8:01 Auspicious Beginnings - the sound is already out of sync on the intro! 8:02 Fixed. But Ooh the reaction shots are already rough. Anne Hathaway and Sally Field don't look so happy to be there. Jessica Chastain isn't even faking it well and she usually looks so cheerful. Or maybe I'm projecting since I'm bone tired from the Oscar Nom run up and early morning. 8:04 Sam Rubin, critic, is drooling on the IMPORTANT. FAMOUS. PEOPLE.
8:05 For some reason Henry Cavill are presenting the first award. Because when you think of Superman you always think... Best Ensemble?
Ensemble: Silver Linings Playbook Young Actor/Actress: Quvenzhane Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild (who reads her speech from an iPhone which is adorable)
8:18 Some awkward banter for Famke Jannsen where she's not supposed to know what famous action movie quotes are like "I'll be back". Um.... banter isn't supposed to make the star look bad. Do you think she's annoyed that she was a Bond girl before the currrent Bond hoopla?
GQ John Smedley's Ian McLean has really good taste. Check out his shoutouts to Michael Fassbender and Cate Blanchett Stale Popcorn Jean Valjean and Fantine strike a pose In Contention on the various screenplays that are ineligible for the WGA and can't therefore get the Oscar bump. As usual there are a lot of them rendering the WGA fairly ineffective as both a predictive precursor and as a competitive prize since it's dealing with so few of the year's movies!
Cinema Blend Alicia Vikander (A Royal Affair, Anna Karenina) is a starlet in demand now. Once you've seen both of those movies, you'll demand her too! Jean-Pierre Jeunet shares his storyboards from Life of Pi back when Fox was considering him to direct it years and years ago. Interesting inside glimpse of filmmakers grappling with movies they didn't make. NPR on the hunt for Bin Laden and the accuracy of Zero Dark Thirty. Was it really a woman at the center?
"I think it's a literary device. It's not inaccurate, but it's not wholly accurate," says writer Peter Bergen, who himself has spent many years tracking bin Laden.
Movie|Line turns out that a very disturbing NC-17ish scene towards the end of Django Unchained (MILD SPOILER: Django is hung upside down completely naked and receives two malevolent visitors) was even more cruel in an earlier cut -- Samuel L Jackson says his character burned Foxx's nipples off. Celebuzz celebrates the shortest male stars from Jason Statham to Daniel Radcliffe in an infographic Fox Searchlight you can pretend you're an awards voter by downloading FYC booklets!
My last minute super-campaigning for Perks of a Wallflower's Logan Lerman in Young Actor (at least) appears to have paid off though my other pleas did not. Nicole Kidman's remarkable transformation in The Paperboy continues to be ignored in the rush to give all prizes to the same 12 movies so this is hardly a surprise though still disappointing. But the most gob-smacking, head-scratching utterly-embarrassing ommission has to be Michael Fassbender missing out on a nomination for Prometheus as Actor in an Action Movie. It's the laziest star-fuckingest balloting ever by BFCA members -- none of whom should ever say a bad word about the Globes' tendency to do this in their columns ever again. They chose Bale as Batman and Downey Jr as Iron Man reheated do-overs of performance that were only great once or twice seven-ish years ago and they chose them while F***ing Fassbender was just off to the left mercilessly/scientifically wreaking havoc on humans while obsessing over Lawrence of Arabia. My fellow voters, I am sad to say, seem utterly without taste or at least are lost without the barometer of Oscar buzz to guide them; I don't know if you know this but The Academy Awards has no correlative Best Actor in an Action Movie category.
To cheer up myself up I'll just think about Annie and the 11 nominations for Les Miz.
She wore leg-bondage gear to the Les Miz premiere here in NYC! Speaking of Annie... I'd type up reactions to each Critics Choice race but for the fact that I'm due at a luncheon with the cast of Les Misérables right now. Obviously Anne & Hugh win the war of 'how should i spend my next couple of hours?' but more later today...
BFCA "CRITICS CHOICE" NOMINATIONS
Best Picture Argo (7 nominations) Beasts of the Southern Wild (3 nominations) Django Unchained (2 nominations) Life of Pi (9 nominations) Lincoln (13 nominations) The Master (7 nominations) Les Miserables (11 nominations) Moonrise Kingdom (5 nominations) Silver Linings Playbook (10 nominations) Zero Dark Thirty (5 nominations)
Dying to see it in the theater with an adoring crowd again. An adoring crowd of two at home results in off key sing-alongs and that doesn't have quite the same effect.
I have been remiss at sharing good stories and posts from around the web so I hereby return to it.
Pop Matters Jose takes another look at Marion Cotillard's work in Rust & Bone and contemplates Oscar Pop Elegantarium Alexa loves the screwball comedy of David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook Sam HitiOnce Upon a Time in the West fans should check out this artists tumblr The Hot Blog David Poland on the NYFCC winners Cinema Blend two Woody Allen classics coming to Blu-Ray this January
EW top ten lists from popular critics Owen (Lincoln @ #1) & Lisa (Zero Dark Thirty @ #1). They both choose one Oscar hopeful among their "5 worst of the year" lists, too. E! Online Rose McGowan is the latest actress trying to achieve Michelle Pfeiffer's now immortal Scarface look Antagony & Ecstasy wonderful piece on Life of Pi by one of the web's best critics The Carpet Bagger talks to the editor of Flight about the plane crash scene My New Plaid Pants who wore it best: animated decapitation In Contention I totally forgot to mention the Golden Satellite nominations. Lots of love for Les Miz but also weird nominations for films that never opened in the States like Kim Ki-Duk's Piéta so I'm not sure what their criteria is for eligibility anymore
Coming Soon Anne Hathaway recently burst into tears when asked about doing a Catwoman spinoff, adding
...assuming there was enough Kleenex in the world, I would love to do a spin-off
Vulture Speaking of Anne Hathaway. Sort of. a screening of Les Misérables that I would've killed to be it for Academy and Globe members. Hugh Jackman sang and lap danced for birthday girl Amanda Seyfried Gawker on the 13 most powerful images of naked celebrities for 2012 In Contention Pedro Almodóvar, as you know my favorite living filmmaker, will be getting an Academy tribute in London. I'm so jealous of Guy Lodge right now who gets to attend these London events Stale Popcorn Glenn on Australia's film award nominations (formerly AFI and now called AACTA) . The musical The Sapphires leads. Cinema Blend Casey Affleck stayin' creepy. He aims to play the Boston Strangler in a new film
Finally, Grease superstars of yore, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John made a new video together for their Christmas album.
No comment. My inner child loves Livvy & Grease too much to comment. (Other than that John Travolta who not so unrecently commanded $20 million a movie maybe could have spared two hundred thousand dollar bills so this didn't look like it was made for two!)
Thursday, January 10, 2013 at 8:15PM 
Ensemble: Silver Linings Playbook
