> It’s a measure of how desperately this year’s Oscar needed some kind of surprise that the closest thing to a thrill all evening was Meryl Streep’s win as Best Actress.  Streep has been winning Academy Awards since 1979, and she’d been touted for her performance as Margaret Thatcher since months before THE IRON LADY […]

  Over the weekend, this year’s Oscarland acquired its first helping of Conventional Wisdom, thanks to the initial release of 12 YEARS A SLAVE (Fox Searchlight) in theatres and the unveiling of SAVING MR. BANKS (Disney) at the London Film Festival and to selected critics.  That Wisdom may very well change a dozen times between […]

  We’ve taken a tour through Best Actress and Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and Best Director, and that leaves one last major gold statue to be handed out.  As we have all along, we will assume that every nominee deserves to be there on merit, and we’ll pass on the […]

  The Screen Actors Guild award nominations are important in the Oscar precursor game, but not in their most showcase way:  the Best Ensemble winner (often taken to be SAG’s equivalent of “Best Picture,” since it awards a film’s entire cast) doesn’t have any remarkable correlation to the Oscar winner for Best Picture.  However, in […]

  The calendar has turned to 2014, and the critics, for the most part, have spoken.  Now Oscar season is moving into the Guild part of its schedule, and today the Producers Guild announced its Best Picture nominees.  The PGAs have been a fairly accurate precursor of Oscar nominees, with 8 of its picks last […]

  Provocative, almost existential questions have circled this year’s Oscars since seconds after the nominations were announced.  Should the awards, and the Motion Picture Academy’s voting membership, mirror the actual state of the film industry, which is overwhelmingly dominated by older white men, or a Platonic ideal embodying a more diverse vision of what the […]

> The New York Film Critics Circle famously (notoriously?), having decided that they simply couldn’t wait to announce their 2011 awards until, y’know, they had actually seen all the movies (when Warners couldn’t rush them a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close–which doesn’t open until December 25–the Circle simply ignored it), has made its […]

  So, is it over? It certainly feels over.  Voting for the Academy Awards ends tomorrow, and last night’s win at the Writers Guild for Best Adapted Screenplay cemented Argo’s astonishing streak of victories over the past 5+ weeks.  With the Oscars still almost a week away, it’s already at the heart of the Argo […]