I’m just going to come out and say it: there isn’t enough going on in Scoop to justify it’s existence to anyone but die hard Woody Allen completists. Admittedly I have a love/hate reaction to Allen’s work. There is no doubt that he is a supremely gifted filmmaker, but Scoop is another example of his inability to get out of his own way. The premise here is enticing enough: while visiting a well-heeled friend in London, a young American journalism student with a deeply ingrained self-worth problem (Scarlett Johansson) is given a tip from a veteran, hard-nosed reporter (Ian McShane) that a prominent man of British society (Hugh Jackman) is actually the serial killer responsible for a string of unsolved murders. The twist is that McShane’s character has recently died, having received his hot tip while riding an absurdly caricatured boat across the murky waters to the afterlife. For reasons both mysterious and contrived, he able to momentarily breach the temporal plane to communicate with Johansson while she is inside a prop magic box during the second-rate magic show of “Splendini,” a hack showman played by Allen.
Somehow, though, it seems as though Allen tapped the reserve of his creative energy on the premise, leaving little for the execution. There are scene in which the actors, Jackman especially, might as well be wearing signs that say “I know this isn’t great but it will look good on my resumé.” As for Allen, I imagine that even those who are partial to his style of comedic acting would admit that his schtick is both tired and out of place here, perhaps fitting in with the absurdity of the ghostly sub-plot, yet at odds with how seriously he and the other actors are taking the rest of the film. It’s like Fletch meets Masterpiece Theatre. If that sound like fun to you, well . . . off you go.
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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