>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 – […]

  Mitch Metcalf will have more to say about this weekend’s actual boxoffice numbers versus Sunday’s studio estimates later today, but one point is worth noting for its Oscar implications.  It was important to Warner Bros that ARGO, the studio’s big awards season hope and the fruit of its golden-boy director Ben Affleck (and also […]

  We noted yesterday that one of the useful things a pre-Oscars awards group can accomplish is mixing new titles and talent in with the conventional wisdom pool of front-runners, and the National Board of Review did that today.  A full list of its winners is here, but the headline is that the group (which […]

  After a campaign that’s felt so long it seems like there should be a presidential inauguration at the end of it, here we are.  The 86th Academy Awards are about to begin, and while tedium is inevitable (Ellen DeGeneres, although certain to be less obnoxious than last year’s Seth MacFarlane, isn’t exactly a fount […]

  OK, so you’ve got your Best Picture nomination.  You’re one of the chosen 9 films with a chance to reap the glory (and success) that follows an Academy Award win.  You’ve got 46 days until the awards are given out, and 41 days until the polls close.  What do you do now?  Here, title […]

> The National Board of Review is an organization with a virtually unknown membership that exists in public consciousness for precisely one day per year, and this is their day:  the announcement of their film awards.  Their claim to fame, such as it was, came from being the first ones out of the awards gate–but […]

  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 […]

  The National Society of Film Critics is the only major group that withholds its honors until after year-end, and for the most part its choices today were as idiosyncratic as its scheduling.  With the exception of Best Actress to Cate Blanchett and Foreign Film to Blue Is The Warmest Color, the awards were off […]