Saturday, February 20, 2016 at 7:06PM 
Murtada here. Love for the Meryl and C/Kates of the world can skewer perceptions. It's rare for actors to receive multiple Oscar nods. Most first nominations are also last nominations. Less than 180 actors in Oscars 88 years have managed 3 or more. And this year Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight joined that list. (The rest is after the jump due to extreme gif'ing).
Saturday, February 20, 2016 at 1:00PM If you haven't fully investigated the Best Picture Chart you should do that today. There are several unusual ways to rank the 8 nominees for Best Picture: machismo factor, number of deaths, MPAA ratings, running time, and more.
Sample to your right. Check it out
Ranking, my friends, is mandatory since Best Picture is determined on a preferential ballot. There's mine to the far right (this was crafted the day of nominations so no "backlash" was in play). Theoretically the preferential voting puts polarizing pictures at a disadvantage but what isn't polarizing these days?
How would you rank them? Are you still undecided as to which film will win? Three good indicators (SAG Ensemble, PGA, and DGA) famously went to three separate pictures (Spotlight, The Big Short, and The Revenant) confusing the matter more than is usual. If you missed the latest podcast Nick and I talked about the most difficult categories to predict which we're guessing are: Picture, Director, Costume Design, Production Design, and Sound
Friday, February 19, 2016 at 12:30PM 
Oscar is only 9 days away! So it's time for 9 lists with the magic number 9. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE. NINE.
According to this website there are 9 Irish nominees this year? Kiss them!
I can only find six though. Maybe they meant all Room & Brooklyn noms (6) plus actors (2) plus short film (1)?
Best Picture Ed Guiney, Room
Best Actress Saoirse Ronan, Brooklyn
Best Actor Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs
Best Director Lenny Abrahamson, Room
Best Adapted Screenplay Emma Donoghue, Room
Best Live Action Short Benjamin Cleary, Stutterer
The 9 best movies of all time that received exactly 9 nominations (in chronological order, *indicates Best Picture winner)
1941 Citizen Kane
1951 A Place in the Sun
1969 They Shoot Horses Don't They?
1979 All That Jazz
1979 Kramer vs Kramer *
1992 Howards End
2002 The Hours
2009 The Hurt Locker*
2013 12 Years a Slave*
Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 9:15AM 10 DAY UNTIL OSCAR! Random Oscar Trivia This Morning...
Today is the 91st birthday of George Kennedy. In addition to getting to spend a lot of shirtless sweaty hours with Paul Newman (mmm) in Cool Hand Luke, he's the oldest living Best Supporting Actor winner. But who, you ask, are the others? (Just humor me and ask okay?)
Okay, okay. I'll tell you!
The Five Oldest Living Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners
after the jump...
Wednesday, February 17, 2016 at 10:45AM 
I'm beginning to have butterflies. You? Just for fun some random trivia surrounding the number 11 today. Links go to previous articles here at TFE on these films or performers
• Pictures with exactly 11 Oscar nominations
Mr Smith Goes to Washington (1939), Rebecca (1940), Sergeant York (1941), The Pride of the Yankees (1942), Sunset Blvd (1950), West Side Story (1961), Judgment at Nuremberg (1961), Oliver! (1968), The Godfather Pt II (1974), Chinatown (1974), The Turning Point (1977), Gandhi (1982), Terms of Endearment (1983), Amadeus (1984), A Passage to India (1984), Out of Africa (1985), The Color Purple (1985), Saving Private Ryan (1998), Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), The Aviator (2004), Hugo (2011), and Life of Pi (2012)
• Movies that won exactly 11 Oscars
That's the most any movie has ever won and it's a three way tie: Ben-Hur (1959), Titanic (1997), The Lord of the Ring: Return of the King (2003). Currently Ben-Hur is being remade and is supposedly opening this very summer... wish them good luck because living up to such a legendary film is never easy and remaking one at all is a fool's errand.
• Only person to win exactly 11 Oscars
Cedric Gibbons won the Production Design category 11 times, back when it was called Art Direction. His first was for The Bridge of San Luis Rey (1929) and his last for the Paul Newman film Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956). That's the second most Oscars won by anyone. Walt Disney has the most with 20.
• Directors who've helmed exactly 11 Best Picture nominees:
None. Steven Spielberg is almost there, with Bridge of Spies being his 10th. He's in second place currently for most with only William Wyler ahead of him with 13. Wyler's record, which once seemed invulnerable, is sure to be defeated in the future now that we have more Best Picture nominees per year.
• Oscar winner of 2011
The Artist, a silent comic homage to the early days of Old Hollywood. And speaking of...
• Oscar winner of 1911
Just kidding, the Oscars didn't exist back then. The first American "feature films" as we know them (i.e. over an hour in length) started showing up soon thereafter and by the mid-teens 100 years ago Hollywood was on fire, and I'm not talking about the flammability of celluloid. By the mid teens the industry was producing over 500 features a year (most of them lost now of course) and some of them totally epic. See: D.W. Griffith's influential 3 hour double whammys of The Birth of a Nation (1915) and Intolerance (1916)
Bette in DARK VICTORY (1939) which I might call her third best performance
• Actors with exactly 11 Oscar nominations
None. Unless you count Bette Davis's write in for Of Human Bondage (1934) in which case she has 11 nominations. Curiously she won for her first two official nominations (Dangerous and Jezebel) and then just got better and better but never won again despite frequent nominations!
YOUR TURN. Use the number 11 wisely in the comments, however you'd like!
