Last year, Christopher Plummer became the older Oscar winner and kept alive the trend of actors with “Chris” in their name winning the Oscar for Best Supporting Actor (Christian Bale and Christoph Waltz) before him. Waltz will have to win again to keep that going in this year’s competitive list of nominees.

Time to bust into the acting categories! Best Supporting Actress has been a lock in recent years and things don’t appear to have changed. Last year, Octavia Spencer was the much-deserved winner for balancing comedy and drama, a nice change from the two previous winners who played overbearing mothers (Melissa Leo in “The Fighter” and […]

Occasionally a great, critically adored foreign film will come along and impress so many people that the walls of the Best Foreign Language category cannot contain it. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” was one such film. Michael Haneke’s “Amour” is only the ninth foreign language film to do it and as such, it’s the biggest favorite […]

2012 was an incredible year for animation in quality and quantity, and so five films were nominated this year, only the fourth time that’s happened in the category’s 12-year history. Interestingly in terms of U.S. box office, only two of the six highest-grossing animated films were nominated. Popular films including “The Lorax,” “Hotel Transylvania” and […]

Some rule changes for eligibility as well as other factors could shake up the precedent for the Academy to award the high-profile documentaries, but the subject matters of these films are going to be quite familiar to you.

Wouldn’t it be nice if short films got the same publicity the other 11 months of the year? At least the Academy honors these films, even if they blow right through them during the ceremony, and some theater chains will screen all the nominees together. 

If the Academy is doing nothing else right, they’ve made up for it by restoring the Best Original Song category. After just two films were nominated last year, the rules changed as to how Academy members vote for the category, namely that they don’t. Now, the number of nominees is contingent on the number of […]

Time to finish out the technical categories with breakdowns of both the Best Cinematography and Best Film Editing categories. These people have a serious impact on carrying out the director’s vision both when it’s being shot and when shooting has wrapped and the scenes are actually being turned into a movie.

After breaking down the computer-heavy categories first in Sound and Visual Effects, next on the list of Oscar categories to tackle are the three categories that involve work mostly done the old-fashioned way.

It’s time again from my annual breakdown of the categories at the Academy Awards for the month leading up to the ceremony, which is on Feb. 24. We start with the technical awards, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Visual Effects.

The Oscar nominees this year were announced two weeks early, and it so happened I was on vacation. It was tough not to include my annual predictions, but considering how wild award season has been so far, it wouldn’t have been pretty. As such, I still have lots to say about this year’s nominees.

With the Academy Award nominations already having been announced, the Golden Globes lost a bit of thunder this year, but with such a wide open race in terms of who will take home Oscar gold, the winners of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s accolades has to count for something right? Well, if anything, things just […]

Although its esteem has wained in recent years as the Oscar precursor, the 70th Annual Golden Globes are happening on Jan. 13. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler are co-hosting (both were nominated for their respective NBC comedies) and would you look at that, no abominable nomination choices. None of the movies or people nominated are […]

It’s been a great year for movies, so it’s been predicted (ironically) that we’d have a rather unpredictable Oscar season. But one film is threatening to change all that. With Best Picture awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, National Board of Review, Boston Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Online and […]

Another year in the books, but what a more unusual journey. I could be sitting here this fine Monday morning with spit and ire for Brett Ratner’s production job and Eddie Murphy’s hosting duties, but thankfully fate (and Ratner’s mouth) had other plans. It would’ve certainly given the ceremony a unique flavor, but I have a […]