>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 – […]

Following up on Mitch Salem’s Best Picture overview, here’s an updated look at the odds for the major Oscar categories. After its winning streak at the various guild award ceremonies, Argo has traded places with Lincoln as the favorite for Best Picture.  London bookmakers would pay $1.15 on a $1 bet if Argo wins, a movement of +6 in […]

With the announcement of the Oscar nominations today, Lincoln only became more of a favorite by London oddsmakers (moving from a payout of about $1.80 on a $1 bet last week to about $1.40 today).   The odds got a bit longer for Les Miserables and Argo, but Zero Dark Thirty had the biggest swing (from a payout of about $5.50 last […]

> After what seemed as long as a presidential primary season, the Oscar nominations are finally here. What do they tell us? THE ARTIST Is Still The Film To Beat. There were plenty of surprises sprinkled throughout today’s nominations, but none that seriously challenged the conventional wisdom. If Martin Scorsese were still looking for his […]

> 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 […]

  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 […]

  We’re less than 24 hours away from that exciting moment when the first negative tweet about Seth McFarlane’s performance as this year’s Oscar host appears, so it’s time to go all-in and make some final choices.  Here, then, with no more knowledge or record of success than anyone else, are our Academy Award predictions […]

  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 […]