Nominations have just been announced for the 64th annual Emmy Awards.  The full list is here; below is a rundown of some of the major categories and early thoughts: BEST DRAMA Boardwalk Empire Breaking Bad Downton Abbey Game Of Thrones Homeland Mad Men This is the first time in memory that no Drama nominee […]

  Movie audiences can’t get enough of watching things blow up, and tonight’s ACADEMY AWARDS has the potential to explode before our very eyes.  Everyone knows the litany of what’s gone awry along the way, from the host/no-host mess, to the Most Popular Film Oscar that never was, to the foiled attempt to hold the […]

  The calendar has turned to 2014, and the critics, for the most part, have spoken.  Now Oscar season is moving into the Guild part of its schedule, and today the Producers Guild announced its Best Picture nominees.  The PGAs have been a fairly accurate precursor of Oscar nominees, with 8 of its picks last […]

  Let’s face it:  anyone with an interest in the matter has been circling the same basic list of titles and names for weeks now, if not months, and the truth is that as much fun as it would be for some shocking surprise to find its way into tomorrow’s Oscar nominations–Mud or Brie Larson, […]

  Year-end awards from critics groups have two purposes in the big-picture (which is to say the Oscar) context.  In the aggregate, if enough of the groups are in agreement to form a consensus, they can make an accolade seem like an established fact–sort of a “how could you dare to ignore this?” message.  (Although […]

> 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 […]

  With the overwhelming amount of quality television these days available on various platforms, the Emmy nominators (of which I’m one, in certain categories) weren’t going to get it all right.  (A full list of nominees is here.)   There were omissions aplenty–The Americans and The Knick on the drama side, to name just two, and […]

Based on the fast national ratings for Sunday, the Academy Awards telecast should average around a 13.4 rating with adults 18-49 (adjusting the preliminary 12.1 rating upward to account for the Pacific time zone seeing the show three hours before the normal network feed pattern).  If our estimated adjustment is correct, this would be the […]