Awards Daily Giveaway (sticky)

On Writers Guild Saturday, we’re giving away a Blu-Ray player as our final giveaway of the year. We’re pretty sure. We might have one more.

Click the jump for info.

• Built-in Wi-Fi networking for accessing BD Live bonus materials as well as streaming photos from your PC
• Full HD 1080p output for Blu-ray Discs and upconversion of standard DVD video to 1080p
• 24p True Cinema capable lets you watch films at their intended 24 fps (frames per second); Dolby TrueHD and DTS-HD
• Outputs: 1 HDMI, 1 component, 1 S-Video, 1 composite, 1 analog audio (2-channel), 1 digital optical audio, 1 digital coaxial audio, 1 Ethernet
• Includes remote control and composite AV cable; measures 16.9 x 8.1 x 2.8 inches (WxDxH)

It looked pretty good to me.

To enter this giveaway, please write your favorite scene in any film this year. Since the winners will be chosen at random, it won’t make your chances any better if you pick the films we love, versus the films we don’t love. If you don’t leave a valid email address you will have to come back later to see if you won. Deadline for this giveaway is Sunday night after the BAFTAs.

One winner will be chosen at random. If an international winner is chosen we will figure out an alternative. Please enter once only — we check!

I will start with my favorite scene of the year (and I’m not even entering the giveaway!). My favorite scene of the year is when Jeremy Renner confronts a taxi driver in Baghdad. What I love about this scene is that it illustrates both the great writing, directing, cinematography, sound and editing. When I interviewed Kathryn Bigelow she said that they were lucky enough to find an abandoned car in Aman, Jordan where they were filming that had a cracked rear view mirror. Bigelow and Barry Ackroyd make brilliant use of it when we see the driver’s eyes in close up. Each time Jeremy Renner, or Sgt. James, confronts the driver we see an extreme closeup of his poker face. We see what James sees. We don’t know his motives. We can only guess at them. He looks scared. No, he looks angry. He has a bomb. No, he’s just a cab driver. The fear amid the soldiers, who could lose their lives at any minute should a bomb go off, is palpable. It is one of the many scenes of tension in the film. Every time the three bomb techs go out they are confronted with a life or death situation. Every single time.

The scene also illustrates the film’s technique of using multiple cameras at various locations to give the viewer a geographic idea of the bomb site perimeter, which Bigelow has explained must be 300 meters.¬† What a great scene.

Here are a few more memorable scenes that have clung to my psyche this past year:

The phone conversation between Colin Firth and Jon Hamm in A Single Man. Firth finds out his beloved has died in a car crash. What follows after that is his attempt to deal with his grief, mainly how he can’t imagine living a single day without this man. Firth talked about this scene when he recently did an interview with Terry Gross on Fresh Air and said that it wasn’t Jon Hamm during the filming. But Hamm is so perfectly voice-cast in that scene, and might as well have been Don Draper himself calling Firth.

The moment that Meryl Streep gets a telegram from her sister with the news that he sister is now pregnant. She sits with her husband and she cries. But the brilliance of the moment, and of the scene is that Julia is crying for two reasons – one, she is happy for her sister. And two, she has never had children of her own. It is such a deep and meaningful scene and one that only could have been pulled off by this intelligent and insightful actress.

In Jim Cameron’s films there is always an exhaustive exposition. But there is a moment in his films when the plot turns. And every single time it is a thrill and a half to watch. It is worth sitting through the long and clumsy first halfs to get to the exciting part. This happens in Aliens when Sigourney Weaver has to take over driving the tank because the team is now under siege by the aliens. This happens in T2 when Ahnold and the boy come to jailbreak Linda Hamilton out of the mental ward. It happens in Titanic when they at last hit the iceberg, and it happens in Avatar when Michelle Rodriguez breaks the three characters out of prison and they go down to Pandora to try to help save them. Once this action sequence kicks into gear, Avatar is nothing short of a thrill a minute.

The first twenty minutes of Up has to be some of the best cinema of the year, animated or not. The way we see the couple grow up together, have a life together, endure heartache together — almost wordlessly — is the kind of stuff that great films are made on. The Oscar race has a way of greatly diminishing works in the short run to the final show. It takes a while for the films to break free of all of this. Up is certainly one that will be remembered long after the Oscar race been forgotten.