More than any other movie this year, The Grand Budapest Hotel has seen its awards season hopes resurrected. Released in the awards season doldrums of March, the film proved to be surprisingly successful by indie film standards, grossing nearly $60 million in the United States alone. Despite its popularity and critical acclaim though, most Oscar pundits dismissed any awards whispers as pure fantasy, citing the film's early release as problematic and claiming director Wes Anderson's particular sense of comical whimsy as too quirky for stodgy Academy members. Miraculously though, The Grand Budapest Hotel has overcome all obstacles to become one of the major contenders in the 2015 Best Picture race. Set in a fictional European hotel in a fictional European country right before the onset of World War II, the film stars Ralph Fiennes as Gustav H., the hotel's concierge who imbues the resort with a sense of old-fashioned class. The film is a zany comedy with Anderson's trademark touch of humanist sentimentalism, but its nostalgic setting makes the movie more accessible than Anderson's previous contemporary set films. In terms of the movie's awards prospects, the fact the film is a technical marvel is a huge plus. Every guild imaginable has managed to cite the film as one of the best of the year, which means within the Academy, there will be fans of the film in almost every single branch. Given Anderson's iffy track record with the Oscars, some pundits are still reluctant to count the movie as a lock, but don't fool yourself, this Best Picture nominee is in the bag.
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.
