This past week John Williams had his 80th birthday. One of the first thing he will do during his 80th year will be attending the Oscars later this month where the Maestro is nominated for 2 best score awards. Even at this age Williams is at the top of his game.

In honor of the most prolific film composer alive today I wanted to use my weekly film score soap box to celebrate the man who has provided the soundtrack to the imaginations of several generations.

Everyone knows about his contributions to Star Wars, Superman, Indiana Jones and Harry Potter, but how many people are aware that he wrote not one, but two classic themes for Lost in Space?

It was John Williams music that made me fall in love with film music. I can pinpoint it all the way back to a single moment in Jurassic Park when the helicopter approached Isla Nublar, the cue still gives me chills to this day, and nearly two decades later I still look to Mr. Williams as the inspiration for a life long passion.

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This week’s pick is yet another John Carpenter classic. Kurt Russell stars as the first ever action hero of the 1980s in Escape From New York (1981). After success with Halloween and the horror classic The Fog, Carpenter’s next project would be a unique blend of science fiction, action, noir and a western. The result is one of the finest multi genre classics of its time.

Set in a dystopian future (now the past) the United States’ crime rate rises to an astonishing four hundred percent in 1988. To combat the growing crime rate, the United States becomes a totalitarian police state and the great city of New York is turned into the one prison for the whole country. A fifty-foot containment wall is erected around all of Manhattan Island, all the bridges and waterways are mined, and the United States Police Force patrols the wall perimeter to insure no one escapes. Once you go inside the prison, you never come out.

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Last month we spent time reviewing the Golden Globe nominated film scores, at the time I had only listened to one of them going in so it was a nice way to start award season and catch up on some great scores. Now that the Oscar nominations have been released I was going to do the same thing, only I have already reviewed most of them

Thankfully I spaced out and didn’t review the second of John Williams two nominated scores yet, The Adventures of Tintin, so I can knock out the last of the major nominated scores and be all caught up in time for the big show next month. After this week I will move onto the two films with Oscar nominated songs to spice things up a bit.

The Adventures of Tintin is the second score from Williams this year and in tandem with War Horse showcases the Maestro’s range as a composer, even today. Based on the action/adventure films Williams has composed for in the past, Tintin  marks a bit of a departure as the music is not dominated by specific themes, it is more a collection of classic action music that sets the stage for the impressive animated film.

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At 5:30 AM Pacific Time on Tuesday, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed their nominations for this year’s Oscars.

Hugo leads with 11 total nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The Artist scored 10 nods.

Some of the nominations were a big surprise, especially in the Best Picture catagory. While films like The Artist and The Descendants were a shoe-in, especially after their performance in the Golden Globes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Help were also recognized. Also curiously, there were only nine pictures nominated as opposed to ten, which we’ve seen the past two years.

Best Director is chock full of veteran Oscar nominees. Woody Allen, Terrance Malick, Alexander Payne, and Martin Scorsese have earned almost 40 nominations all together. Michel Hazanivicus, however, is up for his first nomination.

Most notably absent from several catagories was Drive, for Best Picture, Best Actor for Ryan Gosling’s spectacular performance and Best Supporting Actor for Albert Brooks. It dig snag a nomination for Sound Editing, but I would have liked to see it recognized a bit more.

The Oscar buzz continues until the Academy Awards ceremony airs on Sunday February 26th. You can see the full listing of nominees after the jump, and let us know what you think of the nominations!

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For those who immediately tuned out the news about the 2012 Academy Awards after they heard that “retired” host Billy Crystal would be dusting off his tuxedo to get back up on stage, they had no idea what extents the Academy would go to in order to make you think that this isn’t your mom and dad’s Oscar show.

That’s why they pulled out the stops and collaborated with Funny or Die to put together this epic movie-style trailer featuring the likes of Billy Crystal, Robin Williams, Josh Duhamel, Megan Fox, William Fichtner and Vinnie Jones.

That’s right. Some pretty big star power. And if that isn’t enough for you to get into the Oscar mood, the team has also put together a pretty extensive YouTube channel, with some of the best monologues, acceptance speeches, and overall best moments.

Take a look at the epic trailer after the jump and be sure to tune in to what should be an entertaining Oscars on February 26th, only on ABC.

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This week’s Monday Pick is the John McTiernan holiday action classic Die Hard. It stars Bruce Willis as tough New York cop John McClane who arrives in Los Angeles during the Christmas holidays to reconcile with his estranged wife Holly (Bonnie Bedelia) who works as an executive with the Nakatomi corporation.

As McClane and his wife try to patch up their troubled marriage, the Christmas party is crashed by a group of thieves demanding that the CEO of the company open the vault which houses over six hundred and forty million dollars in barrow bonds. Alone and outgunned, McClane maneuvers through the building bumping off as many terrorists as he can while he tries to find out what their real plans are.

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As we draw closer to the 2012 award season, you can expect so see more and more films that folks like to refer to as “Oscar bait” which are considered films that actors use purely for the sake of an Academy Award Nomination.

One big one this year will surely be Meryll Streep’s performance of Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady. The second film? Clearly Robert De Niro’s role in the upcoming Paul Weitz film Being Flynn. Here’s the premise.

Based on a true story, BEING FLYNN follows Nick Flynn (Paul Dano) who is shocked to have his eccentric and long-absent father, Jonathan (De Niro) reach out to him unexpectedly. Still feeling the loss of his mother (Julianne Moore) in the midst of starting a new relationship with Denise (JUNO’s Olivia Thirlby), the last person Nick wants to see is his father. But you can’t outrun fate and slowly Nick comes to realize he has been given the chance to make a real future not only for himself, but for his struggling father too.

Prepare to have your heartstrings sufficiently tugged in the trailer after the jump, and catch Being Flynn in theaters next Spring.

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This week’s Monday Pick is the classic “animals run amok” monster movie Alligator (1980). The film stars Academy Award nominee Robert Forster, Robin Riker, Michael Gazzo, and Henry Silva.

Alligator is a well written, tongue in cheek horror film centered on the old urban legend of alligators that are flushed down the drain and thrive in the subterranean jungle of the city sewer. The film was penned by writer/director John Sayles who helped write the 1978 Joe Dante Jaws homage Piranha and would also help to write the upcoming release of The Howling. Sayles crafts another horror classic that pits man against a marauding beast with an insatiable appetite.

Robert Forster stars as policeman David Madison who has been investigating some grizzly murders committed in the sewers of a Missouri city. Madison begins investigating further after a pet store owner’s remains ended up in the city’s sewage treatment facility. One other baffling discovery is a women’s small dog that appears to have grown in size substantially after it was reported missing.

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This week’s Monday pick is the action thriller Blue Thunder (1983) directed by John Badham (Dracula, War Games). The film stars Roy Scheider (Frank Murphy), Malcolm McDowell (Colonel Cochrane), Daniel Stern (Richard Lymangood), Candy Clark (Kate), and in his final film performance, Warren Oates (Captain Jack Braddock).

“Blue Thunder” is the codename given to an advanced new helicopter that is chosen to be deployed over Los Angeles in an attempt to quell public disorder in preparation of the upcoming Olympic games and general crowd control from the air.

Scheider stars as officer Frank Murphy, a former U.S. Army helicopter pilot who suffers from PTSD due to his combat experiences in Vietnam. Scheider is chosen to fly the five million dollar prototype that he observes at an army proving ground in the California desert. Murphy is impressed with the chopper’s capabilities such as the ability to record a whisper from two thousand feet, search targets by infrared heat signatures, travel by silent “whisper mode”, and level a city block with a six barrel 20 mm electric cannon.

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This week’s pick is Tim Burton’s Sleepy Hollow (1999), a newer take on Washington Irving’s legendary 1820 novel The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Johnny Depp stars as Ichabod Crane, a New York City police constable who is sent to the quaint upstate village that is the sight of several grizzly decapitations.

Crane believes in science and deductive reasoning, where as the local inhabitants of the sleepy little hamlet attribute the murders to the slain ghost of a Hessian mercenary killed during the American Revolution.

Crane believes that the killer is flesh and blood, and not a demonic spirit as told to him by the town’s elders. Using his powers of deduction and a bag of scientific/forensic tools to discover traces which will lead him to the killer, Crane is about to discover that in the age of reason, there are still many things that are beyond comprehension in the world of Tim Burton.

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This week’s pick is the John McTiernan thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990). Sean Connery, Alec Baldwin, Scott Glenn, Sam Neill, and James Earl Jones star in this Cold War classic about a Soviet naval commander and a new invincible Soviet sub which threatens peace between the two super powers.

Set in early 1984 before Gorbachev came to power as the new Soviet premier, the new ballistic missile submarine Red October sets sail from port in the arctic and makes its way to the north Atlantic for a training exercise. Its captain, Marko Ramius (Connery) selects his officers and the crew for a daring mission that they believe will test the might of their old adversary, The United States navy.

The Red October is equipped with a new type of propulsion system, a caterpillar drive, which renders the sub virtually silent to sonar. This feature and its nuclear payload, represent a clear and present danger to U.S. policy in the north Atlantic at the height of Cold War tensions between both the U.S and Soviet Union.

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Letters from Iwo Jima was Clint Eastwood’s follow up to Flags of Our Fathers as told through the Japanese defender’s perspective. Ken Watanabe stars as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi, who was the man responsible for defending Iwo Jima from the American invasion. Kazunari Ninomiya stars as PFC. Saigo, a conscripted baker who doesn’t want to fight, and wants to return home to his wife and new child.

The film is told through a series of flash forwards and flashbacks such as Flags, and shows the struggle many Japanese soldiers faced while preparing the island for the upcoming invasion by the American Marines portrayed in the first film.

Letters From Iwo Jima is most noted for being the most realistic portrayal of Japanese combatants in a World War II before. Eastwood uses his direction to show a picture which shows the struggles the Japanese faced in preparing themselves for certain death. Of all the characters in the film, both Saigo (Ninomiya) and Kuribayashi (Watanabe) know that this is a fight that they can’t win.

When Kuribayashi arrives on Iwo he is amazed to see how unprepared his forces are in meeting the American threat. Kuribayashi begins transforming Mt. Suribachi into an impregnable fortress that will prove fatal for the American invaders. He also has his men prepare bunker complexes, pillboxes, blockhouses, and many earth covered structures to keep the Americans from gaining a foothold inland from the water’s edge.

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