AMERICAN HUSTLE walked away with the big prize at tonight’s Screen Actors Guild Awards, winning the accolade for Best Ensemble Cast of a Motion Picture.  Although the Ensemble Cast Award is commonly considered SAG’s equivalent of a “Best Picture” honor, it really isn’t, because not every Oscar contender is notable for its ensemble (GRAVITY […]

  Television as a medium seems to become more exciting and surprising practically every week these days, but one thing remains the same:  The EMMY AWARDS is still the weak, erratic sibling of the other major awards shows, even when the telecast itself is slickly packaged, as was mostly the case with tonight’s rendition from […]

  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 awards may be boring at tonight’s Oscars–Frances McDormand, Gary Oldman, Sam Rockwell, Allison Janney and Guillermo del Toro seem to be sure things–but the politics should be fascinating, as host Jimmy Kimmel and the show’s presenters and winners attempt to navigate a #TimesUp and still #OscarsSoWhite moment.  And no matter how predictable the […]

> Nobody remembers the comic strip “L’il Abner” anymore, but there used to be a character in it named Joe Btfspik, who was so unlucky that he walked around with a perpetual dark cloud hanging over his head.  this week, Brett Ratner may feel like he knows how Btfspik felt–but at least poor Joe didn’t […]

  The Emmy Awards are coming up on Sunday, and over the next few days, we’re going to take a look at the nominees in major categories, and what should–and will–win.  Today, the Movie/Miniseries section of the awards.  A few notes about these categories.  First, last year DOWNTON ABBEY was in this portion of the awards, […]

  Picking five dramas as the best of television (or “television,” as it’s more properly referred to these days) is a tough task, and the Writers Guild just announced its nominees, all of them worthy and yet hardly the only possible choices:  BREAKING BAD, THE GOOD WIFE, HOMELAND, HOUSE OF CARDS and MAD MEN.  At […]

> 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 […]