Personal Ballot: Best Scores, Sounds, Songs...

Though my ears aren't as fine tuned as my eyes when it comes to the cinema, I take pleasure freely from every craft. The best films are the ones that try to engage all senses. (Well, not smell. They tried that with Smell-O-Vision and it didn't work out so well.) 

So here are my choices for Best Original Score, Best Sound Mixing and Editing, Best Original Song and a fifth category that's kind of "off-Oscar." The Film Bitch Awards have always had a Best Adapted / Combination / Song Score category for films where the original score is only part of the defining musical sensation and the rest comes from pre-existing material or songs that are woven into the sound mix. Films honored include in these various aural categories include The Handmaiden, Arrival, Moonlight, Lion, Jackie, La La Land, Sully, The Witch, Doctor Strange, Sing Street and more. Which movies did you love listening to this year? 

Final Predictions: Animation, Documentary, and Sound Categories

Another day another dizzying array of last minute nerves over this confusing Oscar race. We've already talked Picture, Director, Actor, and the Screenplay categories right here. Now several more categories...

Animated Feature
A couple of months ago The Red Turtle looked like the sure thing "art" entry in the this category but it doesn't appear to have gathered much momentum and I worry it may be omitted. Working the opposite trajectory is Kubo and the Two Strings (more and more popular... could it even give Zootopia a run for the win?) and My Life as a Courgette which could pick up nominations in both animated feature and foreign language feature, something that has never happened before.  

Documentary Feature
The only question that seems relevant at this point is "can anything beat O.J.: Made in America?"...

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Best Tweets on the Globe Nominations

Feel free to suggest others in the comments...

BEST ACTRESS COMEDY

The way you feel about iTunes updates is how Meryl Streep feels about Golden Globe nominations.

— Louis Virtel (@louisvirtel) December 12, 2016

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'If Ever I Would Leave You,' List-Making... It wouldn't be in November

On this day in history as it relates to the movies...

1859 Billy the Kid, future legendary outlaw, is born. He's been played in movies and TV by actors like Buster Crabbe, Hugh O'Brian, Paul Newman, Clu Galager, Val Kilmer, and perhaps most famously by Kris Kristofferson, BAFTA nominated for Pat Garret and Billy the Kid (1973)
1887 Boris Karloff, villainous movie icon (Frankenstein, The Mask of Fu Manchu, Scarface, etcetera) is born
1888 Harpo Marx is born

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Swing Tarzan Swing: Disney's 1999 Animated Take

We've reached the penultimate episode of our Tarzan series. Now sailing into Disney wilds...

by Nathaniel R

For over half a century in film and television storytellers didn't think Tarzan needed an origin plot but when the movies told it (Greystoke, 1984), it was as if everyone had always wanted to. Why not Disney then? Disney hadn't quite run out of classic fairytales to adapt by the mid-nineties but they were shifting their focus to boys. This was arguably due to their gargantuan back-to-back biggest-ever successes of Aladdin (1992) and The Lion King (1994), two animated features that deviated from their princess focus. Enter Hercules and then Tarzan. Neither were girly fairytales but both were still firmly embedded in fantasy and heightened enough for musical numbers.

Sort of.

By the time Tarzan rolled into town, Disney executives had clearly begun to wonder if audiences were done with the musical part of their Animated Musicals because Tarzan is only a musical in the sense that non-diegetic adult contemp ear worms keep popping up. They arrive without warning, with all the subtlety of a slasher movie jump scare.

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