This is the fifth and last Best Picture nominee that I have seen. Just in the nick of time for the Oscar ceremony on Monday morning, which I won't be able to watch! Isn't that ironic?

Anyway, of all the nominees, "Juno" is the most accessible to the casual movie fan. It is understandable why this is the only one of the five nominees to be a box office hit, grossing more than $100M.

The situations and the dialogues are so much closer to reality than the others. The plot is simple and direct, but the treatment is unique. It was interesting to note that the writer (Oscar nominated and likely winner of Best Original Screenplay) Diablo Cody used to be a stripper. I guess that would account for the avant garde yet frank treatment of the sensitive subject matter of teenage sex and pregnancy. The script has a decidedly feminine bent, showing the strengths of the women characters.

The musical score was very unusual. I cannot even define the genre of that music and those quirky jangly songs! Very interesting soundtrack.

The actors are really very good here, led of course by Ellen Page playing Juno. She is very believable in her portrayal of a strong sensible, smart-alecky high school girl whose unexpected pregnancy expectedly shakes up her life. I can't believe she is actually already 20 years old!

Jennifer Garner is very remakable as well playing the childless woman who wanted to adopt Juno's baby. She has very touching moments, and she was really effective in them. Especially that scene where she was talking to Juno's bulging tummy in the mall. There was also those tense scenes that dealt with complicated marital issues she had with her husband Mark (Jason Bateman).

My favorite couple in this movie are J.K. Simmons and Allison Janney as juno's dad and stepmom. If this movie was set in the Philippines, all hell would have broken loose in that scene where Juno confesses her pregnancy to her parents. There was none of that here, in a rather sharp contrast of cultures. They had very witty and snappy lines. Great scene of Allison giving the holier-than-thou ultrasound technician a piece of her mind.

Overall, it was admittedly better than I expected. However, I do not really think this is really Best Picture material. It won't go home empty-handed I would bet. I do think its main chance for an Oscar is for its Original Screenplay. That said, the morality issue will always be with this movie. What message exactly does it say and deliver to teens of today about teen pregnancy?

This is the fourth of the Oscar Best Picture nominees I watched. Compared to the other three, this movie is the one where I come out feeling that Oscar is written all over it. This is the one with the elegant epic feel, reminiscent of past Oscar winner "The English Patient".

This is where cinematography (by Seamus Mc Garvey) is a key star element. All the scenes were meticulously composed shot like a special painting on a moving canvas. So many breathtaking and sweeping landscapes. Even the scenes depicting the horrors of war were imbued with artistic insight. So many vivid portraits as well with penetrating pain and anguish.

This is where the musical score (by Dario Marianelli) harks back to bygone grandiosity, like many past Oscar winners. Yet the tension in the music is uniquely heightened by the sound of typewriters typing. This ties in neatly with the story as the central character is a writer.

The story begins with Briony Tallis (an Oscar nominated Saoirse Ronan), a fanciful 13 year old girl who loves to write. She had just read a lustfully-worded love letter by the son of their household help Robbie (James McAvoy) to her sister Cee (Keira Knightley) and actually caught them in a compromising situation in the library. That night, as an assault is perpetrated on a guest in their opulent household. Briony accuses Robbie as the culprit and thus he is brought to jail. This part of the movie felt like "Gosford Park."

The second part of the movie traces how the love story of Cee and Robbie progressed through the war years four years after the arrest. Robbie was released from jail when he decided to join the army. Cee becomes a nurse. However, Robbie gets sent to France and they continue to communicate their love through letters. This part of the movie felt like "Cold Mountain" and "A Very Long Engagement."

I felt the third and last part of this story is the one that gives it its defining characteristic and twist. The story goes back to Briony, now 18 (Romola Garai). She is now fully cognizant of her erroneous accusation and its tragic effects. She gives up her slot at Cambridge and becomes a nurse as well. She seeks out Robbie and her sister in order to atone for her past sins. And just when you thought it is all over, Briony comes back again, this time in the present (Vanessa Redgrave) in an epilogue with more.

I am not surprised that this film had already won the Golden Globe and the British Academy Awards for Best Picture. I feel that its chance for the Oscar for Best Picture may be compromised by the fact that its Director Joe Wright was not nominated. I am not surprised why its lead stars McAvoy and Knightley were not nominated. While they maybe the bigger stars, in the story, they play support to the main story of the Briony character. While this film had its flaws, particularly its derivative feel in a greater part of the story as I have already indicated. But so far in its totality, among all the nominees I have watched, this is my favored one for Best Picture of 2008.

This is the third of the five Oscar Best Picture nominees that I have seen. I would not have expected this movie to be a Best Picture nominee at all if watched this last year. The build up of the movie is very slow. It only gains momentum in the middle and then it has you under its masterful grasp. The ending is quite neat though, even predictable, thus exposing the simplicity of the plot. However, it would also emphasize the excellence of the directorial style of Tony Gilroy (in his directorial debut) that makes the totality of this film transcend the limitations of the script.

The acting was definitely excellent. The three main characters all play lawyers. All three were deservedly nominated for Oscars in acting. In fact, as a testament to the level of acting in "Michael Clayton", this is the only movie with more than one cast member nominated for Oscar Acting awards this year.

The star is definitely George Clooney. He was really very good here in a subtle and quiet way (so unlike the over-the-top style of Daniel Day Lewis in "There Will Be Blood"). He plays a lawyer who is employed by a firm as a "fixer", someone who uses under the table methods to smooth out creases in the cases of other lawyers. Clooney deglamorizes himself here (if that's possible) in playing a sad, down-and-out character who gets caught in a high stakes legal case involving big business. He makes the audience forget his real life persona. That lingering close-up on his face as he rides a taxi at the end shows him going though an entire gamut of emotions without a word nor gesture--excellent.

Tom Wilkinson, whom I have admired as an actor since "In The Bedroom," is Arthur. He plays a big time defense lawyer who discovers that the firm he is defending, U-North, was actually killing people with its weed-killer products, and turns crazy in the process. His monologue about the sins of the company directed towards the agents whom he found out were bugging his apartment was a highlight of acting excellence.

Tilda Swinton was not really an actress I liked from her past work. I will always picture her as the Snow Queen in the Narnia movie. This may be the only film that I have seen her in modern dress. Here, she plays the in-house attorney of U-North who had to resort to desperate measures to cover up for the sins of the company she works for. Cool on the surface, a bundle of nerves behind the scenes. Very good also.

Compared with the other two nominees I have seen, this is actually more accessible to the regular viewer, since it is modern and the language used is clear. It is very effective as a character study. I am of the opinion though that its chances of winning Best Picture is a long shot. It lacks the epic feel that Oscar seems to love. The nomination alone may be its reward.

This movie is almost a one-man show. And that one man is Daniel Day-Lewis.

At first I thought I was watching a silent movie. The background story of Daniel Plainsview's humble beginning as a silver miner who got lucky hitting an oil deposit and how he adopted the infant son of a worker who got killed in the mine (whom he named HW), was all told in images and music, no dialogue. You knew you were in for a different type of movie. The first words were said only thirty minutes or so into the movie.

This is one of those epic (2 hrs. and 40 minutes, but it certainly felt longer than that) movies about oil. "Giant" with James Dean immediately comes to mind, but this movie did not have the gentility of Rock Hudson and Elizabeth Taylor. This movie is as dirty and grimy, and ruthless as it gets.

Essentially it depicted how Daniel (with HW in tow) sweet-talks his way with the simple backward folk in order to cheaply get their oil-blessed property. Then, problems arose when Daniel did not want his oil well blessed by the young preacher Eli. From there, misfortunes started to happen, worst of which was when HW suffered total deafness because of an oil rig explosion. Daniel's life was never the same after that. Towards the end, he was a broken drunk rich man, with plenty of unresolved conflict within him, that results in tragic consequences.

I have liked DDL ever since he played the genteel Cecil in "A Room With A View". Now, more than 20 years later, DDL is really in an acting tour-de-force in "There Will Be Blood". However, I must say that this acting was also flawed in a way. It started out really well, DDL was really very good in those early scenes as an oil speculator. But when religion came into the picture, I felt his acting went over the top, as if it was for a stage play. There was a scene when he had to submit himself to joining the church of Eli, subjecting himself to a "throwing out the demons" ceremony in order to get access to a piece of land. And then there was that scene in the end where he used milkshakes as a metaphor for how he had been able to get oil was a case of too much self-conscious acting. The over-acting in these scenes, not only by DDL, but also Paul Dano (who played preacher Eli), was almost humorous in its excess.

I liked this one better than "No Country For Old Men" as it had more substance and structure by its writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson (of "Magnolia" fame). The cinematography was very impressive. The camera work and editing of that big scene of the fateful oil rig explosion that made HW deaf was also very good. The musical score was something else. There was no sweeping music as you would expect from epics like that of "Dances With Wolves". Instead there were these seemingly unrelated pieces of music, that do not seem to be appropriate to the scene. It felt experimental in a way. It was interesting though. This movie was clearly trying to be a cinematic masterpiece, but I think its efforts are too obvious and obtrusive. Not bad by any measure, but I think it went a little overboard.

I watched this movie because it was the pick to win the Oscar for Best Picture this year. I don't get it. I did not like it. It was very long and episodic. While there well-shot individual scenes, yet with no coherence in its totality. It seemed to be about this guy Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) who stumbled into a bag containing two million dollars, and how this money turns his life topsy-turvy (I know, we've seen that before). But somewhere down the line, it lost me as to what it was really all about.

The violence is too brash and in-your-face, yet numbing and gratuitous. These scenes are largely due to one man, Anton, played by Javier Bardem, who really very creepy in his cool yet crazed killer role. He went to town with it, and is considered a lock for the Best Supporting Actor prize. While I was very distracted with his weird hairstyle, he was successful in developing tension in every scene he was in. He was especially effective in the quiet scenes like that with the gas station owner, the wife of Moss, and even that with a miscast Woody Harrelson. The question always comes up in your head--will he shoot them or not?

The Texas accents are too thick for me to understand the dialogues clearly, and that further reduced my full understanding. That entire mumbling monologue of Tommy Lee Jones that brought the movie to an unsatisfying, not to mention, sudden, end was such a major anti-climactic let-down for me.

I liked the Coen brothers' work with "Fargo," that actually succeeds despite its unusual premise. But this one is very disorganized in its direction. This was exemplified was that strange decision was having a main character die off-camera. Why? It felt like you just wasted your time following his actions and decisions, just to have his character snuffed out so suddenly and anonymously.

In general, I was very disappointed with this one. Maybe too much high expectations led to my reduced appreciation. I don't really get the title up to now. Definitely, this was not how I felt after watching "The Departed" the other year. I knew right away that film was a winner. This one, I don't think I would even have the patience to watch again.