With a little over 24 hours before polls close for Oscar nomination voting (ballots must be submitted by 5PM tomorrow LA time), the big winners from today’s announcement of the Directors Guild nominees were Martin Scorsese and THE WOLF OF WALL STREET.  While it can never be considered a “surprise” for Scorsese to get […]

> 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 […]

  There are 4 ways an Oscar night can be memorable: A Great Host:  Seth MacFarlane was bad–maybe not James Franco bad, but bad.  The ways he was bad, though, weren’t in any way unexpected.  Meta-gags and courting offensiveness are the things that have made him very, very rich.  When you hire Seth MacFarlane, you’re […]

  Tonight the Writers Guild of America followed the lead of the Golden Globes and gave its award for Best Original Screenplay to Spike Jonze for HER rather than to AMERICAN HUSTLE.  The WGA awards were seen as Hustle‘s chance to recapture some of the momentum it had lost after 12 YEARS A SLAVE and […]

> Everyone was down, as the new season started to settle in on itself–but some were down more than others. ABC:  MODERN FAMILY is doing quite spectacularly, more than 20% above last season’s average.  The results in other timeslots were more mixed.  SUBURGATORY had a very nice debut at 8:30 (again, kudos to ABC Marketing […]

  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 […]

  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.  […]

  Over the past 10 days or so, a multitude of groups have presented awards for 2013’s best, with prizes given to screenwriters, editors, cinematographers, animators, and production designers.  FROZEN solidified its commanding lead for the Best Animated Film Oscar, but that’s about the only conclusion to be found, as the other honors were spread […]