Anne Thompson Looks at Summer and Sees Oscar Gold

Look to the summer, says Anne Thompson, for potential Oscar movies:

But this year, five summer movies could score a top ten slot, from crowd-pleasers Up, Star Trek and Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to higher-end fare such as Public Enemies and Hurt Locker.

Not having seen Harry Potter, I don’t see it landing in the top slot, although with ten who knows. Thompson has high praise for the film indeed:

[The film is] just about the best-made picture I’ve seen in many a moon. This Potter is as elegantly designed as a Pixar movie.Its tech credits are outstanding: period production design and costumes, cinematography, and visual effects (the quidditch matches are stunning).

For me, the best picture Oscar nominees are still going to be the ten best films of the year, not necessarily there to appease the public. It’s easy to go there, since The Dark Knight seems to have kicked off much of the hoopla, but you’re still looking at ten best – I don’t know that I see any of these, save Hurt Locker, ending up as one of the best of the year. Impossible to say. Harry Potter opens in the next three days and we’ll see how it goes from there. Public Enemies is solid but the digital video stuff is a bit weird, I think, and ultimately off-putting (usually I don’t think that but with this film…) The buzz for it appears to have deflated somewhat as well and it would need more heat at this point to go all the way, especially with so many Big Oscar Movies coming in the next few months.