Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 2003

The Contenders:

Naomi Watts: 21 Grams
Samantha Morton: In America
Charlize Theron: Monster (winner)
Diane Keaton: Something’s Gotta Give
Keisha Castle-Hughes: Whale Rider

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 2003

The Contenders:

The Barbarian Invasions
Dirty Pretty Things
Finding Nemo
In America
Lost in Translation (winner)

New York Stories

Films: In America
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

Jim Sheridan is a fine director. I’ve liked his movies that I’ve seen in the past, so in that respect, I was looking forward to In America. For some reason, I pegged the time frame of this movie all wrong. I knew that this was an immigrant story, but that’s really all I knew. I expect that this would be similar to most of the immigrant stories that I’d seen and that we’d be somewhere in the late 19th or early 20th century. That’s not the case, though. We’re firmly in the early 1980s with our immigrant clan coming from Ireland through Canada to New York on a visitor’s visa.

Our family consists of four people and the intense baggage of a fifth. Johnny (Paddy Considine) is an actor hoping to make it on stage in New York. Wife Sarah (Samantha Morton) is a school teacher, but can’t find work as a teacher in New York, so instead gets a job at an ice cream parlor near the family’s low-rent apartment in a building filled with addicts and drug dealers. The children are Christy (Sarah Bolger) and Ariel (Emma Bolger, Sarah’s real-life sister). The fifth member of the family is Frankie, the son who has died from a brain tumor. This fact weighs heavily on the entire family, of course, but the hardest on Johnny, who has essentially locked off his emotions so as not to deal with his son’s death.