Oh, the long-windedness of Best Pictures!

by Nathaniel R

If THE BRUTALIST wins it will become the third longest Best Picture winner of all time.

Each Oscar chart is now up though details are not yet ironed out on some of them. We've talked about Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor as the charts went up, so now let's talk Best Picture. On the chart you can vote on your favourite daily and you can see the films ranked by all sorts of silly criteria (you're welcome to suggest other criteria) such as MPAA ratings, death count, horniness, release dates, the Bechdel Test, reviews, box office, my personal preference, and of course their running times. 

Oh the longwindedness of our current times! The average length of the Best Picture nominees this year is an astonishing 149 (2 hours and 29 minutes) which is not quite a record but close to it...

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Red Flag Alert: "Wicked" will now be two movies long!

by Nathaniel R

Though we've been anxiously awaiting the Wicked movie for (checks IBDB) 18 years, 6 months, and 6 days, we are suddenly dreading it. We were fairly pleased with the casting and the director choice but this new information is a major red flag. In keeping with Hollywood's money-grubbing franchise mania in which they attempt to wrestle as much money from consumers as possible even if they have to pad the stories or extend them well past their breaking point -- popularized by finales that were cleaved in half to guarantee an extra billion in ticket revenue (see Twilight and Harry Potter) or three movies based on a single book (The Hobbit) -- they've decided to make Wicked a two part movie.

Director Jon M Chu (Crazy Rich Asians, In the Heights) writes...

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Sundance: The quandaries of 'Framing Agnes'

by Cláudio Alves

In the running time discourse, I'm firmly in the pro-long films camp, believing that a short duration is in no way indicative of cinematic discipline. Even so, it's easy to understand where people like Nathaniel come from. Everyone has seen some messy movie and came out thinking it could have been stronger if a dozen or so minutes had stayed on the cutting room floor. That being said, the reverse can happen when a project has great potential but kneecaps itself by being too brief, unable to develop its ideas. Chase Joynt's Framing Agnes is one such effort, full of fascinating information and captivating thoughts, not to mention good intentions. Unfortunately, at 75 minutes, this documentary flies by without time to explore any of its ideas with adequate depth…

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Tweetweek

Accurate, this!

seems like the pandemic is structured like buffy the vampire: each season has a lot of mini crises but is about one big bad. (new Variant, etc) by that logic does will the series finale will find us sinking into a hole in the earth as the hellmouth consumes us? plz, yes. hurry.

— Allison P Davis (@AllisonPDavis) December 16, 2021

After the jump many more curated tweets including reactions to Time's Person of the Year, Spider-Man No Way Home, various awards things, and relatable and/or amusing tweets...

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What's the average length of a Best Picture?

by Nathaniel R

This is Lawrence of Arabia... not Dune

It's 136 days until the Oscars and 136 is a golden number. It's the average length, in minutes, of a Best Picture Oscar winner. When we first calculated this number over a decade ago 138 was the average but in the past 10 years or so, running times of actual winners have been shaved a bit. Here are the running times of all winnners from longest to shortest. You'll see that the majority of winners are over 2 hours long which has caused no end of padding in "serious" movies but alas, not enough padding for tender buttocks watching interminable movies.

Here are the running times of all winnners from longest to shortest as well as this year's contenders from longest to shortest...

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