A messy awards season became even messier with the results of today’s critics group awards. The big prize of the day was the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, which… tied.  Full results are here, but Best Picture went both to Gravity and Her, as different a pair of science-fiction stories as one can imagine.  […]

  The polls close for Oscar nomination votes at 5PM today LA time, amid anecdotal reports of many last-minute ballots being cast in a season crowded with contenders.  There is much last-minute maneuvering going on, from the movie ads unusually swelling the LA Times’s Calendar section this midweek, to an insta-controversy about Meryl Streep’s speech […]

Projected weekly network ratings in prime time (based on four days of official nationals and three days of fast nationals).   The return of the NFL regular season pushed NBC to the top of the heap (with not one but two prime time games, on Thursday and Sunday).  NBC matched the same week last year with […]

  …and now it’s all real.  AMERICAN HUSTLE and GRAVITY lead the Academy Award nominations with 10 each, with 12 YEARS A SLAVE right behind at 9, and those three are probably the leading candidates for Best Picture as of this moment.  But there’s plenty more to talk about, so here are the marquee categories […]

The EMMY AWARDS could hardly have gone more emphatically HBO’s way, with wins for Best Drama, Comedy, Limited Series and Made-For-TV Movie, not to mention many of the acting, writing and directing awards that went with them.  It was a night with a lot of exciting new winners, but the show itself was very much […]

> Los Angelenos will have a chance to get advance looks at some of this year’s Oscar candidates at the AFI Film Festival, which begins in just about 2 weeks.  Today the Festival announced the Gala and Special Screenings, which typically make up the bulk of the high-profile titles, and they include quite a few […]

  Yesterday, we looked at the major Movies/Miniseries categories at Sunday’s Emmy Awards.  Today it’s time for the season’s honored comedies: COMEDY SERIES “The Big Bang Theory” (CBS) “Curb Your Enthusiasm” (HBO) “Girls” (HBO) “Modern Family” (ABC) “30 Rock” (NBC) “Veep” (HBO) WILL WIN: MODERN FAMILY, unexcitinglyfor the third year in a row–more from a process […]

  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 […]