Critics Choice Winners

The all virtual Critic's Choice Awards were held tonight. Eternally handsome Taye Diggs hosted direct to camera, which must have been one of the easiest gigs ever. No audience to play to, no flop sweat if jokes failed as thy often do for awards show hosts. Just an obedient laugh track (meant to be ironic or...?) and the camera. 

The Critics Choice voters often agreed with the Golden Globes including Best Picture for Nomadland which led the awards with 4 wins. But they went their own way in Best Comedy where Palm Springs took the prize. Sorry Borat but all was not lost because Best Supporting Actress went to  Maria Bakalova. The winners are after the jump...

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75th Anniversary: The 1945 Oscars Revisited

by Baby Clyde

Bob Hope and the 1945 winners

The war was over and finally Hollywood could get around to more important matters like giving Joan Crawford an Oscar.

It had been a pared down ceremony for the preceding few years with tuxes and ballgowns discouraged. Even the statuette itself had been made from plaster rather than gold plated bronze but at the 18th Academy Awards, which took place at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre 75 years ago today, the glamour was back and there was no one more glamorous in town than 20 year veteran Joan. She skipped the ceremony...

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FYC: Sean Bobbitt for Best Cinematography

by Cláudio Alves

Director Shaka King (left) and Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (right)

Sean Bobbitt started as a news camera shooter, a photojournalist more than a cineaste. His first feature was Michael Winterbottom's 1999 Cannes Competition entry Wonderland, an auspicious beginning to what would become a splendorous filmography. The collaboration with British director Steve McQueen came to define the cinematographer's career, their work running the gamut from commercials to museum installations and award-winning films like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. Despite all this, Sean Bobbitt has never been nominated for an Oscar. Thanks to Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, that sad state of affairs may be about to change…

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FYC: Julia Garner in "The Assistant"

by Ben Miller

This year’s Best Actress race is filled with powerful women going through big things.  Viola Davis and Andra Day portray groundbreaking artists dealing with systems stacked against them.  Frances McDormand and Vanessa Kirby are women trying to work through immense grief.  Carey Mulligan is exacting revenge for monumental wrongs.

In The Assistant, Julia Garner portrays Jane, an assistant to a Hollywood big wig.  Jane is not going through something big.  She is just doing her job.  Something big is happening nearby, she recognizes, but she can’t do anything about it...

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Rank these 8 time winners, 8 days before the Oscar noms

It's 8 days until Oscar nominations are out. How fun is it that exactly 8 movies have won exactly 8 competitive Oscars? For dumb fun rank the films which pulled off that feat, only one of which didn't win Best Picture.
*cries in Cabaret*

• Gone with the Wind (1939)
• From Here to Eternity (1953)
• On the Waterfront (1954)
• My Fair Lady (1964)
• Cabaret (1972)
• Gandhi (1982)
• Amadeus (1984)
• Slumdog Millionaire (2008)