>With the help of some online bookmaking sites, we have the latest “official” odds for tonight’s Emmy Awards.  Let’s take a look about what they say about the conventional wisdom, and make some adjustments where they don’t make sense. BEST DRAMA Bookie Odds: Mad Men – 1:2 Boardwalk Empire – 11:4 The Good Wife – […]

  The American Film Institute issued its list of the year’s Top 10 movies (and television shows) today, and their selections have been quite close to the Oscar nominees over the past couple of years, so they’re worthy of some attention.  There were no great surprises in the chosen 10, which AFI lists alphabetically, with […]

        NETWORK FINALS:  THE LAST DEFENSE had a particularly ignominious exit, losing 0.1 in final numbers for a 0.3 finale.           Broadcast Official Nationals Program Ratings Chart     CABLE HIGHLIGHTS:  Discovery’s SHARK WEEK originals for the night were LAWS OF JAWS and AIR JAWS: THE HUNTED both at […]

  As we did on the movie side, here’s a quick look at today’s major Hollywood Foreign Press Association Golden Globe nominees in TV and some early thoughts.  Mostly, as is the case with any TV awards these days, the Golden Globe lists are proof that with the current flood of quality shows on a […]

> For many years, the National Board of Review has been the self-appointed first group on the calendar to announce awards for Best Picture and other categories.  The NBR is sort of like the Golden Globes without super-powers; they’re 110 people tangentially related to the world of film whom you’ve never heard of and whose […]

  On the TV side of its fence, this morning’s Screen Actors Awards nominations (a complete list is here) were conservative to the point of being downright boring.  With the exception of House of Cards and the revived Arrested Development, not a single show or performer was nominated for a new 2013-14 series, while 30 Rock, […]

  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 […]

> This year’s Academy Awards have so far engendered the kind of enthusiasm and excitement usually associated with a suburban DMV office on a Tuesday afternoon.  People seem to be sullenly resigned to the inevitability of THE ARTIST‘s victory, even though it would be unlikely to get anything like a majority of the Academy’s estimated […]