{"id":197,"date":"2017-01-30T01:46:06","date_gmt":"2017-01-30T08:46:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/?p=197"},"modified":"2017-02-27T14:52:46","modified_gmt":"2017-02-27T21:52:46","slug":"the-pleasures-of-oscar-season-by-clayton-pickard-kids-first-film-critic-age-17","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/2017\/the-pleasures-of-oscar-season-by-clayton-pickard-kids-first-film-critic-age-17\/","title":{"rendered":"The Pleasures of Oscar Season by Clayton Pickard, KIDS FIRST! Film Critic, age 17"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>From December through February is the time of year I love best because there are so many substantial films out in theatres, be they Hollywood, Indie or Foreign films. This year especially has brought us so many terrific movies such as <em>Manchester by the Sea, La La Land, Moonlight, Lion <\/em>and<em> 20th Century Women<\/em>. All of these films have been nominated for Best Picture, except <em>20th Century Wome<\/em>n, which was my favorite film of the year.<\/p>\n<p><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"size-thumbnail wp-image-198 alignleft\" src=\"http:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/02\/Star-150x150.jpg\" alt=\"\" width=\"150\" height=\"150\" \/>I was fascinated with all the catchy, get me up dance numbers in <em>La La Land.<\/em> I thought it captured the essence of the beginning of a relationship, when two people first fall in love. <em>Lion<\/em> is so emotionally harrowing, but captivating at the same time. Dev Patel portrays grown up Saroo so well and has justly been nominated for Best Supporting Actor for his role in it. <em>Manchester by the Sea<\/em> is a spectacular, but serious, family film that is very relatable because of its teen protagonist. This film is the flat-out truth about how horrible or exciting life can really be. It doesn&#8217;t pull any punches. It just tells an honest story about a dysfunctional family. <em>20th Century Women<\/em> is a hip, pop and lock sort of punk rock movie that young teens will love. I am very surprised that it was not nominated for Best Picture.<\/p>\n<p>Out of the nine Best Picture nominations, I have only seen three. I plan to see many more over the next few weeks before the Oscars. I meant to see <em>Moonlight<\/em> for the past two months, but the subject matter seems so intense. I also look forward to seeing<em> Hidden Figures<\/em>. The trailer makes it seem like an important feminist take on the moon landing. Everybody seems to love<em> Arrival<\/em>, but I usually don\u2019t enjoy alien movies. This one sounds rather interesting, since it&#8217;s about a linguist trying to decipher the Alien language.<\/p>\n<p>I have seen three out of the five films up for Best Animated Feature: <em>Kubo and the Two Strings, The Red Turtle<\/em> and<em> Zootopia.<\/em> The two that I haven&#8217;t seen are <em>Moana <\/em>and<em> My Life as a Zucchini.<\/em> <em>My Life as a Zucchini<\/em> is a great \u201ctitle.\u201d It&#8217;s the premiere film this year at the New York International Children&#8217;s Film Festival, so I will probably see it there. I believe <em>Kubo<\/em> is the most creative and enchanting film up for the award. Can\u2019t wait to see who wins the Oscars for all of these. Until then, I\u2019ll just keep judging and guessing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>From December through February is the time of year I love best because there are so many substantial films out in theatres, be they Hollywood, Indie or Foreign films. This year especially has brought us so many terrific movies such as Manchester by the Sea, La La Land, Moonlight, Lion and 20th Century Women. All [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[4],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-197","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-film-critics-blog"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=197"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":199,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/197\/revisions\/199"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=197"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=197"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kidsfirst.org\/juror\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=197"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}