Saturday, December 19, 2015 at 9:00AM Just for silly quick fun I thought we'd list our most popular tweets this year. Not necessarily the best but the ones that caught on somehow. It's like a very quick 140 character scrapbook of the film year.
Our 15 Most Popular Tweets of 2015 after the jump...
Opening Twitter. pic.twitter.com/2s2JKHoco4
— Kyle Stevens (@cinementalist) October 12, 2015
Saturday, December 5, 2015 at 5:00PM Two recent trade editorials have driven us crazy enough to write long hair-pulling screeds in response. We're bald now! The first was a 'dishonorable' defense of our #1 gripe Category Fraud and we'll be quicker about this one which is about our second biggest pet peeve of Oscar season: 'the holiday glut' aka the ghettoization of adult movies into the final quarter of each year.
The Hollywood Reporter's "Everybody Cannibalized Each Other" - Harvey Weinstein
Weinstein begins his guest editorial by calling the final quarter glut of awards-hopefuls a "pet peeve" which is fine if we say it... but him?!? He championed it for 20 years with his own actions!
Friday, December 4, 2015 at 1:10PM 
'I'm not SUPPORTING you. I don't even like you!'I'm not in the habit, as some online pundits are, of dissing articles written by other people but two articles just published enraged me. ...I exaggerate. They made my skin crawl from their indifference and hypocrisy. Let's get the indifference out of our system first.
Variety's "Long and Honorable History of Category Fraud" - Tim Gray
Gray immediately pisses the reasonable Oscar-lover off with the way he begins this defense of Category Fraud, a topic birthed and coined right here at The Film Experience years ago since nobody else was willing to get riled up about it and make it a cause. He introduces the topic in the the context of real world problems with life & death consequences as a way to insure that any complaints about the topic are, in the grand scheme of things, entirely irrelevant. Yes, it's true, Tim. Category Fraud does not lead to car accidents (unless Nathaniel is enraged and driving) and it doesn't threaten the world's natural resources. But this is a cheap argument. Imagine the rage you'd conjure in the reader if you used this same tactic when speaking about the lack of diversity in casting and directing jobs in Hollywood. The same is, in fact, true. Nobody will die and it won't cause starvation or droughts if people of color don't get acting jobs and women aren't considered for directing big budget Hollywood movies. But that is absolutely no reason to not care about these problems!
Every topic will seem small when placed against death and disaster. By this logic the Oscars aren't worth talking about either! But that does not mean that the topics are unimportant within their own "ecosystems." That's Gray's choice of word so let's use it. [More...]
Wednesday, December 2, 2015 at 11:00AM 
In the past 48 hours I've screened The Revenant, Joy, and Creed. Since the first two are still under embargo we're not allowed to speak of them yet. I will say these non spoilers that The Revenant continues the tradition of Inaritu's love of miserable arguably suicidal men, and Joy continues in the tradition of David O. Russell sandbox like playgrounds for actors eager to play with their new parts. But...embargo!
As movie buffs well know, the original Rocky was a smash hit when it premiered in December 1976, becoming the biggest box office hit of that year, making a star of Sly Stallone, charting a #1 single ("Gonna Fly Now"), and earning an incredible 10 Oscar nominations. It eventually won Picture, Director, and Editing on the big night. And against unreal competition too: Network, Taxi Driver, Bound for Glory, and All The President's Men. The Rocky series spawned a few popular sequels but eventually exhausted its welcome as film franchises do. Creed, smartly plays like both a straight sequel (VII) and a spinoff or rebirth with Rocky Balboa passing the franchise torch to Apollo Creed's son Adonis (Michael B Jordan).
So let's talk Creed and Oscar and the ways it could well factor into the Oscar race after the jump...
Monday, November 23, 2015 at 2:24PM 
Precursor awards are like microwave popcorn. It takes a second for the bag to heat up and then things really start popping. Today the Producers Guild of America named their nominees for Theatrical Documentary Features. The Producers Guild Award winners will be presented on Saturday, January 23, 2016 in Los Angeles.
Documentary Feature Nominees
The only one of these titles I hadn't personally heard of before today was Something Better to Come, a poverty-doc about children living on a gabarge dump in Moscow. More on what this list does and doesn't mean for Oscar after the jump...
