The Academy Awards are this Sunday. In honor of the big night, here are just a few movies nominated for an Oscar that are worth watching.
Silver Linings Playbook
The romantic dramedy, with eight Academy Award nominations, is comprised of a powerhouse team of actors including Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert De Niro, Chris Tucker and Julia Stiles. Pat (Cooper) is a bipolar man who has just been released from a mental hospital and is now living with his OCD-diagnosed father (De Niro). While Pat deals with a restraining order that prevents him from contacting his wife, he befriends a widowed sex addict (Lawrence) who promises to help him get in contact with his wife if he acts as her partner in a local dance competition.
Les Misérables
This musical drama, set in 19th century France, is another film with a plethora of great actors. Russell Crowe plays a ruthless policeman in search of Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman), who has broken his parole. Several years later, Valjean becomes a mayor and factory owner. When Valjean finds out that one of his former workers (Anne Hathaway) has become a prostitute in order to pay her debt to the Thénardiers (Sacha Baron Cohen), Valjean promises to take care of her daughter. Going into too much detail may be a spoiler, but this is one film about love, sacrifice and redemption that you have to see!
Argo
Directed by and starring Ben Affleck, Argo has been widely acclaimed by movie critics across the board and is nominated for seven Academy Awards. It recants the story of a CIA operative Tony Mendez (Affleck) who leads the rescue of six U.S. diplomats from Tehran during the 1979 hostage crisis. His plan to extract them involves him posing as a Hollywood producer looking for locations in Iran and training the refugees to be his “film crew”. The suspense will keep your heart pounding until the very end.
Skyfall
If you love a good James Bond film, Skyfall – up for five Academy Awards – will not disappoint you. Bond (Daniel Craig) is on an assignment that goes awry and is presumed dead until the MI6 is compromised and several agents are exposed. M (Judi Dench) turns to Bond, who follows a trail that leads to secrets from M’s past. While the movie lacks the sensuous scenes that Bond films are known for, it makes up for it with thrilling action.
Django Unchained
This western film takes place in the Deep South and Old West during the pre-Civil War years. It centers around a free slave (Jamie Foxx) who travels through the South with a bounty hunter (Christoph Waltz), to rescue his wife (Kerry Washington) from a crazed plantation owner (Leonard DiCaprio). The star-studded cast and five Academy Award nominations are promising, but criticism surrounds the alleged insensitivity of the director, Quentin Tarantino, to racial slurs and his mockery of slavery.