During Oscar season, I try to watch as many nominated movies as possible. Or rather, I try to watch as few movies as possible after analyzing the nominations and the reviews. Last year I managed to watch nine of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture, missing only 'A Serious Man'. Last night I watched True Grit, which looks to be one of this year's nominees. The reviews had been mixed, and there was a lot of dialogue at the start. I must have dozed off, awaking in time to see the heroine Mattie get bitten by a rattlesnake while suspended upside down against the sloping wall of a dry shaft. What followed was the most gripping movie sequence I've seen in a long time.
Not the criss-cross cutting of the wound site and the sucking out of the venom, not the shooting at the rattlesnakes in the dark, not the hauling her out of the shaft. None of that.
It was the ride to save her life. Rooster Cogburn pulls her up onto the back of his horse and they both ride through the blinding desert sun into the velvet starry evening, into her sweat and delirium, through the horse's laboring and collapse, through her screams at the horse's death which Rooster delivers with a gunshot - and finally, with her in his arms - running, then stumbling, he out of breath and she barely breathing, collapsing in a heap some distance from a house, the occupants of which he alerts with a single shot in the air.
This year's Oscar nominations will be announced on January 25th.
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