29 Days until Oscar

29 is the number of the day. It's also the most common age for Best Actress winners. That's quite something if you consider that the youngest best actor winner of all time was 29 and just a month shy of his 30th (Adrien Brody, The Pianist). The gender bias that preferences young actresses and older men gets even worse when you realize that HALF of all Best Actress winners won by the age of 33. Less than 10% of Best Actor winners were 33 and under. The eight women who won at 29 are...

Emma Stone is the youngest Best Actress nominee this year at 28 and expected to win by most pundits. Stone is the same age now as the following winners were: Norma Shearer in The Divorcee, Joanne Woodward in The Three Faces of Eve, Luise Rainer in The Good Earth and Charlize Theron in Monster.

Curiously there is no "most common age" for Best Actors (spread out fairly evenly from mid 30s to mid 40s) or Best Supporting Actress (all over the place). The most common age for Supporting Actor winners is 46 (seven winners).

Kiss the hand

Happy Thoughts from Oscar Nominations!

We've delivered the hot takeaways, mourned the snubs, but now let's get positive. I polled Team Experience about what made them happiest this morning and which category is the best overall. I hope you'll chime in. An unexpected consensus emerged straightaway in their answers. More after the jump...

Which nomination made you happiest?

Tim: Kubo and the Two Strings for Best Visual Effects. It's a great movie that deserves as much as it can possibly get, and also a good reminder to keep our conceptions about what "counts" as film craft as broad as possible

Laurence: Kubo and the Two Strings for Visual Effects. After the Ex Machina win I got the sense that branch was becoming more interested in awarding outside the box effects, so I bet on this nomination happening early. It's stunning work even by Laika standards...

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Team Experience: Mourning the Snubbed, Pondering the Head-Scratching Nominees

I polled Team Experience this morning about the Oscar nominations. Here are the first two related questions on absences and curious inclusions. We expect your answers to add to the conversation in the comments. 

What omission in this morning nominations most upset you?

Matthew: Like everyone else on here, I am devastated, first and foremost, for the outstanding Annette Bening, an exclusion for which I hold A24 accountable. Finally, I'd like to imagine that Pharrell and Sing Street composer Gary Clark are off together somewhere getting hammered and slinging insults at the tire-fire that is "Can't Stop This Feeling."

John: The intense excitement at Isabelle Huppert's name being read first, chased quickly by the sad reveal that Annette Bening lost a nomination is a perfect capsule for this Oscar morning...

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Personal Ballots: Best Actor and Best Actress

And so it's come to this, the finale of the traditional Oscar-like categories in our own annual Film Bitch Awards. All the nominations have been announced in the first round ("special" non-Oscar related categories still to come). It's years like this when I wish YOU wish 5 were a much larger number in so many fields. There were seven leading ladies I really wanted to honor and six leading men but five does not equal six or seven. Alas. It's also strange when films you really love are denied any nominations in your own prizes. Such was the fate of one film from my top ten list (Embrace of the Serpent). Fences and Lion, two Oscar hopefuls I'm quite fond of, also look deceptively unloved with only two nominations each though with both Best Actor and Best Actress citations, Fences can't complain. 

tfw when you realize you're nominated for a Film Bitch Award. (Huppert plays it cool)

In the final nomination tally, 35 movies received at least one nomination, with Arrival and La La Land leading the pack with 8 nominations each (will they also lead the Oscar nods?). The Handmaiden, Moonlight, 20th Century Women, and Jackie trailed not so far behind. The rest of the films weren't as lucky but perhaps they'll rise in the "special" categories to come. 

Page 1 Picture, Director, Screenplay, Animation
Page 2 Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress
Page 3 Visual Categories: Cinematography, Costume Design, etcetera...
Page 4 Aural Categories: Song, Score, etcetera