Awards Season, Reviews / 01.03.2018
THE BEST PICTURE PROJECT – ‘Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)’ (2014)
A decidedly divisive film somehow takes the top prize....
When I do my predictions next year, if I say anything along the lines of it being an "unpredictable year", you have my permission to promptly slap me in the face. Despite all the discussion about how the winner of each category was so wildly difficult to nail down, everything pretty much went to plan, besides perhaps one major shocker. I am being completely genuine when I say that I was totally surprised to keep placing a tick next to prediction after prediction on my list. In the end, I walked away with three...
Well, the day has arrived. After what feels like a longer-than-usual awards season, and an enormous amount of back-and-forth on these predictions, the time has come to lock them in. I haven't been this doubtful about the majority of my predictions in many years. There's been a few tricky categories over the past couple of seasons, but nothing like this year. Even at this late hour, I have absolutely no idea what will win Best Picture. I think my 'for and against' series of posts made my mind...
Awards Season / 18.02.2015
The case for and against ‘Boyhood’
The next Best Picture nominee under The Jam Report's microscope is Richard Linklater's masterpiece Boyhood. The film had been the presumed winner for most of the season, and it looked likely to sail to the podium without much competition at all...
Reviews / 13.02.2015
Top ten films of 2014
Well, here we are again. Where on earth did 2014 go? And how did I manage to completely ignore The Jam Report for pretty much the entire year? Life/uni/film-watching/alcohol gets in the way, I suppose. I'm sure I made this promise last year, but 2015 will be different! I will devote more time to my writing! So how did 2014 stack up? For me, it was another phenomenal year in film. We had some fantastic box-office blockbusters that proved you could still create entertaining, intelligent, and thought-provoking art on a...
Worst. Nominations. Ever. Look, maybe I'm exaggerating with that statement, but in all the years I've been paying way too much attention to the Academy Awards, I cannot ever remember being this downright disappointed by the final nominations. You come to expect a few surprises, and of course a few painful snubs, but this year, it seems like the snubs are too damn hard to swallow, no matter how many times I remind myself it's just an awards show. At the end of the day, great films, and the...
Awards Season / 14.01.2015
Fearless Oscar nomination predictions
It only feels like yesterday that awards season began, and yet here we are on the cusp of the Academy announcing their anointed ones for 2015. There's still a lot up in the air, and I wouldn't say I'm entirely confident with a lot of these categories, but alas, onwards and upwards with this year's predictions. Best Picture American Sniper Boyhood Birdman Foxcatcher Gone Girl The Grand Budapest Hotel The Imitation Game Selma The Theory of Everything Whiplash I'm well aware Selma has oddly been left out of the Producer's Guild Awards, and it's very rare for a film to...
Awards Season / 31.12.2014
The 1st Annual Jammies – celebrating the best (and worst) of film in 2014
After talking about award shows incessantly for the last 20-odd years, it seems strange that the idea to create my own awards has never crossed my mind. So here we are with the 1st Annual Jammies - The Jam Report's very own end-of-year awards, honouring the best, and worst, in cinema for 2014. Now I know what you're thinking, and no, this won't just be another boring old Best Actor, Actress, Director type awards. I wanted to do something different, and maybe a little less stuffy, so I've created...