Gurus o’ Gold: Nominations Morning (Page 1 of 2)

NOW With More Gurus!

The Gurus take on all the Oscar categories, except for shorts. This round, The Gurus have Lincoln winning 7 Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, Actor, and Adapted Screenplay. And Skyfall would be win the second most Oscars, with three. The second page of nominations can be found here.

Wilmington on DVDs: People on Sunday

  PICK OF THE WEEK: CLASSIC PEOPLE ON SUNDAY (Menschen am Sonntag) (Four Stars) Germany: Robert Siodmak & Edgar Ulmer, 1930 (Criterion Collection) I. FROM CALIGARI TO HITLER When you’re young and smart and talented, you can also be a little  cocky — brash beyond your years. You’ll make it some day, for sure.  There’s…

20W2O: “They” – The Oscar Morning Sequel

While there are people/films out ahead in many categories, they are all still open. And there is now a super-idiot-sized Phase 2 in which the fight can be fought. And fought it will be. The public dissection of Lincoln‘s historic veracity – fair or not – has commenced while you were getting your 7am coffee.

Nominations Day

• The List of Nominations
• Nominations Reactions
• Nominations by the Numbers
• The Nominations Sidebar

20 Weeks to Oscar: Follow the Voting – A rather bizarre list … but not really shocking

20 Weeks To Oscar: Nominations Morning – Follow The Voting

The entire list of nominations is a checkerboard, which speaks to the mess The Academy created with the January 3 date (which subsequently changed to January 4 when The Academy bothered to look at the calendar sometime in December.)

An argument could be made that this is exciting… that the nominations being all over the place, with the exception of Lincoln, makes for a more interesting night. Perhaps.

2012 = 10 + 23

With Zero Dark Thirty going wide only just this weekend and other films opening after Thursday’s Oscar nominations announcement, 2012’s not dead, it’s not even past. A top 10, plus twenty-three more movies, lightly annotated, with a documentary survey to come.

20 Weeks To Oscar: 6 Weeks To Go – The Great Rush To Judgment… And Subsequent Settling

As of today… as of the parade of opinions once nominations are announced on Thursday… It’s William Goldman Time, baby. No one KNOWS anything. Not yet. (But that won’t keep us all, me included, from spouting off.)

The DVD Wrapup

Frankenweenie, House at End of Street, Samsara, Dredd, Lapland Odyssey, SEAL Team Six, Sleep Tight, Grand Hotel and more…

Gurus o’ Gold: 3 Days From Nominations

Refreshed from the holiday break, the Gurus take one last shot at Picture, Acting, and Directing just hours before the DGA nominations and 55 hours before the Oscar nominations are announced.

Look for charts of all categories (except shorts) by Thursday afternoon.

The Weekend Report

They simply can’t put a stake through the heart of Texas Chainsaw. The newest incarnation of the 1974 ‘Saw was top of weekend movie sales with an estimated $23.1 million debut. Chainsaw was also the only new national release, although several late-year award qualifiers also expanded to national exposure. Eco-themed drama Promised Land failed to ignite with the addition of 1,650 screens and a gross of $4.2 million. More promising though hardly explosive was The Impossible with $2.8 million from 572 locations. Also expanding from exclusive to limited status was Oscar-touted Zero Dark Thirty with a $2.7 million gross from just 60 playdates. The flip side was the total collapse of Not Fade Away that eked out a quiet $278,000 at 565 garages.

Wilmington on Movies: The National Society of Film Critics Awards for 2012

Michael Haneke’s tragic and haunting French film Amour was named the Best Picture of 2012 by the 60-member National Society of Film Critics at their annual meeting in New York City—and that vote included my picks, on a proxy ballot. Haneke’s film, which also won the Palme d’Or at the 2012 Cannes Film Festival, took two other awards: Best Director for Haneke and Best Actress to Emmanuelle Riva, for her heartbreaking portrayal of a dying musician.

Friday Estimates

Texas Chainsaw Massacre 3D dismembers all this awards season seriousness and takes the top slot with a double-digit Friday. And Django Unchained stays strong while The Hobbit takes its biggest hit as it passes $250 million domestic. Les Miserables‘ revolution is losing steam, though it will hit $100m this weekend. And Lincoln breaks the $140m tape.

Wilmington on Movies: Promised Land

Matt Damon, who’s become a kind of classic American leftist movie star—a Hank Fonda of the new millennium—has gotten trashed by some right-wingers (and some moderates and left-wingers as well) for his new film Promised Land. But I think it’s pretty good—a Capraesque tale about a big natural gas corporation trying to get drilling rights to the gas deposits in a Pennsylvania farming town that’s fallen on hard times. Damon, who’s one of our best actors and doesn’t always get the credit he deserves (because, these days, he gets slammed for his politics), plays a smalltown Iowa guy who thinks he understands and relates to these smalltown Heartland people, and has a Messianic sense about his job.

Wilmington on DVDs: Rosemary’s Baby

Rosemary’s Baby is shot with claustrophobic intensity and voluptuous eeriness by Polanski and his gifted cinematographer William Fraker (who also photographed Bullitt), is a great-looking, beautifully-acted, very scary show that probably affects you even if you don’t believe in the devil (as I don’t).

The 2012 Top Tens: Updated

Another 30 lists … and the top 10 remain the same. A little bit of a shuffle in the next ten, with Looper and Skyfall moving up the chart. The next update may find The Grey stepping forward to take the #20 spot from The Sessions, but Zero Dark Thirty seems safe at the top.

2012 Top Ten…. plus…

I have listed 35 films… which leaves out a lot of films I really liked. I am also doing a doc Top Ten. I could easily go another 20 on films I liked, but just don’t think of when using the word “best.”

Wilmington on Movies: Jack Reacher

In any case, violence begets box-office, or so Hollywood often seems to believe—and Jack Reacher is an almost ridiculously violent movie, so ridiculous that if writer-director Christopher McQuarrie had dreamed up better jokes, and more of them, he might have had one hell of a comedy.