Tyler Perry as Alex Cross as Denzel Washington in Flight. I told you he was so undercover.

I can’t sugarcoat it: this is a terrible week for new DVDs.  Besides Alex Cross and Flight (which, to be fair, many people liked), there’s new films starring Kevin James, Andy Samberg, Christopher Walken, Olivia Wilde, Miley Cyrus, Ving Rhames, and Rob Schneider.  There’s movies about musicians, the mafia, and the mechanics of making movies. There’s criminals, florists, and mixed martial artists.  There’s even a movie about talking babies!

The DVDs:
Flight
Alex Cross
Here Comes The Boom
Celeste And Jesse Forever
A Late Quartet
Deadfall
So Undercover
Mafia
You May Not Kiss The Bride
Yelling To The Sky
In Our Nature
Side By Side
Little White Lies
Caught On Tape
Toys In The Attic
The Bouquet
The Dynamiter
The Solomon Bunch
Baby Geniuses And The Mystery Of The Crown Jewels
The Whole Truth

Streaming: Check out your choices here.

Want to know which movie is about talking babies?  Continue reading to find out. Intrigued by the The Dynamiter?  Well then, continue reading.  Already recognize titles like So Undercover and want to head straight to the Netflix page?  Click the link above and this week nobody will hold it against you, but if you do you’ll never know about Rob Schneider and the bicycle bell sound effect.

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Oscar voters are out of touch, milquetoast, hopelessly middlebrow, and so old that they couldn’t even figure out how to e-vote, but it’s always been this way, and we still argue about it anyway. Even after Forrest Gump over Pulp Fiction, The English Patient over Fargo, Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan, etc. The list goes on, and we should know better. In 2013, no one should be surprised that the Academy’s choices are two parts wrong and ten parts boring, but if we’re going to bitch somewhere, it might as well be here. I may be a lot of things, but allergic to money isn’t one of them. And hey, as bad as the Oscars are, they’re still a thousand times better than the Grammys and the Emmys put together. So here they are, the best and worst of this year’s Oscar nominations. KNIVES OUT, SHITHEADS! IT’S TIME TO END SOME FRIENDSHIPS!

(FYI, you can find my reviews and best-of list and Burnsy’s Worst list at these links. The full list of nominations is at the bottom below).

BEST PICTURE:

Best:
Django Unchained. After getting snubbed at the DGAs and WGAs, it’s nice to see Tarantino’s latest get some love from the Academy, even though the very things that make me love it instead of just like it – that it’s so gleefully vulgar and deliberately lowbrow – are the same reasons it won’t win and didn’t receive more nominations.

Worst:
Beasts of the Southern Wild, Les Misérables. I’ve already gone over in great detail why Beasts isn’t a great movie.  Even in terms of movies that appeal hard to pedantic white liberal fantasies, Life of Pi did it better, and in a much nicer way (not to mention, it had a carnivorous island full of meerkats).

Les Mis is just… God, it’s so predictable. You had the choice of nominating less than 10 (you’ll notice there are only nine nominees this year – here’s a refresher course on why), and Les Mis still made the list? I think of it like this: There are times in my life when I’ll be riding my fixed gear down to my local San Fran latte shop listening to This American Life on my iPhone; and other times when I’ll be eating chicken wings with my bros while we watch football and trash talk each other’s fantasy teams down at the sports bar. In both instances, I’ll think to myself, “God, I feel like such a stereotype right now,” and try to change something up. Oscar voters… never seem to have that thought. “A movie full of famous actors with dirty faces singing French songs about poverty and trying to f*ck each other? Oh hell yeah, more of that plz.” Les Mis would be insulting to Academy voters if they weren’t so dumb. Les Mis can derelicte my balls, capitan.

Snubbed:
No Magic Mike? Are you kidding me? But I’m not surprised. It was inevitable that the Academy voters would only see the guy pumping up his blurry dick in the foreground, and not the nuanced, melancholy story about trying to find a place in the modern economy that those blurry dicks were framing. Looper? The Master? Again, not surprised, but the fact that Les Mis got in but not the best original sci-fi in years and Joaquin Phoenix’s most watchable performance isn’t going to go unmentioned here.

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The Oscar nominations are out, and you probably want to see them. You’re in luck, because here they are. (Will be updated with commentary shortly). Lincoln leads with 12 nominations. A Spielberg movie about a beloved dead guy? Who could’ve seen that coming? Life of Pi is second with 11.

Best Picture:

“Beasts of the Southern Wild”

“Silver Linings Playbook”

“Zero Dark Thirty”

“Lincoln”

“Les Miserables”

“Life of Pi”

“Amour”

“Django Unchained”

“Argo”

Best Supporting Actor:

Christoph Waltz, “Django Unchained”

Philip Seymour Hoffman, “The Master”

Robert De Niro, “Silver Linings Playbook”

Alan Arkin, “Argo”

Tommy Lee Jones, “Lincoln”

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Turn your Flight into a party with the Bud Light Otter

Anheuser-Busch is asking Paramount to obscure the logos of Budweiser beer in Robert Zemeckis’s Flight, saying they didn’t participate in the production and don’t want their product associated with Denzel Washington’s portrayal of an alcoholic pilot. Yikes, we can’t have booze being associated with alcoholism! It’s all part of Bud’s latest ad campaign: “Bud Light: It’s not for pilots.”

Anheuser-Busch said Monday that it has asked Paramount Pictures Corp. to obscure or remove the Budweiser logo from the film, which at one point shows Washington’s character drinking the beer while behind the wheel.

Budweiser is hardly the only alcoholic beverage shown in “Flight,” which earned $25 million in its debut weekend. Washington’s character frequently drinks vodka throughout the film, with several different brands represented. William Grant & Sons, which distributes Stolichnaya in the United States, also said it didn’t license its brand for inclusion in the film and wouldn’t have given permission if asked.

I saw Flight, and I actually didn’t even remember the part where he drank a Bud. I remembered the part at the beginning where he drinks Miller (High Life, if I’m not mistaken). If anyone should be pissed, it’s the scotch brands, over the way they show scotch inside a hotel mini-fridge. Everyone knows you don’t refrigerate scotch, I mean come on.

“We would never condone the misuse of our products, and have a long history of promoting responsible drinking and preventing drunk driving,” AHB Vice President Rob McCarthy wrote. “We have asked the studio to obscure the Budweiser trademark in current digital copies of the movie and on all subsequent adaptations of the film, including DVD, On Demand, streaming and additional prints not yet distributed to theaters.”

At what point did the idea of product placement become so pervasive that you’re not allowed to show products that exist in the world without asking the manufacturer’s permission first, for fear that people will assume it’s a sponsor? It’s insane. At this rate, if you can’t get a sponsor, your characters are going to have to wander around in white t-shirts with “T-SHIRT” ironed on the front.

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Not that we’re counting.

Opening Everywhere: Wreck-It Ralph, Flight, The Man with the Iron Fists

FilmDrunk Suggests: Sorry, I don’t mean by the title and banner image that there aren’t any good movies this weekend. In fact, I’m super stoked about Wreck-It Ralph and The Man with the Iron Fists. And while people are saying great things about Flight (except Vince, who hated it), I can’t see it because I already hate flying enough as it is, and the last thing I need is the thought that I should give my pilot a breathalyzer when I fly from Orlando to Seattle. Mainly, go see the RZA’s directorial debut or the adorable movie about video game characters.

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