Best Pictures for Home Viewing
Saturday, February 22, 2014 at 1:00PM all links in this article go to my favorite post about the movie in question
For those of you who live too far from major markets to see everything before the Oscars, or who love watching a movie over and over and over again, you won't have to wait too long to fulfill every viewing impulse you have for this year's batch of Oscar nominees. Almost every single Oscar nominee will be on DVD and BluRay by the end of March except of course for the handful that don't have to follow the normal rules of release like foreign film and animation: Omar, Ernest & Celestine, The Wind Rises, The Missing Picture which have just started their theatrical runs or are coming soon. There's no word yet on late arrival The Invisible Woman, nominated for costume design. The only Best Picture that hasn't announced a BluRay release date is Spike Jonze's Her which is slightly surprising since its competitors, which are mostly still going stronger at the box office, have.
Coming Tuesday!
Best Picture nominees Gravity & Nebraska hit stores the day Oscar voting ends. So they won't be able to tout any of their potential wins on their jackets
Already Available. Will you have seen them all by March 2nd?
Best Picture nominees: Captain Phillips & Dallas Buyer's Club; Screenplay nominees: Blue Jasmine & Before Midnight; Animated Features, Visual Effects and Craft nominees are often available before the other shortlists since they're less reliant on Christmas releases to win gold. So you can already get: The Great Gatsby, All is Lost, Star Trek Into Darkness, Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, The Lone Ranger, The Croods; Plus: the grim thriller Prisoners, about child abduction nominated for Best Cinematography, and Denmark's Foreign Film nominee The Hunt starring Mads Mikkelsen as a man accused, and thus presumed guilty, of child abuse which is suddenly and uncomfortably extra topical.
Coming in March
March 4th
Best Picture nominees 12 Years a Slave & Philomena plus costume & cinematography eye candy kung fu in Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster
March 11th
Two musically-focused nominees: Inside Llewyn Davis, nominated for Sound Mixing, and The Broken Circle Breakdown Belgium's Best Foreign Language Film nominee is a cancer drama but it's also one of the best performance musicals of recent years; moving bluegrass family drama. I don't plan on buying either movie but my god the music. Gimme the soundtracks!
March 18th
Best Picture nominee American Hustle plus two Best Original Song features Mandela and Frozen. I find the Disney behemoth's home video date surprising. It's still in the box office top five. You can make money on home video forever but theatricla revenue comes just once (until the next technological breakthrough for which you can retrofit it and rerelease) so why cut off that money?
All the Best Pictures will be on blue ray by March 25th (except Her)
March 25th
A cushion-your-ass double feature. Got a free five & half hours? Best Picture The Wolf of Wall Street (180 minutes) and Best Foreign Film The Great Beauty (142 minutes) arrive on the same day.
April 7th
That's the day you get the three fire breathers: Smaug from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Violet and Barbara Weston (Meryl & Julia) in August: Osage County.
CHECK OUT THE OSCAR CHARTS
And make sure to vote for your favorite Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor and the like.
Reader Comments (5)
Seeing as how I'll be watching it on a much smaller screen and in 2-D, I know re-visiting Gravity won't compare to the theatrical experience, but I'm excited to see it again (and have it in my collection) nonetheless.
I don't understand why films like The Missing Picture (and Monsieur Lazhar a couple of year back) only come out in theaters after the big show. Sure, I know some people will only find out about these movies during the actual Oscars, but it would seem that more of the arthouse audience likely to see them would be more drawn to "Academy award nominee XXX" before the show rather than "Academy Award nominee (and loser) XXX" afterward.
Evan -- you're spot on.
Anything that can't be bothered to open beyond LA and NY before the ceremony gets shunned.
Frankly, the rules should be changed. Nominations should be announced on a Monday, with only films that went reasonably wide (whatever number of markets gets them to at least 50% of the population) on or before the prior Friday qualifying, even if they are foreign or animated. What's the point of honoring films no one ever gets a chance to see until months later.
One of the worst offender was that Japanese film that won foreign a few years back. Didn't come to SF until something like May. No $12.50 for you!
of course, this would lead to crazy game playing and some very crowded weekends in January, but if the fans can't see the films nominated, how are they supposed to care?
Besides the 15 short films, which I can never seem to find before the Oscar telecast, I have nine films left to see: Before Midnight, The Invisible Woman, Despicable Me 2, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom, Ernest & Celestine, The Wind Rises, The Great Beauty, The Missing Picture, and Omar. I know I'll definitely watch Before Midnight before the show and I hope I can find the others, particularly The Great Beauty.
The Broken Circle Breakdown is also currently available on ITunes, which is how I plan to watch it tomorrow!