Introduction: 86th Academy Awards: 2013
12 Years a Slave won best picture, but shouldn't it have been Gravity? Both were up against some awesome competition - Philomena, Nebraska, Captain Phillips, Wolf of Wall Street, American Hustle and Dallas Buyers Club.
Posters
Why Gravity should have won
Gravity is a 2013 science fiction thriller, directed by Alfonso Cuarón, who also co-wrote, co-edited, and produced the film. It stars Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as American astronauts, stranded in space after the mid-orbit destruction of their Space Shuttle and attempting to return to Earth. No-one had seen special effects like this - it wouldn't have been possible a few years before - the shattering of the International Space Station by space debris, Clooney tumbling through space making us feel like we are with him - disorientated and dizzy. But also the film's power comes as much from Bullock’s committed role as a woman, struggling to maintain her will to live. It's not sci-fi movie, but more a space thriller. Viewers gets the sense that the action is happening to them, in the here and now.
The movie draws, broadly, on the style, of Kubrick's 2001 (1968) in it's grace, but the technical achievement goes way beyond that masterpiece. It has no monsters - it is a very human story, combining technical daring with moving storytelling, pushing both to their limits. For the dedicated effort into creating this, at times, beautiful space world, this film deserved the Oscar for this reviewer.
Gravity was produced in the UK, where British visual effects company Framestore spent more than three years creating most of the film's animations which cover 80 of its 91 minutes.
Gravity received ten nominations, including Best Actress for Bullock and Best Picture, and won seven awards, including Best Director, Best Original Score, Best Cinematography, and Best Visual Effects
12 Years a Slave
This film is a 2013 biographical drama film directed by Steve McQueen from a screenplay by John Ridley, based on the 1853 slave memoir, Twelve Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. Northup was kidnapped in Washington, D.C. by two conmen in 1841, sold into slavery and put to work on plantations in the state of Louisiana for 12 years before being released. This isn't the first movie about slavery in the United States — but it may be the one that makes it impossible to deny America's part in enslavement and cruelty through black history. Genteel white folk with manners, good clothes and picturesque plantations, are the backdrop for the visceral cruelty McQueen depicts in this film. This is an extremely well told and shocking story of one oppressed black individual, and those around him, but to this reviewer, it is not breaking new ground. What gives 12 Years a Slave its originality, is the way it is directed and the fluid way McQueen tells an awful story. If anything he should have won best director for this. 12 Years a Slave received critical acclaim - it earned over $187 million on a production budget of $22 million. The film received nine Academy Award nominations, winning for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay for Ridley, and Best Supporting Actress for Nyong'o. The Best Picture win made McQueen the first black British producer to ever receive the award and the first black British director of a Best Picture winner.
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