Arts & Culture

Arts Writers Feud Over Potential Oscar Winners

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The only thing more divisive than religion and politics is opposing Oscars predictions. The Arts section has weighed in on their favorites; where do yours stack up? Best Picture
Will Win: The Revenant

As much as we would like to see something smart like Spotlight or funny like The Big Short take home the coveted award of Best Picture, we will probably see Alejandro Iñárritu walk out with a little golden man for the second year in a row.  The story of a frontiersman (Leonardo DiCaprio) out to seek vengeance on the man who left him for dead (Tom Hardy) is a simple yet intense storyline.  It is beautifully shot — thanks to Emmanuel Lubezki —  with vast shots of nature and landscapes.

Arts & Culture

Meru: Questionable but Beautiful

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Mountain climbers, the real-deal ones, the ones who fearlessly risk life and limb to conquer peaks, arouse a natural human curiosity about how they can be so undaunted. Besides being mortal and being 60 percent water, these people’s programming seems to have absolutely no relation to how us normal folks function. You don’t know if they’re enlightened beings who have found something ethereal above the pettiness of people down below, or if they’re neanderthals who have no civilizational restraints. Meru, a documentary now showing at Cornell Cinema on Thursday and Saturday, chronicles a group of these climbers. Specifically, Meru focuses on Conrad Anker, Jimmy Chin and Renan Ozturk as they try to hike the “Shark’s Fin” route of Meru, a peak in the Indian Himalayas.

Arts & Culture

BROMER | Shoah: On Not Remembering

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Correction Appended

Over winter break, while you were doing something normal like watching the Bill Murray Christmas Special, or something, my friend Zach and I spent two days watching something decidedly more intense: Claude Lanzmann’s 1985 Holocaust documentary, Shoah. To say that one does not watch, but endures, Shoah, Claude Lanzmann’s nine -and-a-half hour documentary about the Holocaust, is not meant to denigrate the film in any way. It is uncompromising, nauseating, obsessive — and required viewing for anyone who wishes to grapple with this stain on human history and the horrifying absence left in its wake. The film comprises of interviews with survivors, witnesses and German perpetrators, as well as footage from Nazi extermination sites in Poland and their surrounding areas. Lanzmann often used hidden cameras and other forms of deception to capture the testimony of those who, for obvious reasons, preferred not to have their role in systematic murder broadcast to international audiences.