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 […]

> Until its final 45 minutes, the one thing that could be said about this year’s Oscar telecast was that it was at least brisk.  Merely 2 hours and 15 minutes into the show, there were amazingly only 3 awards and the In Memorium segment still to go.  But for ABC, running under the appointed […]

  Here’s a factoid:  during the 1970s, that halcyon decade when the rebel filmmaker inmates finally, if briefly. took over the Hollywood studio asylum, viewed by movie history ever since with wistful nostalgia, every single winner of the Best Picture Oscar was one of the Top 10 box-office grossers of its year.  This includes big-budget productions like […]

6:30 We’ve arrived at that strangest phenomenon of awards season, the night when we collectively grant the 88 nonentities of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (none of them filmmakers, many of them not even critics, and some of them of dubious principle) meaningful sway over the Academy Awards.  That will be even more true this […]

  Continuing as we’ve done for Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress and Best Actress, here’s a final look at the pros and cons behind each nominee for Best Actor.  All are assumed to deserve the award on the basis of performance, and precursor wins can be counted elsewhere.  Also read about the Best Director and Best Picture races. […]

  The Oscars are not the Golden Globes.  That appears to be the underlying message of today’s action by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, revoking the Best Original Song nomination of “Alone Yet Not Alone” from the film of the same name.  (According to The Hollywood Reporter, this is just the 2d […]

> 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 […]

> Our thoughts on the movie Golden Globe nominations are here.  Meanwhile, in television: BREAKING BAD:  LOSER – Really, one should say Golden Globes Credibility:  Loser, because when you fail to even nominate the best season of one of the best shows of the decade, that’s what you lose.  And if not nominating the series […]