Now that the Oscars have brought at end to the 2010 movie award season, I was reminded this evening of the movie which I feel qualifies as the Most Overlooked Movie of the 2010 movie award season.
Each year, there seems to be one amazing movie that is overlooked by Oscar but will last in perpetuity and popularity for years to come. Often times, those films are of the inspirational nature but just don’t make it into the popularity contest that is the Hollywood buzz-o-meter which seems to guide the Academy Awards race.

“Citizen Cane,” “Easy Rider,” “Blade Runner” and “The Shawshank Redemption” are among the all-time Oscar overlooks. And while my nominee from this year doesn’t quite make it into that category of greatness, I still suggest that Ben Afflect’s directorial and acting effort, “The Town,” deserved more attention than it got this year.
Critics Choice and the American Film Institute named “The Town” as one of its ten best films of the year. Perhaps it was made in the wrong decade. The seventies gave us “The French Connection,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Serpico” and of course “Chinatown” and “The Godfather,” and several of those films garnered award recognition.
But in “The Town,” we found depth, heart and soul among those on the wrong side of the law in a way not seen since Michael Mann’s “Heat.” Perhaps Ben Affleck is on the wrong side of the Hollywood chat scene. Or perhaps the nuances of recreating Boston’s Charlestown just got lost on the folks 3,000 miles away on the left coast.
“The Town’s” redemptive story carried the themes of loyalty, friendship, generational inertia, freedom, underdogs, good vs. evil and love in relationship to judgementalism. It may not have been “Shawshank,” but I believe it’ll be one of those favorite movies that AMC is “connecting us to” for years and years to come. It’s worth a DVD look if you haven’t seen it.