At the Oscars, times are changing.

Please welcome guest contributor Mark Blankenship, who you've previously heard from as a guest panelist on the Smackdown...

Even while getting rightfully criticized by presenters who mocked the mostly-white acting line-up and the all-male slate of directors, the Academy still managed to deliver an Oscar ceremony this year that was full of historically inclusive winners. All of those victories are exciting on their own, and some even point to larger trends that suggest there's hope for this awards body yet. If the patterns hold, then the Oscars just might become prizes for all artists, no matter who they are.

For instance, Parasite's historic Best Picture triumph is even more encouraging when you consider it alongside Moonlight's win (about queer black men and boys)...

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New Oscar trivia from the Hollywoods big night

by Nathaniel R

A FEW FIRSTS!

• Laura Dern became the first person in her highly acclaimed family to win the Oscar and is now (3/1) in her nomination/win stats. Her mother Diane Ladd (3/0) and father Bruce Dern (2/0), who she name checked as her heroes in her speech have never won. 
• Parasite became the first South Korean film to win ANY Oscars and it won 4 of them. The individual wins from Bong Joon Ho, Kwak Sin-ae, and Han Jin Won are the first times any Asian has won Best Picture or a writing category...

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1999 with Nick: "Stuart Little" and Visual (and Animated) Effects

This week, in advance of the Oscars, Nick Davis is looking back at the Academy races of 20 years ago, spotlighting movies he’d never seen and what they teach us about those categories, then and now.

This year, The Lion King joins Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas (1993) and Kubo and the Two Strings (2016) as only the third fully animated feature to be nominated for the Best Visual Effects Oscar. I’ve read that tidbit in several places and assume that it must be true, according to people who know better than I do. I wasn’t sure why the movie that defeated Kubo, the 2016 remake of The Jungle Book, did not belong on this list, until I remembered that Mowgli was played by a living, breathing actor, Neel Sethi. Actually, what I mean is that I remembered Mowgli was in the movie, period. And I actually didn’t remember, I had to look it up. The Jungle Book, like an incredible number of films nominated for Best Visual Effects since the category got expanded to a five-wide field in 2010, made almost zero lasting impression on me. Like Best Original Song, it’s a division where I gladly release myself from seeing all the nominees. So, sorry, Lion King. Sorry, Endgame. Don’t get smug, Rise of Skywalker, you weren’t much better. And, until I proposed this series to Nathaniel, which partly exists to fill my own viewing gaps, sorry to Stuart Little, a movie that really tested my sense of the line between animation and visual effects, especially in the context of 1999. That line only gets blurrier as time goes on, so I thought I’d dig in a little...

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Fourth Timers: Brad, Kathy, Saoirse, Joaquin, and the Zeéeeee

Four days till Oscar.

This season brings us multiple four-timers. It's round quatro for a full 25% of our acting nominees: Brad Pitt, Renée Zellweger, Saoirse Ronan, Joaquin Phoenix, and Kathy Bates. They're all on their fourth nomination for acting (though Brad has additional nominations for producing).

Let’s rank their 20 nominated performances for fun after the jump, shall we? Yes, let's...

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5 Days till Oscar

For a bit of 'number of the day' silliness, let's talk about the #5 in relation to Oscar. Obviously the best correlation is that the traditional Oscar category is 5 nominees wide and has been for most of Oscar's history once they settled into their routines with various exceptions of categories which resisted being that large for reasons both understandable and nonsensical. Best Makeup FINALLY became a five wide category this very season (long overdue). Of this year's five-wide categories only one is made up entirely of first time nominees: Best Animated Short!  Other five related nonsense after the jump...

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