Oscar Schmoscar

I'm not much of an awards show fan, and Big Daddy Oscar is at the top of my list of awards I don't care about.

It's nothing personal. I just get bored with the speeches, and most of the movies that are nominated are ones I haven't seen. This year's nominees were announced today, and as it turns out, I've only seen one of the potential Best Pictures. If the rest are anything like it, I don't think I want to see them.

On Saturday, my husband I went to a matinee of Atonement. Much touted by critics and radio commercials, the movie has been put forth as this decade's Titanic, an epic love story destined to amaze viewers with its brilliance. I'm a sucker for love stories, especially ones that take place in time periods with great clothes, but even I couldn't muster any excitement for this movie.

The story is a bit complicated to condense into one paragraph, but the crux is that a young girl (Saoirse Ronan) misinterprets something she sees, and that misinterpretation causes her to send an innocent man (James McAvoy) to prison, and ultimately, into the horrors of World War II. Incidentally, he's also the great love of her older sister (Keira Knightley), so she not only ruins his life, she ruins her sister's, causing a lifelong guilt trip and much grief and sadness all around.

The movie was adapted from a book, and it's pretty obvious there were some key things the moviemakers skipped over. The sisters have exactly two conversations in the movie -- one at the very beginning and one later in the younger sister's imagination. It's hard to believe she feels that awful about ruining the life of a sister she never speaks to.

Furthermore, I never got to see any of the "white-hot chemistry" between Keira Knightley and James McAvoy that the radio ads mentioned, mostly because their "epic love" lasted all of five minutes before they were torn apart forever. They fought in the morning, he wrote her a dirty letter in the afternoon, and by evening, they were in flagrante in the library. Is that what the kids are calling epic love these days? Whatever happened to witty conversation? I hate to sound cold-hearted, but I didn't really care whether those two ever got together again. Especially because when they did, they barely knew what to say; they seemed like strangers, not star-crossed lovers whose passion had been building for years.

It just felt forced. Hearing Keira Knightley whisper/whimper/cry "come back to me" got really old, really fast, and even the big moment of revelation where the younger sister figures out what she really saw (which I'm not even certain I believe she saw -- the way the movie goes, it almost seems as if the guilt she feels has made her simply make up a new version of events) fell flat. And the terrible bastard we're supposed to hate is someone we never really liked in the first place.

I could go on, but I won't. I will say that the movie was very nice to look at, and it made me want to read the book, because I think the story is intriguing and was simply told badly. I also feel compelled to say that I like Keira Knightley, but I wish she didn't always walk with her arms flapping behind her. It's a bit distracting.