After a campaign that’s felt so long it seems like there should be a presidential inauguration at the end of it, here we are.  The 86th Academy Awards are about to begin, and while tedium is inevitable (Ellen DeGeneres, although certain to be less obnoxious than last year’s Seth MacFarlane, isn’t exactly a fount […]

  OK, so you’ve got your Best Picture nomination.  You’re one of the chosen 9 films with a chance to reap the glory (and success) that follows an Academy Award win.  You’ve got 46 days until the awards are given out, and 41 days until the polls close.  What do you do now?  Here, title […]

> The National Board of Review is an organization with a virtually unknown membership that exists in public consciousness for precisely one day per year, and this is their day:  the announcement of their film awards.  Their claim to fame, such as it was, came from being the first ones out of the awards gate–but […]

  In any given year, there are perhaps 15 movies that can even be seriously entertained in a Best Picture conversation, so with the combination of a potential 10 Oscar nominees under the new rules and the weeks of preliminary awards, Top 10 Lists, predictions and speculations that occupy the weeks preceding the announcement, the […]

  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 […]

  Here’s a factoid:  during the 1970s, that halcyon decade when the rebel filmmaker inmates finally, if briefly. took over the Hollywood studio asylum, viewed by movie history ever since with wistful nostalgia, every single winner of the Best Picture Oscar was one of the Top 10 box-office grossers of its year.  This includes big-budget productions like […]

> It’s a measure of how desperately this year’s Oscar needed some kind of surprise that the closest thing to a thrill all evening was Meryl Streep’s win as Best Actress.  Streep has been winning Academy Awards since 1979, and she’d been touted for her performance as Margaret Thatcher since months before THE IRON LADY […]

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 […]