The Academy Awards ceremony is now less than a month away, and earlier this morning David Edelstein of CBS Sunday Morning took a close look at the most controversial nominee of them all: director Michael Haneke’s AMOUR. In his commentary and review, Edelstein remarks how shocked he was when the film pulled in 3 of the biggest nominations (i.e. Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actress): “I was gobsmacked myself. “Amour” is a hell of a movie, but the Academy doesn’t often nominate foreign language films for the top prize, especially when they’re bleak, arty, glacially-paced, profoundly hopeless — I could go on.” Edelstein continues, “I’m not a fan of Michael Haneke’s other films, among them the thriller ‘Funny Games’ (made in German, and remade shot-for-shot in English); ‘The Piano Teacher’; and ‘Cache.’ Not to put too fine a point on it, I think he’s a pretentious punk, an arthouse thug, a sadist — don’t worry, he’d love these names, he lives to infuriate bourgeois types like me. But in ‘AMOUR’, he has a real-world antagonist even crueler and more brutal than he is: time.” You can watch Edelstein’s commentary below, and check out the trailer for AMOUR below as well. The Academy Awards air February 24th on ABC and CTV.
