The only thing more boring than a typical Oscars is one without surprises, and the closest thing to a major upset this year turned out to be Disney’s loss in the Best Animated Short category.  (The studio almost instantly rebounded with the much more important Animated Feature prize for Frozen.)  All the conventional wisdom […]

  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 Writers Guild of America, it should quickly be noted, operates under very strict eligibility rules, only allowing awards to go to films produced under WGA or WGA-affiliated contracts.  That disqualified a number of very prominent Oscar contenders this year, including Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild, and left […]

> Until its final 45 minutes, the one thing that could be said about this year’s Oscar telecast was that it was at least brisk.  Merely 2 hours and 15 minutes into the show, there were amazingly only 3 awards and the In Memorium segment still to go.  But for ABC, running under the appointed […]

  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 […]

  Movie audiences can’t get enough of watching things blow up, and tonight’s ACADEMY AWARDS has the potential to explode before our very eyes.  Everyone knows the litany of what’s gone awry along the way, from the host/no-host mess, to the Most Popular Film Oscar that never was, to the foiled attempt to hold the […]

  Say what you will about the Golden Globes, on the TV side they’re often more open to acknowledging new talent and shows than the Emmys (let alone this week’s stodgy SAG Award nominations) tend to be.  That’s the case again with today’s nominees, particularly in the acting categories. BEST DRAMA SERIES BREAKING BAD (AMC) […]

  The Writers Guild is unusual among awards-giving groups in that it strictly enforces the rule that only screenplays written for films produced under Guild agreements are eligible.  That tends to exclude some of the major indie movies of the year and many foreign imports, which are produced non-Guild for budgetary and other reasons.  The […]