Thursday, February 7, 2019 at 7:37AM 
Since it's only (haha) 477 days until Maleficent 2 hits theaters, Michelle Pfeiffer gave us a sneak peek of her character Queen Ingrith on Instagram. We don't know if she's a fairy queen or just a regular queen yet but we hope a fairy queen because how many actresses can say they've played fairy royalty twice? (see also: Titania, Queen of the Fairies, in A Midsummer Night's Dream, 1999)
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 7:00PM with Nathaniel R and Murtada Elfadl
In this episode Murtada and Nathaniel sound off on Sundance buzz, and the current madness of the awards race and Oscar's late-life identity crisis and one shockingly ill-thought-out decision after the next, ad infinitum.
Index (58 minutes)
00:01 Sundance buzz: The Farewell, Clemency, One Child Nation, Them That Follow , and The Report
17:25 Recent guild prizes: Bryan Singer & Rami Malek's Bohemian Rhapsody and how everything keeps going wrong this awards season.
22:34 Bo Burnham's Eighth Grade's surprise DGA win
26:00 Oscar's identity crisis and its increasingly terrible decisions. Murtada tries to talk Nathaniel off the ledge.
36:00 Spike Lee and Bradley Cooper at the DGAs and guilds confusion about Best Picture
45:40 Trying to survive Oscar's dwindling sense of self and we're back to Sundance to talk about next year's Oscar possibilities, especially in regards to Clemency
56:00 Annie Awards and wrap-up
Referenced in the Podcast
• Nathaniel's "Awards Season is Killing Me" Rant
• DGA winners
• Murtada's Sundance Coverage
You can listen to the podcast here at the bottom of the post or download from iTunes. Continue the conversations in the comments, won't you?
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 4:23PM 
18 days til Oscar so today is a perfect day to look at and listen to the composers nominated for Best Original Score. They have 18 nominations between them and on their Oscar chart, you can vote on who you think should win. Let's check out the nominees!
Terence Blanchard for BlacKkKlansman (56 years old | 33 features | 1st nomination!)
This New Orleans native is world-famous jazz musician and trumpet player. He's been working with Spike Lee in on capacity or another since Spike's second film School Daze (1988). His first full score for Spike was Jungle Fever (1991) and Blanchard has scored all but a couple of Lee's joints since...
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 1:20PM That was quick. There are only four spots left in the next Best Actress Oscar race.
We kid, we kid. Academy Award nomination races aren't sewn up half as quickly as the internet always pretends they are. Nevertheless it's hard to deny that on paper Cynthia Erivo playing Harriett Tubman (there's your first still above) reads just right for major Oscar attention.
There are so many ways in which this seems likely without seeing a single clip. Let us count them...
Wednesday, February 6, 2019 at 11:33AM by Timothy Brayton
Coraline, which opened in theaters ten years ago today, was groundbreaking in all sorts of ways. It was the first feature made by Laika, soon to become a cultishly loved, critically praised animation studio with an Oscar nomination for every one of its four films (a fifth, Missing Link, is set to open in April). It was one of the first films in the most recent 3D fad to demonstrate a real sense of the emotional and narrative possibilities of using stereoscopic effects, and it was only rarely equaled in the years following. It represents an extraordinary leap into a brand new mixed-media animation style that I refrain from calling "revolutionary" only because nobody else but Laika seems to be interested in experimenting with it.
The truly special thing about Coraline is not that it achieved any of these things. Plenty of films invent new stuff. What's special – downright miraculous, even – is that Coraline feels just as fresh and bold in 2019 as it did in 2009...
