Tuesday, December 25, 2012 at 10:00PM 
Complete the Sentences!
1. For Christmas this year we watched _______________* and it was _____________!
*some of you bitches better say Les Miz!
2. My favorite Christmas moviegoing experience ever was when I saw _____________ because _________________ and ____________
3. If Oscar Voters want to give me a gift they'll nominate ____________.
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 at 4:00PM Today is the 10th anniversary of the release of The Hours. That's just another reason to feel merry today and remember that gratitude isn't just for Thanksgiving. Especially not when it comes to the gift of cinema. We celebrate the movies all year long but we get extra weepy about the greatness of the artform right about now when drowning in awards and top ten lists .
Christmas 2002 brought three very special actresses together
Not that The Hours is an especially festive or celebratory movie but each Christmas does seem to bring us a super-depressing Best Picture Event (this year's iteration: Les Misérables). The Hours tracks three parallel women Virginia Woolf (Oscar winning Nicole Kidman), Laura Brown (Oscar nominee Julianne Moore) and Clarissa Vaughan (Meryl Streep) who are connected by difficult personalities, anxious spirits ("I feel as if I'm unravelling"), and Woolf's masterpiece "Mrs Dalloway" which she is writing and Laura and Clarissa are reading in the braided plots.
The 2002 Best Picture nominee is a beloved classic to actressexuals the world over and, as such, I know it's close to the heart of many of you. When I spoke with Nicole Kidman recently, we took a time machine detour to talk about her winning year. (I thought I'd save that piece of our conversation for a surprise Christmas gift for you. Surprise!) The Oscar winner herself was totally taken aback when I mentioned the approaching anniversary. "Wow. That was ten years ago?!?"
Indeed it was, Nicole, indeed it was.
NATHANIEL R: You've been invited back to the Oscars with Rabbit Hole recently but what's your most vivid memory of that winning journey with The Hours?
NICOLE'S PERSONAL MEMORIES AFTER THE JUMP...
Tuesday, December 25, 2012 at 10:14AM Happy Holidays
Merry Christmahanakkwanzukkah to all of you out there who make up The Film Experience's sexy, smart, diverse, magical, actress-loving, Oscar-obsessed cinephiliac community of readers. The site literally wouldn't still exist without you, whether that's through your blogging-fuel comments, e-mails of gratitude, cup o' joe donations (see right hand sidebar), and just general sharing and retweeting and emailing and the engaged fandom that has increased TFE's profile over the years enough to snag us the occassional ad buy, festival gig, BFCA membership, and audiences with and greetings from various goddesses.
Thanks for being there over the years and thanks for still being there. If I had a magical sleigh and flying reindeers I'd drop gifts down each of your chimneys, but I only have this blog to give. More interviews, final Oscar nomination predictions, and Year-End goodies to come in the final two weeks before Oscar Nominations.
May your holiday week be filled with...
Randy celebrations with regulation hotties...
Singing...
and dancing...
Renewed faith and life-affirming friendships...
Unforgettably festive surprises...
And, above all else for our purposes... Wonderful wonderful movies.
Now, go open your prezzies and see Les Miz and Django.
XOXOXO
-Nathaniel R
Monday, December 24, 2012 at 11:19PM Previously in the Year in Review we visited Snow White and the Overrated, Misjudged, Miscast Tomorrow the joyous positivity starts but until then, we purge. Let's rush through this final bout of negativity.
WORST FOREVER-TREND: BAD MOVIE POSTERS
Now I know how the vampires of True Blood feel whey they cry... My eyes! My eyes!
These three posters for To Rome With Love, Quartet and Marvel's The Avengers probably do not represent the absolute worst movie advertisements of the year but they are indicative of three subspecies of Horribilus Posterus: To Rome With Love shoves its cast into multiple little boxes, a common technique that is nearly always hideous on posters but that never stops designers from trying. To make matters worse they've selected color palette so bland that it seems to be advertising air-conditioned nap time, oatmeal breakfast at a theater near you, and A Film By Nancy Meyers all at the same time; Quartet represents the Indecisive Nonsensical brand of bad poster since its retro 80s color blocking suggests period comedy romp (No, sort of, and no) and then it's like oh "every diva deserves an encore" but the movie actually fights against this (I shan't spoil it if you're inclined to suffer through); The Avengers is appropriately colorful but belongs to the most populated subspecies of bad poster, the No One on This Poster Was Ever in The Same Room Together disconnect. Photoshop has become such a crutch for everyone that marketing departments seem to believe that no one values authentic connection in imagery anymore and I absolutely don't believe that's the case. You're paying stars millions of dollars to appear in a movie but you can't require in their contract that they pose together for promotional materials?
Worst Miscellania and 5 Worst Movies of the Year after the jump
Monday, December 24, 2012 at 4:13PM 
Argo is still soaring as precursors go...Tis the Season to Hear from Film Critics Circles and Orgs and Societies. The big news today – if you can call anything Off-Christmas news on Christmas Eve -- is that the Online Film Critics Society have announced their annual nominations with a parade of accordion accompanists on the streets of Chicago, New York and Los Angeles. Or at least that’s what I wish they’d done since they nominated Holy Motors for four prizes instead of the typical requisite runner up position here or there or nowhere. Instead of an accordion parade they just posted their nominations online…as societies are prone to do.
But they’re definitely worth mentioning this year as they seem to be sort-of-maybe a-little-bit-kind-of thinking for themselves beyond the standard pet-peevish traps -- there's plentiful category fraud (even though it doesn't really make sense for critics groups to do that unless they think of themselves as oscar pundits first in which case they might want to check their purpose and/ormission statements!) and the dismissals of Hugh Jackman and Matthew McConaughey, awardage impulses which tend to strike me as genre and gender-norms bias, respectively.
BEST PICTURE
lots more after the jump including weirdly formatted lists (i can't deal today. it's christmas eve) and three more regional critics prizes.
