The Screen Actors Guild Awards are important, because the Actors branch is the largest single constituency of Oscar voters, but they’re also very different from the Oscars. Their major award isn’t a “Best Picture” prize, per se, but one for Best Cast–this hurts intimate dramas like Gravity and All is Lost, while helping starry […]
The Broadcast Film Critics Association and their “Critics Choice” awards seem on the whole way too eager to please, desperate to have as many movies and stars in their tent (and on their CW awards telecast) as possible, with the wealth spread to 10 Best Picture nominees, 6 nominees in each major acting category, […]
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 […]
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 […]
A messy awards season became even messier with the results of today’s critics group awards. The big prize of the day was the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which… tied. Full results are here, but Best Picture went both to Gravity and Her, as different a pair of science-fiction stories as one can imagine. […]
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 […]
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 […]
The Directors Guild of America tonight gave its prize for best film direction to Alfonso Cuaron and GRAVITY. This was not an unexpected result, but it solidifies the sense that this year we have what is (at least) a three-horse race for the Best Picture Oscar: Gravity, 12 YEARS A SLAVE (which split the Producers Guild […]