The only thing more guaranteed to make moviegoers smile than Tom Hanks on screen? An impossibly cute little kid pretending to be Tom Hanks.
One such child re-enacts one of Hanks’s scenes from Captain Phillips in an adorable new video from Cineflix and mom.me that reimagines this year’s Best Picture Academy Award nominees with little kids acting out the scenes.
The budding thesps re-enact scenes from eight of the nine Best Picture nominees, including Her, The Wolf of Wall Street, Gravity, and American Hustle. Philomena is the only one that didn’t get the Kid Oscars treatment, presumably because no one, not even a precocious infant, can compare to Judi Dench.
Given how not-so-child friendly this year’s slate of Best Picture contenders is—have you seen The Wolf of Wall Street?—some of the kiddie takes on the movies are hard to watch, particularly when a child playing a Somali pirate enters in the first frame of the parody wielding a rifle. That’s especially cringe-y.
Thankfully, the parody of Wolf includes no cocaine or sex on a bed of money, and the 12 Years a Slave bit had no whippings. Try not to giggle when the kid playing Chiwetel Ejiofor in the Slave portion turns to the camera after performing Solomon Northup’s reunion scene with his family and says, “This is the only scene producers were comfortable shooting with kids.”
But mostly, it’s funny! Like, really funny! Turns out the only voice that could have made Her more alluring than Scarlett Johansson’s is a lispy kid’s. And the joke about Gravity is spot on. “You have to let go,” one child astronaut (astrotot?) tells the other. “Why?” “Because it’s the theme of the movie!” Ha!
Maybe instead of 47 montages about the history of film, the Oscar telecast should replace that two hours with footage of little kids being all cute and funny. Because they're sooo cute and funny.
