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 […]

Based on the fast national ratings for Sunday, the Academy Awards telecast should average around a 13.4 rating with adults 18-49 (adjusting the preliminary 12.1 rating upward to account for the Pacific time zone seeing the show three hours before the normal network feed pattern).  If our estimated adjustment is correct, this would be the […]

  As with Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, we’re taking a last look at the factors for and against each nominee for Best Actress, with deserving performances assumed and precursor awards put to the side.  Also read about the Best Actor, Best Director and Best Picture races. BEST ACTRESS AMY ADAMS, American Hustle WHY:  With 5 nominations in […]

  The National Board of Review is an organization whose members are largely unknown (and the opinions of whom are of zero interest), with an existence that gets noticed on exactly one day of the year, like that one groundhog whose shadow is checked each February.  (Put another way, it’s the Hollywood Foreign Press Association […]

  Putting aside the question of whether the Golden Globes actually deserve to be considered important (hardly anyone not actively campaigning for their votes would know a Hollywood Foreign Press Association voter if they fell over one), the fact is that we collectively act as if they are, and that makes them so.  And to […]

  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 […]

> For many years, the National Board of Review has been the self-appointed first group on the calendar to announce awards for Best Picture and other categories.  The NBR is sort of like the Golden Globes without super-powers; they’re 110 people tangentially related to the world of film whom you’ve never heard of and whose […]

With the announcement of the Oscar nominations today, Lincoln only became more of a favorite by London oddsmakers (moving from a payout of about $1.80 on a $1 bet last week to about $1.40 today).   The odds got a bit longer for Les Miserables and Argo, but Zero Dark Thirty had the biggest swing (from a payout of about $5.50 last […]