I'm looking forward to the reteaming of Crowe and Scott in A Good Year.
I hope overall that the new Oscar season is a return to glam and opulence and stars, big ideas and big films.
from USA TODAY:
http://www.usatoday.com/life/movies/new ... vies_x.htm
Next year, the Oscars may go to big films, famous directors
By Susan Wloszczyna, USA TODAY
The 2005 Academy Awards race, dubbed by many in the media as the year of the little movie, ended with a Crash two weeks ago.
The outlook for 2006? A possible boom  for big pictures.
Until low-budget specialty divisions such as Fox Searchlight (Sideways) and Focus Features (Brokeback Mountain) get their schedules in place, most of this year's early possibilities for the best-picture prize share at least two traits: They are major-studio releases and most are directed by highly regarded veterans of the Oscar wars.
"It's a big year for auteurist directors that you expect a lot from," says David Poland, editor of the website Movie City News. "The question is, will they deliver?"
It wasn't so much that there weren't mainstream movies with awards aspirations in 2005. "It could have been the year of Memoirs of a Geisha, Jarhead and The Producers," Poland says. "The studios gave money to directors they trusted to make challenging movies." But, along with The NewWorld and Cinderella Man, "they just failed," he says
Now, a fresh slate awaits. Expectations run high for Flags of Our Fathers (no date yet), Clint Eastwood's account of the six men who raised the flag on Iwo Jima during World War II. "It's got to be in there," says Anne Thompson, deputy film editor at The Hollywood Reporter. Considering its theme, a script by Paul Haggis (Crash) and Eastwood's success with 1992's Unforgiven and 2004's Million Dollar Baby, "It has it all," she says.
Other upcoming releases that could make the best-picture cut:
•They're back While Eastwood already is packing two trophies for directing, a pair of long-denied filmmakers return to their favorite genres. Irish-American mobsters clash with the Boston police force in Martin Scorsese's The Departed (November), starring Matt Damon, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jack Nicholson. And Brian De Palma re-enters the noir zone of femme fatales and unsolved murders with The Black Dahlia (Oct. 13), with Hilary Swank, Josh Hartnett and Scarlett Johansson.
•9/11 remembered Two accounts of what happened on that fateful day could find their way onto the Oscar short list. British director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy) tackles the foiled terrorist plot aboard Flight 93 (April 28). Oliver Stone, no stranger to Oscar, emphasizes the human story over political intrigue in World Trade Center (Aug. 9).
•As "Good" as it gets In the titular tradition of Good Night, and Good Luck, this trio has a good shot: The Good German (September), a murder mystery set in postwar Berlin directed by Steven Soderbergh (Traffic) and with George Clooney and Cate Blanchett; A Good Year (November), which reteams Gladiator director Ridley Scott and star Russell Crowe in the vineyards of Provence; and The Good Shepherd (Dec. 22), about the early years of the CIA, directed by and starring Robert De Niro.
There also might be room for a royal bio (Sofia Coppola, directing her first major-studio release with Marie-Antoinette, Oct. 13), a musical (Bill Condon's Dreamgirls, Dec. 22) and a serial-killer thriller (David Fincher's Zodiac, fall).
Of course, a little film or two could sneak in. If the academy liked Capote, why not Infamous (Oct. 13), another take on the controversial author directed by Douglas McGrath (Emma)?
