>Updated Oscar odds confirm a complete snooze is in store for Sunday’s Academy Awards as The Artist and director Michel Hazanavicius are heavy favorites to win Best Picture and Best Director, bringing a very French flavor — and depressed ratings — to ABC’s telecast.  Oscar ratings rise and fall based on the suspense of the […]

  We noted yesterday that one of the useful things a pre-Oscars awards group can accomplish is mixing new titles and talent in with the conventional wisdom pool of front-runners, and the National Board of Review did that today.  A full list of its winners is here, but the headline is that the group (which […]

  We’ll never know if this year’s Best Picture race is as close as we think it is, since the Academy has no intention of ever releasing its vote totals (something it did back at the very beginning of Oscar history).  Nevertheless, all signs are that this is the hardest race in years to call, […]

  The voting has just closed for this year’s Academy Awards, and here at Oscar Central, we are ready to make the following call: Daniel Day-Lewis is going to win the Best Actor Oscar for Lincoln. I know, way out on a limb.  And sure, Buster Douglas beat Mike Tyson, nothing is certain in this […]

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 the last notes of the not-remotely-accidentally-chosen “Fight the Power” fade from the closing credits of the 88th ACADEMY AWARDS telecast, 10 quick thoughts on the show and awards. 1.  Sometimes smart is all but indistinguishable from lucky, and that was the case for the Academy this year, which had chosen Chris Rock to […]

  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 […]

  We’re less than 24 hours away from that exciting moment when the first negative tweet about Seth McFarlane’s performance as this year’s Oscar host appears, so it’s time to go all-in and make some final choices.  Here, then, with no more knowledge or record of success than anyone else, are our Academy Award predictions […]