The Producers Guild of America didn’t clarify much of anything tonight by giving its Best Picture award to both 12 YEARS A SLAVE and GRAVITY.  That provided all 3 of the presumed frontrunners with a prize for the weekend, since SAG gave its top award to AMERICAN HUSTLE last night.  With the Directors Guild […]

  AMERICAN HUSTLE walked away with the big prize at tonight’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning the accolade for Best Ensemble Cast of a Motion Picture.  Although the Ensemble Cast Award is commonly considered SAG’s equivalent of a “Best Picture” honor, it really isn’t, because not every Oscar contender is notable for its ensemble (GRAVITY […]

  …and now it’s all real.  AMERICAN HUSTLE and GRAVITY lead the Academy Award nominations with 10 each, with 12 YEARS A SLAVE right behind at 9, and those three are probably the leading candidates for Best Picture as of this moment.  But there’s plenty more to talk about, so here are the marquee categories […]

  Let’s face it:  anyone with an interest in the matter has been circling the same basic list of titles and names for weeks now, if not months, and the truth is that as much fun as it would be for some shocking surprise to find its way into tomorrow’s Oscar nominations–Mud or Brie Larson, […]

  If it had happened, losing the Best Drama award at last night’s Golden Globes might have been the best thing that could have happened to 12 YEARS A SLAVE–while winning the award in the way that it actually did helped the film very little, if at all. Bear with me here. Remember last year, […]

  The polls close for Oscar nomination votes at 5PM today LA time, amid anecdotal reports of many last-minute ballots being cast in a season crowded with contenders.  There is much last-minute maneuvering going on, from the movie ads unusually swelling the LA Times’s Calendar section this midweek, to an insta-controversy about Meryl Streep’s speech […]

  With a little over 24 hours before polls close for Oscar nomination voting (ballots must be submitted by 5PM tomorrow LA time), the big winners from today’s announcement of the Directors Guild nominees were Martin Scorsese and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.  While it can never be considered a “surprise” for Scorsese to get […]

  The National Society of Film Critics is the only major group that withholds its honors until after year-end, and for the most part its choices today were as idiosyncratic as its scheduling.  With the exception of Best Actress to Cate Blanchett and Foreign Film to Blue Is The Warmest Color, the awards were off […]