Once Upon a Time in the Link

I have been remiss at sharing good stories and posts from around the web so I hereby return to it.

Pop Matters Jose takes another look at Marion Cotillard's work in Rust & Bone and contemplates Oscar
Pop Elegantarium Alexa loves the screwball comedy of David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook 
Sam Hiti Once Upon a Time in the West fans should check out this artists tumblr 
The Hot Blog David Poland on the NYFCC winners
Cinema Blend two Woody Allen classics coming to Blu-Ray this January 

EW top ten lists from popular critics Owen (Lincoln @ #1) & Lisa (Zero Dark Thirty @ #1). They both choose one Oscar hopeful among their "5 worst of the year" lists, too.
E! Online Rose McGowan is the latest actress trying to achieve Michelle Pfeiffer's now immortal Scarface look 
Antagony & Ecstasy wonderful piece on Life of Pi by one of the web's best critics 
The Carpet Bagger talks to the editor of Flight about the plane crash scene 
My New Plaid Pants who wore it best: animated decapitation
In Contention I totally forgot to mention the Golden Satellite nominations. Lots of love for Les Miz but also weird nominations for films that never opened in the States like Kim Ki-Duk's Piéta so I'm not sure what their criteria is for eligibility anymore

Coming Soon Anne Hathaway recently burst into tears when asked about doing a Catwoman spinoff, adding

...assuming there was enough Kleenex in the world, I would love to do a spin-off

poll by twiigs.com

Vulture Speaking of Anne Hathaway. Sort of. a screening of Les Misérables that I would've killed to be it for Academy and Globe members. Hugh Jackman sang and lap danced for birthday girl Amanda Seyfried 
Gawker on the 13 most powerful images of naked celebrities for 2012 
In Contention Pedro Almodóvar, as you know my favorite living filmmaker, will be getting an Academy tribute in London. I'm so jealous of Guy Lodge right now who gets to attend these London events
Stale Popcorn Glenn on Australia's film award nominations (formerly AFI and now called AACTA) . The musical The Sapphires leads.
Cinema Blend Casey Affleck stayin' creepy. He aims to play the Boston Strangler in a new film 

Finally, Grease superstars of yore, John Travolta and Olivia Newton-John made a new video together for their Christmas album.

No comment. My inner child loves Livvy & Grease too much to comment. (Other than that John Travolta who not so unrecently commanded $20 million a movie maybe could have spared two hundred thousand dollar bills so this didn't look like it was made for two!)

It's ZDT for the NBR

And things were looking so super extra competitive this year! Just a few days ago Les Miz, Argo, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty all seemed to be on somewhat equal footing and to a lesser extent Beasts of the Southern Wild, Silver Linings Playbook, and Life of Pi had all received enough warmish embraces from critics, audiences and  Oscared corners of the showbiz culture that we could look forward to a real competition once the Oscar nominations were announced on January 10th. But with the one-two-zero-dark punch of the New York Film Critics Circle and the National Board of Review, the Oscar race suddenly looks a bit less like a clusterfuck and a ltitle more like a done deal. Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow's engrossing account of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, is suddenly apparently way out front.The NBR generally attempts to spread the wealth but not so this year since they gave ZDT three of their top prizes (Pic, Director, Actress)

Will enough critics groups and precursors disagree or is this just one of those years that seemed competitive and then suddenly wasn't... like, oh, so many years in the past!

Winners and discussion after the jump

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Top Ten: Greatest Lone Oscar Nods of the Past 20 Years

Glenn here with another look at one of my favourite bi-products of the Oscar season. They’re the nominations that we sometimes forget about (unless it’s Norbit – we all remember that one!), but which forever brand a movie as “Oscar nominated”. Sometimes they’re the result of one aspect of a film sucking up all the energy in the room, and sometimes they’re the result of a prickly film finding an appreciative consensus in one category. Oh sure, all of the films below probably deserve the sort of Oscar haul that will greet Les Mis, Lincoln, or Argo, but receiving just one makes for fun statistics and even more fun list making! Let’s count down the best films of the last 20 years to receive just one nomination* on Oscar morning, and take a look at the films of 2012 that could very well reap a similar fate in 37 days.

*We’re going to exclude films that competed only in the animated/foreign/documentary categories since the Academy assigns them a ghetto for reason.

serial killer films don't usually generate the multiple Oscar wins of Silence of the Lambs

Honourable Mentions: I couldn’t go further without mentioning Tarsem Singh’s The Cell (Best Makeup, 2000) and David Fincher’s Se7en (Best Editing, 1995) since these two audaciously constructed classics of the serial killer subgenre are such bold choices for the Academy in their respective categories. They make a particularly disturbing double feature, too. You’ll be disgusted at the world for weeks!

The Best Single Nominee Films of the Past Twenty Years

10. Monster (Lead Actress, 2003)
I’m most definitely on Team Nick Davis when it comes to this captivating portrayal of an unravelling American life. Told as if through hazy, overly orchestrated memory pieces, Patty Jenkins’ film about Aileen Wuornos arguably deserved more credit than just for Charlize Theron’s pulverising central portrayal. A makeup nomination was the least the Academy could have done.

And in 2012: Now that tsunami disaster drama The Impossible has been nixed from the visual effects category, surely its only strong shot at a nomination is for star Naomi Watts. Will the Academy recognise the desperate plight of a white woman in danger? Probably.

Nine more achievements and their possible mirrors this year are after the jump...

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Elusive As Ever: Academy's Documentary Shortlist

As if announcing NYFCC's winners and the nominations for the Annies on the same day weren't indicative that awards season is officially upon us, the Academy went ahead and released the 15-film shortlist of documentaries in contention for gold. For all the talk about the new voting system, this list seems to be no different that what we've seen in previous years. It has left off several of the year's most acclaimed titles. That being said, there is a vintage crop of five nominees waiting to happen since the inclusions here are, for the most part, all worthy of their spot. What can I say? It has been an absolutely incredible year for documentaries. But let's get to the most shocking snubs.

The Central Park Five, which won best doc at the NYFCC a few hours earlier, is the biggest exclusion. I reviewed the film at TIFF, where I fell for its exposé of institutionalized racism in the American justice system and I'm genuinely surprised that the voters didn't take to it. Queen of Versailles is another major surprise, though lacking the apparent "importance" factor of The Central Park Five, this one is not quite as inexplicable. When I first watched the film, I described it as "an exquisite treatise on everything that's wrong with our society today, shot through the lens of reality television" and I stand by it as one of the year's best films from any genre and medium. Then there's West of Memphis, one of Nathaniel's predictions, which despite massive thematic and structural differences with the Paradise Lost series, is quite possibly the victim of the previous film's success just last year. Further off the field where Marley and Jiro Dreams of Sushi, both of which I loved but expected not to see on today's list.

On the flip side, I'm ecstatic to see the Israeli documentary The Gatekeepers. It is by far the most important film to be released this year and one that I expect to see among the final nominees.

More worthy inclusions and the full list of nominees after the jump:

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A Lively Live Action Short Race: Bryce Dallas Howard, Matthias Schoenaerts & More...

Yesterday the finalists list for the Live Action Short film category at the Oscars was announced. Bryce Dallas Howard could be an Oscar nominee in just 39 days time! But Ron Howard's daughter is not the only familiar face in the mix here. 

Matthias Schoenaerts in "Death of a Shadow"

One film about mountain climbers, The Night Shift Belongs to the Stars features popular 80s stars Nastassja Kinski (Tess herself) and Julian Sands. Another, Death of a Shadow, stars the rapidly ascending Belgian god Matthias Schoenaerts (Bullhead & Rust & Bone). He plays a dead soldier who hopes to win his life back by capturing thousands of shadows of dying men and women.

Father and Daughter will be nominated together if "when you find me" wins the nomination on January 10thThe 11 wide finalist list, which also features multiple films about children in war-torned countries (a frequent subgenre within award-winning short films), goes like so:

• A Fábrica (The Factory) 
• Asad 
• Buzkashi Boys 
• Curfew 
• Death of a Shadow (Dood van een Schaduw) 
• Henry  
• Kiruna-Kigali 
• The Night Shift Belongs to the Stars 
• 9meter 
• Salar 
• when you find me 

More info and trailers on the Animated, Shorts & Documentary Oscar Chart Page