Foreign Film Long List Overachieving Recap!

Tonight or tomorrow -- depending on how quick they are with the press release -- we'll learn which foreign film submissions made the finals for the Oscar nominations. There are always nine. We don't know why they settled on that number as 10 makes more sense (in a 50/50 kind of way) and 15 would make this category more symmetrical with the other specialty category of Documentary Feature. But if you're curious about how the process of whittling all this down works, you should check out Anne Thompson's breakdown.

One thing that's easy to forget about this complex process is that the actual five Oscar nominations that come from this nine-wide finalist list are decided on by yet another panel, one that changes each year and usually includes a few big names: Florence Foster Jenkins co-stars Streep & Grant were both on that final nominating committee last year for example.

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"Paris Is Burning" and "The Breakfast Club" Among National Film Registry's Class of 2016

By Daniel Crooke

Founded in 1988 as a way to protect and preserve the heritage of “culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant” American cinema, the Library of Congress has announced their annual list of films to be inducted into their National Film Registry – and it’s packed with inspired choices. While most of the internet is consumed with Top Ten fever as the year winds down, let's detour from the contemporary cinema and take a look at this list of twenty-five classics...

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New Photos from "Where is Kyra?"

more pics and an important question...

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Christmas Classics: Little Women (1994)

A few members of Team Experience will be sharing posts on their favorite Christmas movies. Here's Lynn Lee 

You can have your Christmas Story or your It’s a Wonderful Life.  For me, my Christmas movie will always be Gillian Armstrong’s Little Women, which took its bow Christmas Day, 1994, and has kept a place in my heart ever since.  Even though it faithfully adapts a literary classic, the movie’s also a perfect encapsulation of the ’90s: besides Winona Ryder, for whom Little Women was something of a pet project, it also featured a very young Kirsten Dunst, fresh off her star-making turn in Interview With a Vampire, and Claire Danes, still in her Angela Chase days, making her big-screen debut, as well as a 20-year-old Christian Bale completing his transition from child to adult actor.

None of that, of course, meant anything to me when I first saw the film...

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Screenplay Shake Up Means New Predictions

We warned everyone to not "lock" up any screenplay predictions too early, especially when the provenance of a screenplay is confusing, and our warnings were not in vain. The Academy has rejected the campaigns of Loving and Moonlight as "Originals" and they have been moved to the "Adapted" category. Both had made no secret that they were inspired by other works, despite their Original campaigns. Loving is partially based on the documentary The Loving Story (2011) and Moonlight on an unproduced play (of sorts -- though now the playwright is saying it never was intended as a play... which makes the situation yet more confusing) called "In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue". Regardless, the murkiness was enough for the Academy to cry foul on their preferred Original designations.  (If only the Academy's acting branch would play this kind of interference when obviously lead acting roles like Rooney Mara in Carol or Hugh Grant in Florence Foster Jenkins or dozens of others in recent years claimed "supporting" designation.)

Prior to this Academy ruling, the Original Screenplay competition looked enormously competitive with a nail-biting battle between Manchester by the Sea and Moonlight for the gold. Now both movies -- arguably the two biggest critical darlings of the year -- have a clearer shot at a win but it does make the competition for the other four nominations in each category more exciting and open. Both charts have been updated accordingly. Which screenplays do you think benefit from this ruling?