Best Achievement in Visual Effects

Iron Man • Buy the DVD • Buy the Blu-ray

WINNER: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • Sign up for the DVD • Sign up for the Blu-ray

The Dark Knight • Buy the DVDs • Buy the Blu-ray

Tags: Best Visual Effects, oscars

Best Achievement in Art Direction

Changeling • Buy the DVD • Buy the Blu-ray

WINNER: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • Sign up for the DVD • Sign up for the Blu-ray

The Dark Knight • Buy the DVDs • Buy the Blu-ray

The Duchess • Buy the DVD • Buy the Blu-ray

Revolutionary Road • Buy it on DVD • Buy it on Blu-ray

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Best Writing, Screenplay Written Directly for the Screen

Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material Previously Produced or Published

WINNER: Dustin Lance Black, Milk (Buy the DVD | Blu-ray) Martin McDonagh, In Bruges (Buy it) Courtney Hunt, Frozen River (Buy the DVD | Blu-ray) Mike Leigh, Happy-Go-Lucky (Buy it on DVD | Sign up for Blu-ray) Andrew Stanton, Jim Reardon, Pete Docter, Wall-E (Buy it on DVDs | Blu-ray)

WINNER: Simon Beaufoy, Slumdog Millionaire (Buy it on DVD | Blu-ray) Eric Roth and Robin Swicord, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Sign up for the DVD | Blu-ray) Peter Morgan, Frost/Nixon (Buy it on DVD | Blu-ray) John Patrick Shanley, Doubt (Buy it on DVD | Blu-ray) David Hare, The Reader (Sign up for the DVD | Blu-ray)

Tags: Milk, Best Writing, winner

Best Performance by an Actor in a Leading Role

Milk Movie Trailer -

The Winner Is Milk

When a famous person, like the nation's first openly gay male city supervisor, inspires an acclaimed book (The Mayor of Castro Street) and Oscar-winning documentary (The Times of Harvey Milk), a biopic can seem superfluous at best. Taking over from Oliver Stone and Bryan Singer, Gus Van Sant, whose previous picture was the more experimental Paranoid Park, directs with such grace, he renders the concern moot. Unlike Randy Shilts' biography, which begins at the beginning, Dustin Lance Black's script starts in 1972, just as Milk (Sean Penn, in a finely-wrought performance) and his boyfriend, Scott (James Franco, equally good), move from New York to San Francisco. Milk opens a camera shop on the Castro that becomes a safe haven for victims of discrimination, convincing him to enter politics. With each race he runs, Harvey's relationship with Scott unravels further. Finally, he wins, and the real battle begins as Milk takes on Proposition 6, which denies equal rights to homosexuals. He does what he can to rally politicians, like George Moscone (Victor Garber) and Dan White (Josh Brolin). While the mayor is willing, the conservative board member has reservations, and after Milk fails to back one of White’s pet projects, the die is cast, leading to the murder of two beloved figures. If Van Sant’s film captures Harvey in all his complexities (he was, for instance, a very funny man), Milk also serves as an enticement to grass-roots activism, showing how one regular guy elevated everyone around him, notably Cleve Jones (Emile Hirsch), the ex-street hustler who created the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial. Released in the wake of Proposition 8, California’s anti-gay marriage amendment, Milk is inspirational in the best way: one person can and did make a difference, but the struggle is far from over. --Kathleen C. Fennessy

Best Performance by an Actress in a Leading Role

The Reader (2008) New Trailer Movie

Winner Is The Reader

What is the nature of guilt--and how can the human spirit survive when confronted with deep and horrifying truths? The Reader, a hushed and haunting meditation on these knotty questions, is sorrowful and shocking, yet leavened by a deep love story that is its heart. In postwar Germany, young schoolboy Michael (German actor David Cross) meets and begins a tender romance with the older, mysterious Hanna (Kate Winslet, whose performance is a revelation). The two make love hungrily in Hanna's shabby apartment, yet their true intimacy comes as Michael reads aloud to Hanna in bed, from his school assignments, textbooks, even comic books. Hanna delights in the readings, and Michael delights in Hanna.

Years later, the two cross paths again, and Michael (played as an adult by Ralph Fiennes) learns, slowly, horrifyingly, of acts that Hanna may have been involved in during the war. There is a war crimes trial, and the accused at one point asks the panel of prosecutors: "Well, what would you have done?" It is that question--as one German professor says later: "How can the next generation of Germans come to terms with the Holocaust?"--that is both heartbreaking and unanswerable. Winslet plays every shade of gray in her portrayal of Hanna, and Fiennes is riveting as the man who must rewrite history--his own and his country's--as he learns daily, hourly, of deeds that defy categorization, and morality. "No matter how much washing and scrubbing," one character says matter of factly, "some sins don't wash away." The Reader (with nods to similar films like Sophie's Choice and The English Patient dares to present that unnerving premise, without offering an easy solution. --A.T. Hurley

Tags: The Reader, Oscars

Best Achievement in Directing

WINNER: Danny Boyle, Slumdog Millionaire (Buy the DVD | Blu-ray)
David Fincher, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button (Sign up for the DVD | Blu-ray)
Ron Howard, Frost/Nixon (Buy it on DVD | Blu-ray)
Gus Van Sant, Milk (Buy it on DVD | Blu-ray)
Stephen Daldry, The Reader (Sign up for the DVDs | Blu-ray)

Tags: Directing, achievement, slumdog

Best Motion Picture of the Year

Slumdog Millionaire is Winning

Danny Boyle (Sunshine) directed this wildly energetic, Dickensian drama about the desultory life and times of an Indian boy whose bleak, formative experiences lead to an appearance on his country's version of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?" Jamal (played as a young man by Dev Patel) and his brother are orphaned as children, raising themselves in various slums and crime-ridden neighorhoods and falling in, for a while, with a monstrous gang exploiting children as beggars and prostitutes. Driven by his love for Latika (Freida Pinto), Jamal, while a teen, later goes on a journey to rescue her from the gang's clutches, only to lose her again to another oppressive fate as the lover of a notorious gangster.

Running parallel with this dark yet irresistible adventure, told in flashback vignettes, is the almost inexplicable sight of Jamal winning every challenge on "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?," a strong showing that leads to a vicious police interrogation. As Jamal explains how he knows the answer to every question on the show as the result of harsh events in his knockabout life, the chaos of his existence gains shape, perspective and soulfulness. The film's violence is offset by a mesmerizing exotica shot and edited with a great whoosh of vitality. Boyle successfully sells the story's most unlikely elements with nods to literary and cinematic conventions that touch an audience's heart more than its head. --Tom Keogh

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score

Best Achievement in Music Written for Motion Pictures, Original Score

Alexandre Desplat, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button • Buy the CD

James Newton Howard, Defiance • Buy the CD

Danny Elfman, Milk • Buy the CD

WINNER: A.R. Rahman, Slumdog Millionaire • Buy the CD

Thomas Newman, WALL-E • Buy the CD

Tags: Oscar, winner

the 2009 academy awards

9 [Teaser Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

9 [Teaser Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Race To Witch Mountain [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Race To Witch Mountain [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Knowing [Trailer 2] [HD] 2009

Knowing [Trailer 2] [HD] 2009

Ice Age 3 Dawn Of The Dinosaurs [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Ice Age 3 Dawn Of The Dinosaurs [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Watchmen [Trailer 2] [HD] 2009

Watchmen [Trailer 2] [HD] 2009

Star Trek [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Star Trek [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Angels & Demons [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Angels & Demons [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Friday The 13th [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Friday The 13th [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

The Uninvited [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

The Uninvited [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Underworld 3 Rise Of The Lycans [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Underworld 3 Rise Of The Lycans [Trailer 1] [HD] 2009

Dragonball Z movie / Original Trailer 2009

Dragonball Z movie / Original Trailer 2009

Madagascar - Escape 2 Africa (Widescreen) (2008)

Madagascar - Escape 2 Africa (Widescreen) (2008)

released on February 6, 2009

The first trailer to "Madagascar 2: Escape To Africa" from Dreamworks Animated Studios.

Diablo 3

Diablo 3

The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

The Secret Life of Bees (2008)

Release on 3 Feb 09

Amazon.com

Headed by an all-star cast of women, The Secret Life of Bees is the heartwarming and well-told story of a young girl who finds love and acceptance from a trio of independent sisters. The Secret Life of Bees is based on the bestselling book of the same name by Sue Monk Kidd and centers around the plight of 14-year-old Lily (Dakota Fanning). Assuming the burden for her mother's premature death, she has a precarious relationship with her abusive father T. Ray (Paul Bettany). Lily's only friend is her caregiver Rosaleen (Academy Award winner Jennifer Hudson). Set in South Carolina in 1964, when civil rights wasn't a given, Rosaleen's life is threatened by racists who'd just as soon see her dead than exercise her right to vote. Lily runs away with her to a town she believes may hold the secrets of her mother's life. There the pair meet the Boatwright sisters August (Queen Latifah), June (Alicia Keys) and May (Sophie Okonedo)--who produce the area's famous Black Madonna honey. They eventually provide Lily with the unconditional love she never felt she had and also show Rosaleen that being a black woman in the South doesn't mean she can't have a sense of worth. The Secret Life of Bees doesn't try to pass itself off as a historical documentation of race relations in the 1960s. But the fictional slice of life still resonates because of the feelings of injustice that it stirs up. Though the film is written to show the disparity between blacks and whites, there is always a strong sense of hope, thanks to the lead actresses who bring empathy and dignity to their roles. Hudson exhibits some of the same quiet grace that Regina Taylor brought to her role as the family housekeeper in the superb TV series I'll Fly Away. Latifah has the part of wise matriarch down pat, even when she's playing a sister rather than a mother. And it's clear that Fanning is making a seamless transition from kid to young adult roles. Whether she's giving an impassioned monologue or listening thoughtfully, Fanning brings nuance and intelligence to her role. --Jae-Ha Kim