I am link parts, link skin, link heart... ♫

The Wrap Frozen nearing the $1 billion mark globally. Unreal.
Mail Online Matt Damon faxes his buttcheeks to Ben Affleck... for charity. No really. 
The Dissolve on the broken down grace of Bill Murray 
AMPAS you have to see this "moment" from the 68 Oscars with Jane Fonda and costume design!

LAist Spike Jonze in a very uncomfortable interview about Her
Gold Derby will Mickey Mouse finally win an animated short Oscar this year for "Get a Horse"? He's quite a loser in this category
TFE icymi Tim, our animation expert, reviewed that short here. (I loved it, too)
Mental Floss Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure just turned 25 years old. Can you believe I asked my team if anyone wanted to write about it and NO ONE did. sad face. 
Twitter I don't know why I find the 'Jake Gyllenhaal stole Taylor Swift's virginity' gossip so amusing but I do.(Jake used to have such better taste!)
Variety a review of that gay themed Brazilian film The Way He Looks that took a Berlinale prize 
Vanity Fair Katey talks to the Oscar nominated makeup artist on Dallas Buyers Club. the budget she had to work with is shocking.

It's a franchise world. We're just living in it only to consume
Pajiba the new Wonder Woman Gal Gadot "shows off her, uh, Amazonian biceps"
The Film Doctor with 13 questions on The LEGO Movie
Den of Geek Star Wars Episode 7 rumors and Indiana Jones 5, too 
Hypeable new stills for Guardians of the Galaxy 
Cinema Blend Steven Price, Oscar-nominated for his Gravity score, will be composing Ant-Man 

Olympic-ness
Slate an interesting share on the extremely rigid rules about figure skating at the Olympics. I knew same sex couples were not allowed but I did not know any of these rules about costuming and I was just wondering aloud the other day why the costumes were so monotonous from year to year apart from color changes and the occassional surprise of where the bejazzlements occur. 

Box Office: America Goes For a Ride Along

Amir here, with the weekend’s box office report. Initially I had decided to mirror last week’s column and predict Oscar winners based on their current financial gains – hey! It worked for the Globes! – but Ride Along’s performance has been so stellar that it warrants a mention.  The buddy cop comedy starring Ice Cube and Kevin Hart has been described in some quarters as a comedy version of Training Day with a romantic subplot. That’s probably enticing enough; add to it the fact that Kevin Hart’s hot off the incredible box office performance of his standup show, Let Me Explain, it’s really no wonder Ride Along did so well. Still, snatching the best ever January opening, beating a six year old record set by Cloverfield in the process, is beyond the studio’s best expectations. January is always dominated by the previous year’s holdovers though, and remains a box office hell for new films. To put things in perspective, Ride Along would not have had the biggest opening of all time in any other month, coming only close to the September record (Hotel Transylvania).

Ice Cube and Kevin Hart in Ride Along

Lone Survivor occupied second place with a respectable drop. I have yet to see it for myself and my level of interest in ever seeing it can probably be found with a very powerful microscope somewhere, but the film’s been creating “controversies” because of its – depending on who you ask – realistic depiction, endorsement or sanctification of soldiers. You can count on it to continue to do good business based on the on-going conversation. Another film that’s still going strong is Frozen, which continues to sing and dance its way into American hearts in its eighth week. This week’s 18 percent drop is better than most had expected because direct competition has finally arrived in the shape of The Nut Job, which is surprisingly not a porn parody. Given the latter film’s modest budget, we can expect a profit despite its limited appeal to adult audiences.

BOX OFFICE
RIDE ALONG $41.2m new
LONE SURVIVOR $23.2m (cum. 74m)
THE NUT JOB $20.5m new
JACK RYAN: SHADOW RECRUIT $17.2m new
FROZEN $11.9m (cum. 332.6m)
AMERICAN HUSTLE $10.6m (cum. 116.4m)
DEVIL’S DUE $8.5m new
AUGUST: OSAGE $7.6m (cum. 18.1m)
THE WOLF OF WALL STREET $7.5m (cum. 90.2m)
SAVING MR. BANKS $4.1m (cum. 75.3m)

Among the Oscar nominees, the biggest winners were American Hustle and 12 Years a Slave. The former lost more than 400 screens but had a nearly 30% improvement in sales; the latter regained 650 screens and sold five times as much as last week. Captain Phillips also added more than 700 theatres and saw a dramatic surge in ticket sales, but the nominations didn’t come to the rescue of two films: Inside Llewyn Davis and Her. Last week I mentioned that the Oscars would need to help them out if they want to turn their small fortunes around. I was proven right in the case of Llewyn Davis, as it failed to gain any momentum from Thursday’s announcement and sadly saw its numbers crash. Her experienced a more modest drop but still didn’t benefit at all from its Best Picture nomination. I have several theories, but none of them seem plausible. My best guess is that, the demographic to whom Her appeals, was always going to watch it irrespective of its awards success. Oscar nominations can’t convince everybody to watch a mustachioed, bespectacled man dressed in high pants fall in love with a computer.

Anyway, I didn’t hit the theatres this weekend, and looking ahead, nothing appeals to me before Rhymes for the Young Ghouls, which opens on January 31st in my corner of the world. What did you watch this weekend? Any theories on the Her drop?

Little Miss Cat Lady, Avatar Land, and Other Links

Coming Soon Quentin Tarantino is doing another western (The Hateful Eight) with Christoph Waltz. Sad face. Was hoping he'd try new genres with new stars. 
Film Doctor Her and the intimacy machine
The Guardian a questionnaire for A:OC's Abigail Breslin. Turns out that Little Miss Sunshine herself is a crazy cat lady. Yay! 

Carpetbagger Suzanne Vega is the latest musician to come out with having issues about the portrayal of the music scene in Inside Llewyn Davis
MNPP another fan of Scarlett Johansson's sensational work in Don Jon -- I tell you people... it's so embarrassing that this performance didn't get any Oscar traction!
Just Jared check out Evan Rachel Wood's singing pipes. Wowza. There's another actress to cast in movie musicals

Predictable Sequel News of the Moment
Cinema Blend Terminator Genesis which is already on two strikes (first you don't reboot a series based on time travel which already allows do-overs without pretending originals didn't happen / second they already practiced exceptionally uninteresting casting by getting TV girl badass to play movie girl badass) is now looking for the male lead. I hated the latest Die Hard but Jai Courtney is super nice to look at so can I root for him?
/Film Avatar Land  begins construction in Florida. James Cameron is helping design it because, you know, anything to slow down his filmmaking. I am only interested in going to a land like this if they really amp up virtual technology and you get to be actually inside the body of a huge blue alien with great abs and have hot virtual sex with hair braids

I feel like you could charge a lot of money for that. The park plans an opening to coincide with the Avatar sequels in 2016/2017... or if I know James Cameron, 2019/2020.

Unpredictable Sequel News of the Moment
Did you hear they're making a sequel to The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel? The whole cast (except Tom Wilkinson *sniffle*) will return and Richard Gere and David Strathairn will join them.

Today's Watch
If you haven't yet seen Todrick Hall's Mean Girls parody, Mean Boyz. It's tres gay

My favorite bit is the "small pizza" punchline. Yours?

Editors' Picks.

Jose here. Today we have the announcement from the American Cinema Editors who - shocker - went for more of the same movies! For almost 40 years, the Eddies were awarded to a single motion picture (their first winner was The Parent Trap and their last was the acclaimed Saving Private Ryan) but then they decided that they too needed to include as many movies as possible and split their award into Drama and Musical & Comedy. Now excuse me if I sound ignorant (I did go to film school and all...) but isn't editing exactly the same for both? It's not like you use different equipment and/or need to have different skills to do each, right? Isn't the editor's job actually (along with the director of course) to decide just how funny or how dramatic each movie will be? So I really don't get why guilds need to invent such categories. I don't see the ASC doing that, but god I love the cinematographers for being the classiest guild...anyway enough with my complaining.

Here are the nominees for this year's Eddies:

Click to read more ...

Art Directors Make Their Picks

Jose here, with yet another batch of guild nominees. This time members of the Art Directors Guild have determined nominees in three categories (which are just as nonsensical as those of the Costume Designers Guild...how is Her contemporary and Gravity a fantasy?). It's mostly more of the same, except for one or two rather interesting choices here and there, and truly it seems as if Oscar mostly cares about the "old look" which is why the Period nominees might pretty much translate into our final five nominees. Right?

The nominees were the following:

Click to read more ...