Wednesday, December 24, 2008

Memoirs of a Giesha: A misleading Oscar winner?

Oscar-winning director Rob Thomas' follow-up to Chicago, Memoirs of a Geisha (2005) was highly anticipated as all sophomore efforts of Oscar winners are bound to be, so for a while the picture enjoyed a tremendous amount of Oscar buzz, especially since it didn't come out until the last weekend of the year, but as soon as the critics and audiences saw it, they fell out of love with the film rather quickly. It only scored 35% on Rotten Tomatoes and was pretty soon out of the running for best picture or director because it wasn't a good film.

The problem is that Memoirs of a Geisha while not a good film overall had some good elements artistically. Its cinametography, art direction, and costumes won at the oscars, so the film as a result could call itself a 3-time Oscar winner, which put it alongside Crash (the best picture winner) and Brokeback Mountain (the best director winner) as the most successful film of that year on Oscar night.

Does anyone see a problem with this? Memoirs of a Geisha can be marketed as a 3-time oscar winner when the Academy made a clear choice that a number of other films, such as Munich which was nominated for best picture among other awards and one no oscars, was superior.

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