Two of the Guilds whose memberships overlap with the Motion Picture Academy issued their nominations yesterday.  The first and by far more important (and most eager–they accelerated their announcement by 24 hours, apparently in an effort to influence the tail-end of Oscar nomination voting) was the Producers Guild, whose award winner has coincided with […]

  Another day, another set of nominees. The Golden Globes, of course, whose nominees in full can be found here, have become their own thing, even though as an organization the Hollywood Foreign Press Association has no more credibility than the National Board of Review.  That’s what a celebrity-packed, network-aired primetime telecast will get you. […]

  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 […]

  The Broadcast Film Critics Association is one of those organizations that wants everyone to be happy, including the television network (CW) that carries its yearly telecast, so it gives out a number of MTV-like silly awards, like Best Actor/Actress In an Action Movie (a chance to award Robert Downey, Jr for The Avengers!) and […]

  The big prizes this weekend were the Los Angeles Film Critics Association awards, LAFCA has a habit of showcasing its iconoclasm (the organization has only given its Best Picture prize to the eventual Oscar winner once in the past 18 years, for The Hurt Locker), and this year was no exception. Best Picture went […]

  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 […]

  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 […]

  Mitch Metcalf will have more to say about this weekend’s actual boxoffice numbers versus Sunday’s studio estimates later today, but one point is worth noting for its Oscar implications.  It was important to Warner Bros that ARGO, the studio’s big awards season hope and the fruit of its golden-boy director Ben Affleck (and also […]