25th Anniversary: "Reality Bites"

by Mark Brinkerhoff

Sandwiched between (and oft-overshadowed by) the so-called Baby Boomers and Millennials, Generation X, those born between 1965-1980, seems to get little attention from Hollywood — or from anyone, really. In fact, just last month CBS infamously omitted Gen X in an otherwise comprehensive chart, “Generation Guidelines Defined by Birth Year.” For Gen Xers (of which I am one), this was generally considered as simply par for the course. Of course, of course, of course! 

But 25 years ago this week, we got our cinematic Valentine in the form of Reality Bites, the seminal film of a “forgotten” generation...

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10 Days til Oscar... The Past 10 Years of Stats

Happy Valentine's Day y'all ❤️. It's officially 10 days until the Oscars so it's a perfect time to go list crazy and look at the past 10 years of Oscar honors (2008-2017) for multiple top tens, don't you think? Not that we need excuses to go list-crazy. We make them up when they don't present themselves!  How have the past ten years been for you? We hope you'll share in the listing fun. In addition to ranking the Oscar winners we've notated whether the same achievements medalled in our own annual film bitch awards that year.

PAST TEN BEST PICTURE WINNERS RANKED 

1. Moonlight (2017) *silver medal
2. The Hurt Locker (2009) *gold medal
3. Birdman (2014) *silver medal...

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Cynthia Erivo as Harriet and the *next* Best Actress Race

That was quick. There are only four spots left in the next Best Actress Oscar race.

We kid, we kid. Academy Award nomination races aren't sewn up half as quickly as the internet always pretends they are. Nevertheless it's hard to deny that on paper Cynthia Erivo playing Harriett Tubman (there's your first still above) reads just right for major Oscar attention.

There are so many ways in which this seems likely without seeing a single clip. Let us count them...

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Comment Party Fun: What will Meryl Streep's Oscar ballot look like?

We're just 20 days away from Hollywood's High Holy Night and voting on who will win the Oscars begins in just 8 days. Since 20 is the number for the day we're thinking of Meryl, the only actor in history to have amassed 20+ acting nominations (she's at 21 and the number will presumably climb) and we're wondering who she'll be voting for. Care to make a conjecture in the comments? We know from her speeches at awards shows that she really does watch, value, and think about work by other actors (even shouting out high quality non-nominees which is pretty rare as awards season behavior goes - remember when she praised Adepero Oduye's stunning debut in the little seen LGBT drama Pariah?).

Let's get silly in the comments and make presumptious guesses. Oh come on, you know you want to! I'll make a guess on Best Actor and Best Actress after the jump to get you started...

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Best Actor & Best Actress. Vote on the Trivia-Filled Charts

by Nathaniel R

Lead acting nominees ranked by how many Best Picture nominees they've starred in.

We continue to expand the Oscar charts so we're hope you're enjoying them. All four acting charts are now complete, with Best Actress and Best Actor both newly updated with lots of trivia, theories on how the actors were nominated and more. Just like how we did with Supporting Actress and Supporting Actor. Don't forget you can vote each day on who should win. But for the here and now, here's some trivia in relation to all four acting categories combined:

BY THE NUMBERS
64 = average gross (in millions) of their nominated movies (box office numbers via a couple of days ago)
52 = number of Oscar nominations between them
47 = the average age of this year's nominees 
33 = average number of films they've appeared in
18 = number of children they have among them
9 = number of Emmys won by this group (Close x 3, King x 3, McCarthy x 2, and Malek)
5 = number of Oscars won by this group (Ali, Bale, Rockwell, Stone, and Weisz)
3 = number of Tonys won by this group (Glenn Close only)
2.6 = average number of Best Picture nominees that they've each starred in*
2.4 = the average number of Oscar nominations (in acting) for this year's nominees
2 = number of the nominees married to other famous actors (Elliott & Weisz)
2 = number of nominees who have played Meryl Streep's immediate family on film (Olivia Colman was her daughter in Iron Lady, and Glenn Close her mother in Evening... albeit in flashbacks with Mamie Gummer as the young Meryl)

PERCENTAGES
35% of the nominated characters are LGBTQ people
35% of the nominees were born outside the US (Adams, Aparicio, Bale, Colman, de Tavira, Grant, Weisz)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
35% have also been Emmy nominees (Ali, Close, Driver, Elliott, King, Malek, McCarthy)
30% of the nominees are Water signs (3 Scorpios, 2 Pisces, and 1 Cancer) 
25% are former Oscar winners
25% of the characters nominated are politicians of some sort, professionally or in practice
25% of the characters nominated are musicians or employed in the music industry
20% of the nominated actors have performed on Broadway (Close, Cooper, Stone, Weisz)
20% of the nominated characters are dying or dead by the credit scrawl of these pictures.
20% are former Emmy winners
10% are former Tony nominees (Close & Cooper)
0% of the actors nominated are LGBTQ ...
(but Lady Gaga is mother monster so maybe she counts a little?)

RANDOMNESS
There are no Geminis nominated! It's the only sign not nominated and as a Gemini, we object!

* Those figures are much higher than they used to be pre 2009 when the Best Picture field expanded. It used to be uncommon to have lots of Best Picture nominees on your resume which makes Willem Dafoe's record particularly impressive. He's appeared in the most Best Picture nominees of this group of 20 actors, SIX in total, and yet only one of them (The Grand Budapest Hotel) happened in the current expanded Best Picture era.