldest literary works, The Mahabharata, composed sometime between 3000 BC and 1500 BC, mentions kissing.
 Some demonstrators called Gere's embrace of Shetty 'vulgar' |
And in Kama Sutra, the definitive epic of amour, the scholar Vatsayana, devotes a chapter on the art of kissing. He painstakingly details some 30 types of kisses - straight, bent, turned, press, nominal and throbbing are some among them.
And Richard Gere, please take note, Indian cinema's first kiss dates back to 1933 in a film called Karma where the actress is lip-locked with actor and real life husband Himanshu Rai for some four minutes. Four minutes!
So why does India have this tortured and twisted relationship with the kiss?
Some people play it down, saying those who protest belong to a "loony fringe" of moral fundamentalists. Others say it is a hangover from tradition in an ancient civilisation. Still others say many Indians long for traditional mores as Western consumerist values swamp the country.
Or is it a response to what the Iranian intellectual Jalal-e-Ahmad called "Westoxication" - superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West?
Do some Indians - cutting across class - actually rail against such "Westoxication" when they are revulsed by couples kissing? "Looked at closely," says leading Indian sociologist Dipankar Gupta, "revulsion against Westoxication is principally an aesthetic sneer and not a full blooded call for a return to tradition".
Or is the rage against the kiss born out of a hypocritical morality that equates sex with sin and desire with guilt? As sociologist Shiv Vishwanathan tells me, "India is the only country which has a body police and not a thought police".
There must be some truth in all these theories.
So, torn between tradition and seductive imported values, Indians will continue to grapple with the Big Question - to kiss or not to kiss? And, as a friend quips, "When we do kiss, we don't tell".
As a person in an online forum aptly put it:
Chewing paan and spitting it out every-friggin-where, and peeing on the road side, is more obscene than a beautiful kiss. As is wearing a police uniform and shaking people down for bribes! Let's prosecute these guys first before we go after kissing couples.
