News had it that while filming her new movie, actress Sandra Bullock had to stay inside a dark cell-sized room for ten hours each filming day strapped in a harness suspended mid-air. She even commented how hard, painful and frustrating it was that she wanted to kill director Alfonso Cuaron throughout the ordeal!

Fortunately, the movie’s team efforts did pay out as space thriller Gravity is among the buzzed top contender for the coming 2014 Oscars – thanks to the superb special effects, the tension that always puts the audience at the edge of their seats and of course, Bullock’s (and Gravity’s other stars) acting.

Overcoming Diversities

Gravity is one of the two movies shown in the Toronto International Film Festival that had everyone shouting, “All categories!” for the Oscars. The 90-minute nerve-wracking and breath-holding feature was an exceptional spectacle to watch – from the gravity-less effects to the genuine acting its lead characters, Sandra Bullock and George Clooney, exuded from the beginning of the movie to its end.

The movie’s plot centered on Sandra Bullock and George Clooney as astronauts who were fixing satellites kilometers away from the earth. However, a debris storm from a satellite that exploded turned their mundane space task into a harrowing life-and-death scenario.

“The theme of the film is adversities and the possible outcomes of adversities and rebirth, as in a new knowledge of ourselves,” Cuarón stated in a press conference held Sunday night when the movie premiered in TIFF.

The director’s impressive 12-minute take at the beginning of the movie will most likely earn him a spot in the nominations for “best director’ in the prestigious movie awards.

On the other hand, actress Sandra Bullock has been getting wonderful reviews about her acting – some saying Gravity defines the actress in her best. Could this mean a ticket to an Oscars’ best actress nomination and win?

A Take on Slavery

The other top contender for an all-category Oscar movie in TIFF is 12 Years a Slave, a biopic of Solomon Northup, a free black educated man who lived in the North in 1853 but was cheated, abducted and sold a slave in the South, torn from his family and life in the process.

The drama, directed by Steve McQueen, had tugged on so many hearts the night it premiered in the Toronto festival that many shed tears. The whole movie was described as “unsettling” with the brutal scenes “harrowing.” However, the movie’s director said he had toned down the violence in the movie compared to the book the whole biopic was based upon.

“The book was far more brutal … than what we have on film,” said the 43-year-old McQueen.

Nevertheless, it seems every brutal sequence and dark drama in the movie was worth making since the film ended to standing ovation from the viewers with reporters and movie critics raving good, ecstatic reviews about it.

Actor Chiwetel Ejiofor, the one who played the lead role in the film, could be on his way to winning an Oscars for best actor while co-star Lupita Nyong’o might go home that night with the best supporting actress in tow.