> The Academy limits the number of movie ads that can be aired on the Oscar telecast (until recent years, they didn’t allow any), so as not to make the night look like the awards are shilling for the studios. (God forbid!) It’s not clear whether that’s the reason only 2 movie promos made it […]
AMERICAN HUSTLE walked away with the big prize at tonight’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning the accolade for Best Ensemble Cast of a Motion Picture. Although the Ensemble Cast Award is commonly considered SAG’s equivalent of a “Best Picture” honor, it really isn’t, because not every Oscar contender is notable for its ensemble (GRAVITY […]
> The Golden Globes are given out by 80 international journalists whose opinions, when they’re not voting on these awards, are of no importance whatsoever to anyone on the planet other than their particular loved ones. But the combination of a usually entertaining TV show (hosted again this year by Ricky Gervais) and enough years […]
> It may not literally be true that if you look up “hack” in the dictionary, you’ll find a picture of Brett Ratner. In fact, not all his movies are terrible: there’s Family Man, and… well, Family Man really wasn’t bad at all. But did we need the director of Money Talks, Rush Hour, Rush […]
As the last notes of the not-remotely-accidentally-chosen “Fight the Power” fade from the closing credits of the 88th ACADEMY AWARDS telecast, 10 quick thoughts on the show and awards. 1. Sometimes smart is all but indistinguishable from lucky, and that was the case for the Academy this year, which had chosen Chris Rock to […]
The Writers Guild of America, it should quickly be noted, operates under very strict eligibility rules, only allowing awards to go to films produced under WGA or WGA-affiliated contracts. That disqualified a number of very prominent Oscar contenders this year, including Django Unchained, Les Miserables, Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild, and left […]
> 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 […]
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 […]