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 […]

  There were no surprises of any scale at tonight’s ACADEMY AWARDS (a full list of winners is here) , and that went for the telecast, too.  Neil Patrick Harris was as personable a host as anticipated, and he/his writers were sometimes quick on their feet, as when he had a gag ready about a Documentary […]

  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 […]

  It’s time to gather for the 2020 Academy Awards, which… may be the most boring in recent memory.  The favorites currently seem to be overwhelming, and with no host to carry us through the proceedings, if 1917, Sam Mendes, Joaquin Phoenix, Renee Zellweger, Brad Pitt and Laura Dern win, it’s going to be a […]

  And the winners were… 12 Years A Slave, Matthew McConaughey, Cate Blanchett, Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o… Hey, wait a minute.  Aren’t the Oscars tomorrow night? There was a time when the Independent Spirit Awards were genuinely, you know… independent.  Films like Leaving Las Vegas, The Apostle, Gods and Monsters, Election and Memento won Best […]

  Mitch Metcalf will have more to say about this weekend’s actual boxoffice numbers versus Sunday’s studio estimates later today, but one point is worth noting for its Oscar implications.  It was important to Warner Bros that ARGO, the studio’s big awards season hope and the fruit of its golden-boy director Ben Affleck (and also […]

  The odds-on favorite for this year’s Best Director Oscar can’t win. There’s little doubt at this point that if Ben Affleck had only been nominated for Best Director this year, he would have run away with the award.  That’s probably true even if the dynamics of the Best Picture race had been changed by […]

  Year-end awards from critics groups have two purposes in the big-picture (which is to say the Oscar) context.  In the aggregate, if enough of the groups are in agreement to form a consensus, they can make an accolade seem like an established fact–sort of a “how could you dare to ignore this?” message.  (Although […]