Oscars 2013: Get To Know Your Best Picture Nominees

6. Django Unchained

In Tarantino's seventh film, he follows up his World War II re-imagining Inglourious Basterds with Django Unchained. Now Tarantino's highest grossing film, Django tells the story of Django Freeman, a slave who teams up with a bounty hunter. The two men kill the local villains, elude a very KKK-like gang, and meet Don Johnson while on the search for Django's wife. They find her in the residence of a plantation owner named Calvin Candie, and they concoct a scheme to purchase her from this evil man. Django, while not his best work, is what we've come to expect from Tarantino. Witty dialogue, remarkable acting performances, and great action sequences abound in Django. While Django has harrowing and discomforting scenes of torture and other various forms of cruelty, it also actually happens to be Tarantino's sweetest and most romantic film. In the movies he's previously directed, aside from Jackie Brown and Max Cherry and the few scenes with Shosanna and Marcel, Tarantino never delves into romantic relationships and sacrifice. And though we only see a few scenes of Django and Hildy actually together, they fall back into patterns of familiarity so quickly that it's actually the glint in Hildy's eyes that get them into trouble. It should be noted that in his most recent two films, Tarantino has managed to create some of the most memorable villains in years. Though not quite at the level of Hans Landa, DiCaprio's Calvin Candie is a truly despicable character, taking sadistic glee in the savagery he conducts. And Samuel L. Jackson, as Stephen, plays one of films most miserable monsters, a man with a brutal and confounding loyalty to Candie. These men help reiterate the evils of the time period; the mistreatment of blacks (and basically every other non-white race, though not explicitly depicted in Django) was not something excusable because "that's just the way things were" but rather brutish inhumanity that still taints America after nearly 150 years. Why It Will Win: Tarantino is beyond due for an Oscar, and everyone knows it. Why It Won't Win: Perhaps too abrasive and violent for Hollywood. And the excessive use of the N-bomb.