"Perhaps Margot Robbie in a Bubble Bath Could Explain This One To Me"

Now that we've had 24 hours to process the Oscar nominations I polled Team Experience for one last Oscar Nomination reaction roundup. Which nomination did each of our contributors find most mystifying? Here are their answers which amused me so I hope you feel the same. 

Please bear in mind that these items do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the management. We each have our pet peeves and our "achievements" we just can't with. Share your headscratchers with us in the comments. What's still antagonizing you this morning a full 24 hours after getting used to it as an "Academy Award Nominee" 

Individual targets after the jump...

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Link Wars Episode ∞: The Blog Awakens

Guardian has a piece on the 7 best financial films for the release of The Big Short. Confession: I'm always surprised when internet lists remember that films existed before 1990. And this list has 4 of them [gasp]
CHUD Have you heard Radiohead's Spectre theme. The studio went with Sam Smith instead for the latest Bond
Variety Tupac Shakur biopic All Eyez On Me is coming your way (and filming already). Given the massive success of Straight Outta Compton expect more hiphop/rap biopics 

Gothamist Oooh. AMC Village 7 has reopened in Manhattan with spiffy new seats and bathrooms. I haven't been there in years but will have to return now. Now if only Film Forum and Village East would get renovations and they'd burn down the Angelika, Cinema Village, and Lincoln Plaza and build new non-tiny, non-crappy, subwayrumble-free arthouse theaters somewhere else... wouldn't that be swell?! 
MNPP the only recap of the recent Tom Hardy junket journalist dustup that you need is right here. Seriously who cares?! Stars cancel or push back interviews ALL THE TIME. 
Comics Alliance prepare for your heart to melt with these photos of Chris Pratt visiting a children's hospital 

Best of '15
Florida Film Critics went with Mad Max Fury Road as best of the year in 4 categories and gave Daisy Ridley Breakthrough for Star War: The Force Awakens
Movie Scene Kyle Turner's top 15 from Appropriate Behavior (yay!) to Mistress America (say what?)
Playbill 10 biggest social media moments for Broadway this year. Naturally Hamilton made the biggest splash
Theater Mania names the 9 best Off Broadway shows... i dont understand this number 9? It has to be 10 or 15 this year. I mean, MATH. SYMMETRY. LIST RULES. 
The Film Stage names 50 "Overlooked" films... though the criteria for overlooked is sligthly murky. Tangerine and James White, for example, didn't get even a tiny percentile of the box office they deserved but they did win spirit and gotham nods and in Tangerine's case a lot of press... which has to count for something. Very happy to see Appropriate Behavior (which you'll remember I loved nearly two years ago at its festival debut) and Victoria on the list though. Hopefully Mustang's inclusion (Team Experience loves it) will look silly after the fact if the Academy nominates it and it proves a late-bloomer at the box office. But for now with only $100,000 in the bank at only 3 theaters, it deserves this list placement.

More Star Wars... The Force Won't Go Back To Sleep
Digital Spy People will post ANYTHING about Star Wars for traffic. Here we consider the possibility of a gay Star Wars romance between Finn & Poe 
Gizmodo award winning interactive fan animations - Love the Grand Prize winner on Tattooine.
Vulture polls several celebrities about the best order to view the 7 Star Wars films in. The correct answer is obviously 4,5,6,7 (ignoring 1,2,3) but there's a lot of variety in the responses
/Film concept designs for BB-8 
American Leather Jacket for only $209 you can try to look at cool as Finn or Poe from Star Wars with the jacket they trade off onscreen
Academy Conversations the filmmaking team talks about production - I haven't watched it in full yet but it's nice to see Michael Kaplan represented there. He's one of the great costume designers and has had ZERO academy attention. That's probably because his best work comes in stylish contemporary film (Fight Club, Burlesque, Flashdance, Mr & Mrs Smith) or genre films (Blade Runner, Star Trek, The Force Awakens) and we know how Oscar feels about both of those kinds of pictures.

And if you haven't checked out the Emo Kylo Ren twitter page, do so. Laugh, you will. Know that it's more fun than a yub-nubbing Ewok treehouse party. This is my favorite but there were many many choices for that honor...

mom please don't even pretend you know what I'm going through right now also we are out of conditioner

— Emo Kylo Ren (@KyloR3n) December 22, 2015

Box Office: Bollywood Hoopla

Amir here, with the weekend’s box office report. As predicted last week, the top two films didn’t change at the high end of the pile. Spectre is doing impressive enough business in the US, but its record-breaking haul in China was the real gain. The total worldwide gross of the film surpassed the half billion-dollar mark. There were four new wide releases, three of which landed in the top ten and, embarrassingly, I hadn’t heard of a single one of them before sitting down for this column, so let’s give each a crack.

Love the Coopers, is a family Christmas comedy, and because all mentions of Christmas in November should be banned, we’ll skip over it—it was right behind The Peanuts Movie in third place. The 33, the Antonio Banderas-led film about Chilean miners did as well as a film about such a dark—literally and figuratively—tragedy can do. The real story, however, is India’s Prem Ratan Dhan Payo. It’s an open secret that Bollywood films do really well without significant advertising, but this one is doing even better than usual. Already having the best opening of all time for a Bollywood film in India in the bag, where it opened on the 4-day Diwali weekend, Salman Khan and Sonam Kapoor’s newest venture has the best opening weekend for an Indian film in the UK and one of the top five best in the US.

The Weekend's Top 5
Spectre $35.4m (cum. $130.7m)
The Peanuts Movie $24.2m (cum. $82.4m)
Love the Coopers $8.4m (new)
The Martian $6.7m (cum. $207.4m)
The 33 $5.8m

On the limited side of things, Angelina Jolie’s By the Sea grossed a dismal $9k per screen—it’s a shame; this film looks gorgeous—and James White, one of the under the radar gems at this year’s TIFF fared slightly better, but it’s hard to gauge its success given it’s only playing on one screen.

What did you see this weekend? Are you excited to see Prem Ratan Dhan Payo?

Review: Spectre

Tim here. Four films in, it feels like it's been enough time for the Daniel Craig era of James Bond films to stop doing the origin story thing, but nope, Spectre – the 24th film in the franchise, and the first in its second half-century of life – once again finds the rebooted series putting a whole movie's worth of energy into establishing something that was covered in, like, one scene back in 1963's From Russia with Love. That being the existence of the titular criminal organization, the Special Executive for Counterintelligence, Terrorism, Revenge, and Extortion. It's not so much frustrating as it is baffling: "learn more about Spectre" is basically the whole of the film's plot, with no real threat that needs to be stopped. There's some weird and unsatisfying business with a multinational agreement to share espionage resources, I guess that's the thing driving the plot. A cache of stolen nukes or an attempt to start World War III, it ain't.

Does any of that really matter? If anything, Spectre reveals the core pleasures of the Bond franchise, by removing even the vestige of an actual narrative. It's an exercise in lifestyle porn globetrotting, with Craig handsomely filling out a whole bunch of Tom Ford suits as director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Hoyte Van Hoytema take great pains to make a lot of extremely gorgeous locations in Europe and North Africa look, well, gorgeous. At frequent intervals there is an action setpiece, most of which are pretty terrific. [More...]

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Box Office: The Winner Is Bond... James Bond

Amir here, with the weekend’s box office numbers. The fourth Bond turn by the sexy but no longer enthusiastic Daniel Craig predictably ruled the weekend, scoring the franchise’s second highest opening weekend gross of all time. The highest number belongs to Skyfall, of course, and there was never any chance, with cooler reviews and less general excitement, that Spectre was going to break the series’ record. All things considered this is a great success for everyone involved.

Box Office Top 5
new Spectre $73m
new The Peanuts Movie $45m
The Martian $9.3m (cum. $197m)
Goosebumps $6.9m (cum. $66.4)
Bridge of Spies $6m (cum. $60)

The Peanuts Movie came second and, again, the numbers can be considered successful when one considers the younger generation’s emotional distance with these characters. Both Spectre and Peanuts have another week to spend at the top before their competitions arrive in the form of The Hunger Games and The Good Dinosaur.

New Limited Releases
Miss You Already $570k
Spotlight $300k
Brooklyn $181k
Trumbo $77k
Peggy Guggenheim Art Addict $22k
In Jackson Heights $15k
Theeb $7k

On the limited side of the releases, Oscar hopefuls Spotlight, Brooklyn and Trumbo all entered the fray. Spotlight has the weekend’s highest per theatre average, which certainly isn’t too shabby for a film many are already considering the frontrunner. Whether these numbers can translate to success when the film goes wide remains to be seen. Meanwhile, Steve Jobs continues its lacklustre run. Is it just too soon for people to be interested in a biopic about him?

What did you see this weekend?