Best Picture contenders, the poster collection

(click to supersize)

As a companion piece to Sasha’s Best Picture roundup above, here’s a mosaic of the top contenders in graphic form. I almost said “the best posters Hollywood graphic designers have to offer,” but geez, let’s hope that’s not true. BP doesn’t mean Best Poster in this case, because there are certainly better examples of graphic creativity than these this year. In fact, a couple of these are among the year’s worst. Also, for movies with lavish marketing campaigns and multiple poster variations, the selections shown here are not even always the best poster in each film’s deck of lobby cards. For example, I think the best poster for The Dark Knight (and possibly the best of the year) is this one. But I choose the one above as more representative of TDK’s overall design theme.

The Gran Torino poster is MIA, and you might notice one or two other discrepancies. But for all intents and purposes, these represent the big fish in this year’s Oscar pond [as of 2pm EDT, 11-22-08]. In addition, I think we’re still lacking a significant candidate for breakout foreign language film of 2008 — the annual international movie with nominations that spill over to other categories. Any ideas what that might be? Which of these posters do you love the most? or hate the least? What other films that failed to rise to Best Picture status have one-sheets that make some of these more pedigreed posters look like poop?