Rep. Spencer Bachus faces insider-trading investigation.
Proposal for gay marriage referendum moves forward in New Jersey.
The ultimate 2012 SXSW trailers page.
Obama plans shift in birth control fight.
A star is born (and scorned).
Click here for pictures photographer Bob Willoughby took of Audrey Hepburn from 1953-66.
We're not exactly batting a thousand in this category, but we're pretty sure we got this year's winner pegged. Stupidly, we placed our bets the last two years on wrenching docs—one about the aftermath of the massive earthquake that rocked the central region of China, the other about a female soldier's post-traumatic stress disorder—only to see the voters indulge other fetishes. So, if topicality isn't exactly an asset for a film nominated in this category, we can safely rule out Gail Dolgin and Robin Fryday's warmhearted but mundane The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement, about a now-deceased activist who looks back on the early days of the movement in the days leading up to Barack Obama's victory in the 2008 election. Yes, the 2008 election, which, at least for AMPAS members with proven short-attention spans, probably now feels as old as the silent-film era. Continue Reading »
Is it just us or can the Academy's infatuation with The Artist be felt even in categories where the film isn't nominated? Grant Orchard's The Morning Stroll, about a chicken stopping a passerby on a city street dead in his tracks, first in a time when films were referred to as moving pictures, then in our present day, and finally in a post-apocalyptic tomorrow where zombies have come home to roost, is cute up to the point that its artistry adopts the very ADD it increasingly thumbs its nose at throughout. A sweeter, more quaint vision, Patrick Doyon's Sunday is in essence also a study of human routine, only this one waxes nostalgic on the different world children and adults inhabit without a shred of condescension. Both Terrence Davis and Bill Plympton would love it…and we know how many Oscars each of those filmmakers have. Continue Reading »
A federal appeals court panel on Tuesday threw out a voter-approved ban on same-sex marriage passed in 2008, upholding a lower court's ruling that the ban, known as Proposition 8, violated the constitutional rights of gay men and lesbians in California.
Bilge Ebiri presents the Amadeus Blogathon.
David Hudson collects trailers for films in competition at this year's Berlinale.
And The Guardian selects 10 films from the festival to look out for.
Chris Christie's whole Jersey fat-guy authenticity thing is, um, wearing thin.
In years past, we've written off this category's most obvious UNICEF candidates by virtue of their lack of any value outside of insistent efficacy. In other words, put as many crying third-world children in glass-strewn pediatric cancer wards as you want, but if you haven't color-corrected their tears and can practically see the timecode above their deathbeds, voters are still going to turn you on your way with a pat on the head. The strategy has kept us away from making a lot of easy mistakes in this category. But we've still been wrong more often than not lately because we've repeatedly underestimated the viability of any candidates on the opposite end of the spectrum (i.e. impeccably made student movies obsessed with themselves). Continue Reading »
Why Detroit loves Clint Eastwood.
And that Eastwood ad was David Gordon Green's best work in years.
The White House responds to Virginia anti-gay adoption bill.
Press Play kicks off its Oscar-prediction coverage.
Amazon stores might invade your neighborhood.
Josh Melnick and Water Murch in conversation.
Simpsons dolls banned in Iran as "promoters of Western culture."
It may sound shocking to some that the Harry Potter franchise has never won an Oscar, despite nine pre-2012 nominations being spread across five of the films (Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix couldn't conjure a single nod). Perhaps the Academy simply hasn't been able to brush off the pixie dust with which Chris Columbus ushered in the series, or maybe all those wins for 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King left voters feeling like they'd hit their literary-fantasy quota for the next decade. Either way, though Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2 adds three more nods, including Art Direction, to the saga's final tally, it looks like Harry and his pals are going to ride their brooms into the history books without one nude gold man in tow. Continue Reading »
The New York Giants win Super Bowl XLVI with 21-17 win over the New England Patriots.
M.I.A. upstages Madonna by flipping off the world during the Super Bowl halftime show.
And for those who only care about the ads, click here.
Ben Gazzara, the original Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof on Broadway and star of numerous John Cassavetes films, passed away Friday. He was 81.
Iranian hardliners versus the Oscar.
Yesterday, the Art Directors Guild announced the winners of its 16th Annual Excellence in Production Design Awards.
And the Annie Awards spread the wealth last night.
Bridesmaids is just glad to be invited, no? A "memorable" quote from the film according to IMDb: "You're like the maid of dishonor." Which makes me, an admitted fan of the film, cringe and feel as if I'm misremembering its high hit-to-miss ratio. Margin Call possibly fares worse, because is a line like "I don't get any of this stuff" a refreshing acknowledgement that market-speak is a language that even stock brokers struggle with or a sure sign that J.C. Chandor was too lazy to do his homework? Also out is Asghar Farhadi's A Separation, which faces the uphill battle of having to appeal to voters resentful of actually having to read the screenplay while watching the film. Then there's Michel Hazanavicius's blasé approximation of a silent film that would have been forgotten and lost to time—or an attic fire—had it been actually made in 1925. The reason The Artist won't win is easy: Continue Reading »
That a now slimmer, totally unfunny Seth has been nominated for an Oscar before McLovin' (whose take on Evil Ed was, if no patch on Colin Ferrell's smoldering Jerry in the Fright Night redo, still a more fully realized character than Moneyball's Peter Brand, movies' all-time flimsiest amalgamate) is the only kink in a category preoccupied with old men getting real with their feelings. Which is why no one should've been surprised in the slightest to see Albert Brooks given the cold shoulder: His Drive heavy had no feelings to bloviate (though the compassion he showed one of Drive's supporting characters even while taking his life away should've been more properly noted). I'm not sure whether Brooks should take it as a compliment or an insult to have been excluded, but it has to sting a little bit that Hill's downright catatonic bullpen pencil pusher usurped him in what seems clearly this year's biggest coattails nod. Continue Reading »
As long as there's a Transformers film franchise, there's a good chance Oscar nominations for special effects are going to be thrown at it like alien shrapnel. And since Michael Bay shows no signs of abandoning his clinking, clanking cash cow, expect this year's nod for Transformers: Dark of the Moon to be the second of many (2009's brain-melting Revenge of the Fallen was graciously snubbed in this category). But don't expect it to be the one that tops the 2011 field, for while the Hasbro superbots demand attention on screen, the whole cacophonous series is considerably lacking in prestige, and odds are your average Academy member isn't about to hand it his or her vote. Continue Reading »
Susan G. Komen for the Cure said on Friday it was retreating from a decision to cut funding to Planned Parenthood.
Megaupload founder refused bail in New Zealand.
U.S. jobless rate falls to 8.3 percent, a three-year low.
Roseanne Barr is running for president as a Green Party candidate.
Joshua Land on David Cronenberg and the challenge of the impossible adaptation.
Putting aside the Academy's shocking diss of Steven Spielberg's The Adventures of Tintin in this category, I was with Eric here at first: "I guess we should never underestimate this branch's desire to make the category look like it deserves to exist." The branch, after all, passed up Cars 2 and Happy Feet Two, films few seem willing to go out on a limb for—and Winnie the Pooh, well, that wasn't exactly the second coming of The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh. But after rallying to see the five films that made the final cut, I'm thinking that singing penguins might have actually legitimized this category.
The most delightfully animated feature in this bunch, Kung Fu Panda 2 is still at best a slab of warmed-over holiday seconds, and one whose statistical chance of winning is perhaps smaller than Demián Bichir's. Then you have Puss in Boots, another glossy trifle from the House that Shrek Built that frequently, if shamelessly, brought a smile to the face of this recently anointed cat person. A better dissertation on family than either of them is The Cat in Paris, the wafer-thin but quaint account of a young French girl who discovers that her kitty moonlights as a jewel thief's partner in crime. The film gets my personal vote by virtue of being the most unpretentious and least corporate-looking nominee in the category. Continue Reading »
SXSW has announced its film lineup.
Moments after being released by the Capitol police on Wednesday afternoon, Oscar-nominated Gasland director Josh Fox told POLITICO that by arresting him at a committee hearing, Congress made it clear he is persona non grata on Capitol Hill.
Sometimes you have to put a dog in Joan Didion's name.
Jean Dujardin is going into another meeting.
Head over to The Film Experience as Kurt Osenlund joins Ali Arikan, Mark Harris, Nick Davis, and Nathaniel Rogers to discuss the Oscar race for a few days.
NYPD arrest for marijuana soar in 2011, second highest on record.
We kick off our Oscar winner-prediction coverage this year with the category even AMPAS wants to flush. What exactly does the presence of two nominations signify? It doesn't mean that only two songs were deemed worthy of a nomination. It actually means only one of them broke through the baseline rating required for a nomination (an 8.25 rating, if that clarifies anything), and Academy rules pushed the next-highest-ranking candidate in to simulate a contest. By that measure, in a year during which "Over the Rainbow" represented the only decent song from a movie, "Over the Rainbow" could've theoretically been forced to compete against a song composed entirely out of farts, even if the latter received a score resembling Miss Poogy's typical blood alcohol level, so long as the fart ditty happened to be next in line. Continue Reading »
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