20 Weeks To Oscar: Is The Door Wide Open Again?

Could the Academy’s bizarre preferential balloting system be the defining issue in coming to a Best Picture winner this year?

And let me note again, before going any further, that the existence of the preferential ballot system at The Academy is IDIOTIC and I will forever believe that this was a bad joke foisted on The Academy by an exiting Bruce Davis.

20 Weeks To Oscar: It’s Gettin’ Hot In Here

There are a lot of theories out there about how to read the tea leaves this season. But for me, the truth is that I have never seen anything quite like it.

PGA and SAG, Birdman. Globes, Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel. LAFCA and NYFCC, Boyhood. Coming up in short order… DGA, BAFTA, WGA.

Gurus o’ Gold: A Week After Nominations… Any Changes?

The Gurus update their Best Picture picks and answer this question: Has the leader in any of the other categories changed, in your view, over the last week?

20 Weeks To Oscar: Ragin’

I don’t know that I have seen anything like this before. It’s kind of about Oscar season. It’s mostly not. But Oscar has yelled “pull” and now everyone is shooting at the clay pigeons. And the bullets are flying from every direction.

Gurus o’ Gold: Nomination Day (1 of 2)

The Gurus have voted on the slotting of 22 categories (no shorts yet) after today’s nominations. And if you listen to the Gurus today, 14 of those awards will be split pretty evenly between Boyhood, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.

Gurus o’ Gold: Nomination Day (2 of 2)

Page 1 of 2 Pre-Venice/Telluride/Toronto Best Picture Field Post-Venice/Telluride/Toronto Best Picture Field After New York… Just Before Selma & American Sniper Just After Selma & American Sniper Gurus o’ Gold: A Week From Thanksgiving, aka Screener Time Thanksgiving Week The Rise of Selma Gurus o’ Gold-n-Globes) The Top 8 Categories Heading Into The Holiday Break…

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Most Shocking Event Of The Week!!!!

The Answers…

Clint Eastwood.
Bradley Cooper.
Alexandre Desplat.
Foxcatcher.
The LEGO Movie.
Life Itself.

The Question…

What are six Oscar occurrences today that are legitimately more surprising than Selma “only” getting a Best Picture nod?

Oscar Nominations: The Nominee Reactions

“Almost exactly a year ago, we were off to Sundance wondering if people would ever see Whiplash. Today is truly beyond our wildest dreams. As Fletcher would say, holy #@^!#@*$!!!”.” –  Helen Estabrook, Jason Blum & David Lancaster, producers of Whiplash ______________ “Humbled, thankful and more than anything, grateful. So, so happy that Alejandro and…

20 Weeks To Oscar: Screenermania!

An industry in which a $2.4 million buy-in ($900,000 before you are nominated for anything) just for DVDs—before ads, books, promo items, appearance costs, etc,—to be considered “serious” about receiving awards is a problem.

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Trouble With Endings (spoilers)

This piece deals with the end of three Oscar Best Picture candidates, reveling the ending of American Sniper, The Imitation Game, and Unbroken. DO NOT PROCEED is you haven’t seen the films or do not want to know the endings… you have been warned!

SPOILER ALERT!!!

20 Weeks To Oscar: SNUB!

A snub is a smile turned upside down. That’s the First thing that always hits me when people scream, “SNUB!.” In order for some potential nominee who didn’t get nominated to be snubbed, someone who did get nominated has to have been undeserving in the eyes of the screamer(s). Second thing I think of is…

Gurus o’ Gold: One Last Guess Before Nominations

The Gurus are back for one more round before nominations are announced on Thursday morning. The last slots for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay are the most contentious slots for The Gurus. And Grand Budapest Hotel moves up slightly while Selma moves down slightly.

Look for the Gurus rankings of all the categories (other than shorts) on Thursday afternoon.

The Top 10s of 2014

Boyhood sits alone at the top of the list – nothing else comes close – and then The Grand Budapest Hotel, another big gap and then the rest of the list. Guardians of the Galaxy, in case you were wondering, is sitting there at #21 just a hair away from the Top Twenty.

20 Weeks To Oscar: How To Get Nominated

I’m starting this piece with less than an hour to go in the Oscar voting. And my advice (this is the cheap stuff… if I ever became an awards consultant, my advice would be way more valuable than this) is different for Phase II. But here goes… a list. I hate lists. But it feels like the right format here…

Writes Dan Solomon Of Texas Monthly

“There are a lot of heroes in Selma, and the fact that the film deliberately centers on the experiences of the ones who marched, rather than the ones who fought the battle from Washington, isn’t a slap in the face to Johnson or to history. It’s simply a perspective on history that we rarely see, by the…

20 Weeks To Oscar: In A Holding Pattern

There will be plenty to do for the next week, as we wait for the only nominations that the industry actually cares about. The Critics Choice Awards… Golden Globes… in some ways, these are really the start of the award season for real people. Neither group is particularly legit and neither will have more than a very, very minor influence on the ultimate Oscar winners. More, these televised awards tend to continue the process the settling.

Gurus o’ Gold: Back From The Holidays, Polls Close Thursday

The Gurus are back from the holidays and just after PGA nominations, another look at the Best Picture race as the Oscar nominations speed towards a close on Thursday. Eleven different films got Top 10 votes from more than half the Gurus, keeping things interesting.

20 Weeks To Oscar: Sexism and Racism and Awards Voting, Oh My! (2015 Edition)

This morning’s PGA vote is as unsurprising as unsurprising can be. To begin with, there is nothing included that is out of the box that has been defined for months. American Sniper has built a lot of heat over the holidays. Nightcrawler has been gaining heat for a while already. And Foxcatcher has been expected by most prognosticators since Cannes, pushed into “unexpected” status only in the last few weeks.

20 Weeks To Oscar: The Soft Settling

This is the time of year when I usually write a story about what Bill Condon coined, “The Great Settling.” What that means, essentially, is that Academy voters have now had a chance to watch their DVDs, go to their screenings, hear some whispers, be fed a bunch of narratives, and get advertised to endlessly for a month and the pieces of the puzzle start to fall into place.

Rob Marshall Calls Into The Woods “A Fairytale For The Post-9/11 Generation”

Rob Marshall Calls Into The Woods “A Fairytale For The Post-9/11 Generation”