Personal Ballots Galore!

The Oscar correlative part of the Film Bitch Awards are almost done. Racing to the finish line here. In the updates you'll see the nominees for Best Screenplays and Animated Feature as well as Visual categories like Visual Effects and Makeup.

You never know where a great movie will come from. Who knew that a circular short story by Ted Chiang, an possibly unfilmable novel like "Oh...," or a novella like "Lady Susan" could make great movies like Arrival, Elle, and Love & Friendship? (Okay okay, everyone knows that Jane Austen stories can make great movies. But isn't it insane that Love & Friendship isn't locked up for an Oscar nomination? What was everyone thinking this year?) They're all up for the Film Bitch Award for Adapted Screenplay. The nominees are...

As for the Makeup and Hair ballot, I'll state straightaway that I'll never understand what Oscar's makeup branch wants from their movies (besides old age prosthetics. They love those). Everything that makes my list, save Hail Caesar! and Star Trek Beyond did not make the Oscar finals in that category (or perhaps did not even submit reels to the branch for consideration?). It may seem to on-the-nose to include Neon Demon, but when that nose is a work of art...

Previous Announcements
Picture/Director/Top Ten List
Supporting Actor
Supporting Actress
Costume Design and Production Design
Sound and Music Categories

Three more TBA: Actor, Actress, and Cinematography

Lunchtime Poll: What Cartoon Should Come With a Trigger Warning?

In last weekend's most hilarious Golden Globes presentation, Kristen Wiig & Steve Carell equated Fantasia and Bambi with utterly traumatic childhood experiences. Which begs the question...

What cartoon sends you spiralling into depression? 

JOSE: Dumbo! As a giant eared child, it brings back so many traumas. 

ERIC:  Dumbo.  When caged Mama's trunk reaches for Dumbo's trunk: merciless!

NICK: The Legend of Bagger Vance.

KIM: Toy Story 3 was a pretty traumatic viewing experience for me; I came out of the theatre with my eyes almost swollen shut from crying. (The holding hands when they all thought they were going to die, you guys!) If I harken back to a movie that sent me off the edge as a kid, I'm going to go with The Secret of Nimh. I know it ENDS happily, but that movie is DARK. 

JORGE:  Spirited Away and Howl's Moving Castle throws me into a deep pit of out-of-body melancholy.

DAVID:  The Fox and the Hound is a regular feature in my nostalgic nightmares, even though I haven't watched it since I was about twelve and the VHS gave out. Under the weight of emotional distress, no doubt.

STEVEN:  Every time I think about the fact that there is a Cars 3 coming I get depressed. Does that count?

Cinema Audio Society Nominees

The Cinema Audio Society have announced their nominations for their 53rd annual awards. Though they can help us see what's on the mind an in the ears of sound professionals, they don't necessarily tell us what's coming down the Oscar pike in Oscar's two Sound categories...

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2016's Box Office Scorecard. Big & Minor Hits (Some Flops due to Budget)

Each day for the past two weeks we've been looking back on the year that was from different angles. Today, the biggest hits of 2016 in two different categories (franchise vs original).

It will surprise no one that the year's biggest hits continue to prove Hollywood right (sigh) in pursuing nothing but animated and superhero pictures and franchisable intellectual property and neglecting the nurturing of movies for adults. On the bright side quality pictures do occassionally break through audience resistance to original concepts and voices, often with the help of awards at year's end. So next time you hear people complain about awards season, remind them that we might never get movies made for adults if there weren't shiny gold statues to chase.

How many of these 35 pictures have you seen and which will you hit next? 

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Christmas Classics: How the Grinch Stole Christmas! (1966)

A few members of Team Experience will be sharing posts on their favorite Christmas movies. Here's Tim...

Today we celebrate the 50th anniversary of a great classic: it was on December 18, 1966, that the world got its first look at the animated How the Grinch Stole Christmas, adapted from the 1957 book by Dr. Seuss and directed by cartoon legend Chuck Jones. There are too many ways we could quantity the importance of this television special: as the last of Jones's masterpieces before he settled into Elder Statesman status, as the progenitor of a line of generally strong Seuss adaptations that didn't stop until the beginning of the 1980s, as the third in a line of deathless cartoon Christmas specials that premiered one per year from 1964 to 1966 (Rudolph the Red-Nose Reindeer and A Charlie Brown Christmas are the others).

But since it's the holiday season, let's start with how this is one of the loveliest and most heartfelt stories of the True Meaning of Christmas ever filmed. That is, in no small part, because neither Seuss nor Jones were overt sentimentalists: the author had a slightly arch, caustic tone to his highly precise rhyming that's too self-aware to be saccharine, and Jones built his career on anarchic cartoon comedies, making no fewer than three films on the theme "how many ways can we shoot Daffy in the face?" And with that kind of attitude underpinning the proceedings, How the Grinch Stole Christmas ends up being a little bit saltier than most of the other canonical Christmas classics. Obviously, it gets to the expected place where we all learn important lessons and feel better and embrace tradition, but it works a little bit harder than usual to make sure that it's earned.

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