Oscar Essay

The movie that I personally thought was worthy of an Oscar was 127 hours. This movie was about an independent climber that got himself into a life threatening situation when he fell in a  crevous and a boulder fell onto his arm. Its about his survival and how through the 127 hours he's there he changes and overcomes this extreme obstacle. Though a little short of action, this movie was never boring and kept me interested the whole time.
Lighting in this movie, was very literal. Throughout the movie he got limited sunlight each day, as the crevous hid the sun for most of the day. The darkness of the crevous, provided a doomed feeling for the audience as anybody could see he wasn't ever getting out of that hole. To me the sunlight represented hope for him and, literally, shed some light on the situation at hand (no pun intended).
In this movie, there were a lot of frontal shots, especially as he was facing his own camera, talking to his family. I enjoyed this aspect alot because you could really absorb all his emotion and intimacy. You saw only his face, which in and of itself portrayed lots of emotion and when we watched the movie through his video camera lense, it made it seem as if we were actually there, which i thought was sweet.
As for angles in this movie, the oblique angle shots towards the end really caught my attention. When he finally cut his arm off and was climbing down trying to find help, the oblique angles captured his physical instability as he was exhausted, weak, dehydrated etc...Again, this angle realy helped put the audience, as much as it could, in his shoes, showing what it must have been like to feel like him in those moments. Some other angles used where low angle shots and high angle shots. The low angle shots were mainly shot from the top of the crevous looking down on him showing how far down he was and almost literally, showing how deep of trouble he was in. High angle shots, portrayed from his view, showed how "far" away his freedom was, his way out. From his point of view, the top of the crevous was soo far up and made it seem hopeless for him. Both of these shots, i think, were the most commonly used shots in the movie as the majority of the movie he was in one spot. However, there were several long shots and extreme long shots, to show his location and how far away he was from civilization or help. It's start by showing the crevous, then zoom out more to show the surroundings, then even more to show the vast desert like landscape showing how stranded he was.
In general, I thought the movie was pieced together greatly and every aspect of it really helped me feel how stuck he was. There are a few more elements that I could analyze that were in this movie but the ones I've explained previously are the ones that stood out to me the most.  Though slow in action, James Franco was, in my opinion, genius and it definatley has my vote.