Since winning her first Oscar for The Blind Side, Sandra Bullcok's career has been fairly quiet. This may be due to her much publicized marital issues that led to her divorce from ex-husband Jesse James, or maybe the poor girl just needed a break, but for whatever the reason, since winning the Oscar she has only appeared in one film, 2011's Best Picture nominee Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. She's coming back with a vengeance this year though with a double feature, the first being a comedy in which she costars with Melissa McCarthy, The Heat, and the second being a much more Oscar friendly feature in Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity. If you haven't heard of Gravity, the film is a high-brow, high-concept sci-fi flick about an accident that occurs on a space station and leaves two astronauts (George Clooney and Sandra Bullock) indefinitely floating in space, tethered together simply by their grip on a rope. The movie has been in production for some time and has a purported budget of around $80 million, a figure that has to make its distributors nervous given the experimental nature of the movie. Filmed almost entirely in front of a green screen, from what has been released thus far from the film, it appears the cast will mostly consist of just Mr. Clooney and Ms. Bullock. Their performances then will assuredly be prominently featured in the film, but if they're not up for the task, or they simply can't hold the audience's attention, this could be a negative. Particularly for Ms. Bullock, who despite her Oscar win, has not exactly been known for her esoteric work or auteur collaborations, whether her "talents" actually fit the film's vibe remains a big question mark. Even if she delivers a spectacular performance, there's always the worry the film itself may be a tad too cerebrally adventurous for the generally elder crowd that dominates the voting body of the Academy. The recently released trailer (which if you haven't seen, you should do immediately after finishing this article) did enough to spark my interest, but it did strike me as something that would not likely appeal to some of the same people who gave Ms. Bullock her Oscar for The Blind Side.
A film fanatic at a very young age, starting with the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle movies and gradually moving up to more sophisticated fare, at around the age of ten he became inexplicably obsessed with all things Oscar. With the incredibly trivial power of being able to chronologically name every Best Picture winner from memory, his lifelong goal is to see every Oscar nominated film, in every major category, in the history of the Academy Awards.