academy award nominees

This 2014 Academy Award Winning movie for Best Original Screenplay written and directed by Spike Jonze is your typical boy meets girl, boy falls in love, girl is an advanced computer operating system....wait, what? Actually, Her is anything but a typical love story. It is instead a very interesting exploration of the increasing role that technology plays in our everyday lives and where that might take human relationships in the future. Joaquin Phoenix has the starring role as Theodore Twombly, a man recently separated from his wife, who installs a new advanced operating system (voice played by

Tragically beautiful and real, Amour is a profoundly honest depiction of how a stroke can affect both members of a marriage. Though a French film and in subtitles, one hardly needs the translation to follow the emotions—shame, embarrassment, frustration, loss, fear, and above all, love—that both parties go through throughout the movie.

The movie follows the progression of an elderly couple whose lives change when Anne, the wife, has a stroke that leaves half her body paralyzed. Upon returning home from the hospital, Anne asks her husband, Georges, to promise never to take her back to the

Belgium filmmaker Michael Roskam’s first feature-length film, Bullhead, was nominated last year for best foreign language film, which is perhaps a surprise considering its subject – the Flemish underground hormone mafia.  

The film's title, Bullhead, refers both to where cattle gather before slaughter and to the film’s protagonist, Jacky Vanmarsenille, a cattle farmer and illegal hormone seller for the meat trade. When a deal with buyers goes bad, Jacky’s story unfolds to reveal one of the most tragic characters seen on film. The film’s realism combined with Nicolas Karakatsanis’