Tuesday, December 24, 2013 at 11:01PM 'Who can keep up during Christmas?' I asked in my column over at Towleroad yesterday and after some mumbling about mystifying release strategies for platforming properties (read it if you can't get enough of me) I got to the heart of the matter with two wide releases. They are reprinted here with a bit of embroidery to fill out my thoughts...
Tuesday, December 24, 2013 at 8:33AM Have you seen this "From Script to Screen" video for Gravity? It's basically a very concise and very watchable "Making of" documentary for the YouTube generation. That generation is basically all of us now, whenever we were born. "You've only got 5 minutes? Here you go!"
Monday, December 23, 2013 at 7:44PM Parade 10 movie locations worth visiting from Walter Mitty to Sideways to Harry Potter and more...
Cinephilia and Beyond has links to all 2013 screenplays available for download legally direct from studios
New Yorker the best movies of the year
Slant best posters of the year
Variety The Santa Barbara Film Festival is celebrating the Before trilogy with screenings. I love that trilogy but what ISN'T Santa Barbara celebrating? I swear they have some tribute to every single contender... they're like the NBR, carefully giving out enough awards to get EVERY studio to their annual dinner
The Onion "9 Photos Of Jennifer Lawrence That Will Make You Reassess The Scope Of The 1986 Vienna Convention On The Law Of Treaties Between States And International Organizations"
Deadline Brie Larson and Jessica Lange are joining lead Mark Wahlberg in the James Caan lead role in a remake of The Gambler (1974)
Vulture John Ridley on the toughest scene to write in 12 Years a Slave, the one with Alfre Woodard
Wolfy
Dealbook how do Jordan Belfort's victims feel about The Wolf of Wall Street?
In Contention counts down Leonardo DiCaprio's best performances. Wolf scores pretty high
The Wrap a Wolf of Wall Street Academy screening gone berserk. Scorsese gets a "shame on you" from a voter.
Awards Daily Sasha Stone also chimes in with a "this is why we can't have nice things" though I'm like "this is the last time anyone is going to call the movie 'nice'.
It's been the talk of twitter today but I love David Poland's truth-serving response most...
@Matthew_Lucas But I hate these hyped up stories about Academy screenings that are always f-ing Rashomon with slight dementia
— David Poland (@DavidPoland) December 23, 2013
An Oscar question
Here's a new spot for Dallas Buyers Club trumpeting its prize haul thus far. That awards loot is somehow more than what's sunk in if you know what I mean... but it's been a noisy season and Focus is relatively quiet. Is Dallas Buyers Club something we're underestimating outside the obvious places (Actor & Supporting Actor)
Saturday, December 21, 2013 at 11:26PM 
The Oscar Charts are fully revised. Enjoy! I've currently predicted 12 Years a Slave, Gravity, Captain Phillips and American Hustle to lead the nominations hogging 37 nominations between them and The Great Gatsby and Saving Mr Banks to share the asterisked honor of "most nominations without a Best Picture bid. The wildest card is still The Wolf of Wall Street and the guilds will have to show us if that one is going to make a dent.
PICTURE | DIRECTOR | SCREENPLAYS
The top five look set in stone but how many nominees will we have? The race with the most mystery might just be Original Screenplay. Too many films still seem absolutely believable as future 'of course it was nominated' nominees. But there can be only five. Can Enough Said or Fruitvale Station, two films which have never exactly left the conversation, find a way to slip in?
ACTRESS | ACTOR | SUPPORTING ACTRESS | SUPPORTING ACTOR
The precursor awards have locked up the female categories and placed guards around the door despite a pre-season that seemed robust with possibility. That's always a shame when the performances on the outside are as good as the ones that Adèle, Greta, Brie, Sally, Julia, and so on are giving. The male categories have also tightened up but the chamber isn't nearly as air tight. A bit of "who will it be?" mystery remains.
are these the films that are the biggest wild cards in terms of nomination count?
VISUAL CATEGORIES | SOUND CATEGORIES
Before the Guilds speak up let's speculate wildly!
FOREIGN FILM | ANIMATED, DOCS, SHORTS
The fields are already small from "finalist" lists. Watch along with us as we try to see them all.
Friday, December 20, 2013 at 5:00PM Time for major chart fixes now that all the major precursors have announced their nominations. We've started with Best Picture, Best Director, Animation & Documentary, and the Visual Categories... all updated to reflect recent changes (still working on the rest!).
It's The Film Experience, calling about your Oscar nominations...
The visual categories needed the most fine-tuning though they're much harder to predict prior to the guild nominations. Still, I'm feeling pretty bullish on the my predicted costuming lineup -- not that that branch isn't capable of major surprise inclusions and snubs come nomination morning.
Disco fashions could be hot hot hot with Oscar this year if THE BUTLER & AMERICAN HUSTLE are both nominatedThough the BFCA "Critics Choice" Nominations named the exact ten films most pundits believe are heading towards Best Picture nods, the category is still quite volatile thanks mostly to the precursor underperformance of Saving Mr Banks, the weird resurgence of Rush (of all things), the late breaking Wolf of Wall Street (which underperformed at virtually all the precursors despite a very vocal legion of freshly baptized disciples) and the Weinstein Co's stable of four. It's never wise to count Harvey Weinstein out and the major SAG response to The Butler and August: Osage County combined with the Globe embrace of Philomena and the sweep of "first film" prizes for Fruitvale Station suggest that there's life in that quartet yet.
I'm guessing we have five fairly secure pictures: Hustle, Gravity, 12 Years, Capt Phillips, and Nebraska... which have all shown up everywhere they could have hoped to. But beyond that for the possible 6th, 7th, 8th, 9th and/or 10th slots? It still feels like any number and permutation of the remaining eight or so pictures with the buzz could happen. Though, as per usual, I'd love to see a year with just five nominees again if only to watch the internet's collective head explode from the shock of it.
Current Oscar rules do allow for that, you know. We will have anywhere between 5 and 10 Best Picture nominees depending on how the voting goes down (Oscar's own statistical analysis of the past 20 years suggests that 10 is a virtual impossibility).
So have a look at the refurbished charts and report back. More categories to come.