On with the show!  (Note:  all times are PST) 5PM:  You just know CBS was hoping the AFC playoffs would run just a little bit longer, to screw with the start of the Globes. 5:05:  Best bit so far:  Julia Louis-Dreyfus sitting with the cool film crowd. 5:07:  Fey:  “Matthew McConaughey lost 63 pounds […]

  Provocative, almost existential questions have circled this year’s Oscars since seconds after the nominations were announced.  Should the awards, and the Motion Picture Academy’s voting membership, mirror the actual state of the film industry, which is overwhelmingly dominated by older white men, or a Platonic ideal embodying a more diverse vision of what the […]

  It’s a very good weekend to be a Weinstein.  First Weinstein Company’s The Master set new per-theatre records for a live-action movie release without a stage show, and now the tidings from Toronto are lined with gold: David O. Russell’s SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK, the studio’s romantic comedy-drama starring Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence and Robert […]

  Like presidential politics, the Oscar race doesn’t really stop anymore; one campaign gets underway before the last has even ended.  Argo had yet to collect its statuettes in February before we were already hearing about the awards chances for movies screened at Sundance the month before, especially when Oscar savant Harvey Weinstein bought the […]

  As we did with Best Supporting Actor and will do the rest of this week with the other major categories, this is a final look at the rationales behind and against each nominee’s likelihood of winning.  We’re assuming deserved merit for all, and we’re not going to count up precursor wins.  So, onward: BEST […]

  Note:  All times PST 5:01PM:  Wasting no time, here’s Ricky Gervais with his first monologue since the very different world of 2016.  5:02PM:  Not exactly testing the limits with jokes about “Wild Hogs” and Joe Pesci whacking people. 5:05PM:  The crowd hasn’t had enough to drink yet to even pretend this monologue is funny. […]

> Today we wind up SHOWBUZZDAILY‘s introduction of this year’s most promising Oscar contenders (see Part 1 here and Part 2 here, looking at those that could be called Also Eligible–they’re hoping just to get in the race. Also Eligible SHAME (Fox Searchlight – Dec. 2) SHOWBUZZDAILY odds to be nominated:  11/1 Bookie odds to […]

  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 […]