And the winners were… 12 Years A Slave, Matthew McConaughey, Cate Blanchett, Jared Leto, Lupita Nyong’o… Hey, wait a minute.  Aren’t the Oscars tomorrow night? There was a time when the Independent Spirit Awards were genuinely, you know… independent.  Films like Leaving Las Vegas, The Apostle, Gods and Monsters, Election and Memento won Best […]

  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 […]

> The New York Film Critics Circle famously (notoriously?), having decided that they simply couldn’t wait to announce their 2011 awards until, y’know, they had actually seen all the movies (when Warners couldn’t rush them a copy of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close–which doesn’t open until December 25–the Circle simply ignored it), has made its […]

  It wasn’t a great morning for the Weinstein Company, which saw both of its major candidates rejected by the Directors Guild of America in that organization’s nominations, the last to be announced before Thursday morning’s Oscar unveilings.  The DGA chose: Ben Affleck, ARGO Kathryn Bigelow, ZERO DARK THIRTY Tom Hooper, LES MISERABLES Ang Lee, […]

  The Writers Guild is unusual among awards-giving groups in that it strictly enforces the rule that only screenplays written for films produced under Guild agreements are eligible.  That tends to exclude some of the major indie movies of the year and many foreign imports, which are produced non-Guild for budgetary and other reasons.  The […]

  There were no surprises of any scale at tonight’s ACADEMY AWARDS (a full list of winners is here) , and that went for the telecast, too.  Neil Patrick Harris was as personable a host as anticipated, and he/his writers were sometimes quick on their feet, as when he had a gag ready about a Documentary […]

> This year SHOWBUZZDAILY live-blogged the ceremony.  We’ll have round-up pieces later tonight and tomorrow, but read below for the minute-by-minute feel of the experience as it happened– 8:35PM: But the fun couldn’t last, and with the suspense so thin you could cut it with a straw, THE ARTIST takes its prize. And the friggin […]

  The Directors Guild of America tonight gave its prize for best film direction to Alfonso Cuaron and GRAVITY. This was not an unexpected result, but it solidifies the sense that this year we have what is (at least) a three-horse race for the Best Picture Oscar:  Gravity, 12 YEARS A SLAVE (which split the Producers Guild […]