Arrival should win Best Picture

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Last night, I watched Arrival, nominated for Best Picture and a slew of other awards this year. Starring Amy Adams and the guy who plays Hawkeye (unconvincingly as a physicist), it’s basically the story of how Earth will react when aliens come to visit. Although it sounds like it, this is not an action movie, and that’s a surprising twist.

In general, the nominees for Best Picture are a collection of some of the most depressing and weird movies that would otherwise never been seen by the general public. And once they upped the possible nominees to 10 films per year, I hoped that would mean more mainstream or palatable movies would start to be nominated. Last year, the big surprise nomination was The Martian, even though it was never going to win. And Spotlight was a great movie and everything, but it’s not exactly an upper. None of the Best Picture nominees really are. And it’s been that way as long as I can remember.
 
There is an upside to this, of course. If you’re like me and you make sure to see all the nominated films (or as many as you can before you get too depressed), you end up seeing more than just the Taken trilogy and you get exposed to some great acting and different plot lines. My favorite example of this is Nightcrawler with Jake Gyllenhaal. Because he was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Actor, I made sure to watch it.
 
Unfortunately, he was not nominated for an Oscar, a huge mistake in my opinion, and the film was only nominated for the screenplay. They should have dropped Steve Carell off the nomination list for Foxcatcher, because that movie was completely horrible.
 
But I digress. I don’t want to give too much away about Arrival, because sometimes it’s in the watching and discovery that a movie is truly great and enjoyable. The casting is a little strange, but Amy Adams delivers a great performance and it feels real, like this is hopefully the way we will react if this ever happens. Not that I believe in aliens, but I believe in Star Trek, so it would be amazing.
So far I’ve seen Hidden Figures, Fences, La La Land, and Hell or High Water and while there are some huge bummers in the list of Best Picture nominees, Arrival is the winner in my book. Rent it. It’s worth it.
Creepiest. Movie. Ever.

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