I sometimes wonder what Louis Psihoyos might have been able to convey to a massive television audience if Fisher Stevens hadn’t bum-rushed the microphone when “The Cove” won Best Documentary, and/or Oscarcast producers Adam Shankman and Bill Mechanic hadn’t decided to play Psihoyos off before he had a chance to speak up (all on account […]

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Anne and I discuss “Toy Story 3” as the Best Picture category’s best bet coming out of the summer movie months in today’s Oscar Talk.  Much of that has to do with critical approval, yes, but plenty has to do with the monstrous box office take the film has generated. I’ve already written about the […]

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Welcome to Oscar Talk. In case you’re new to the site and/or the podcast, Oscar Talk is a weekly kudocast, a one-stop awards chat shop between yours truly and Anne Thompson of Thompson on Hollywood. The podcast is weekly, every Friday throughout the season, charting the ups and downs of contenders along the way. Plenty […]

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I was waiting for news of these to begin trickling in… in my memory, the flood of official submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar usually begins earlier than August. Anyway, we’re there, so expect a lot more of these updates between now and October 1, the Academy’s formal (if not entirely inflexible) deadline […]

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If any of you are wondering why we haven’t written anything about the tragic passing of anime director Satoshi Kon at the unripe age of 46, it’s because I’ve been struggling to think of something meaningful to say about a filmmaker I felt I was still getting to know. Truth be told, I’ve only seen […]

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As we enter the fall festival season with an Oscar prediction sheet still covered in question marks, there is at least one category where almost all the viable contenders have already been seen. I speak, of course, of Best Documentary Feature, a race already crowded with possibilities from earlier fests and the summer release calendar, […]

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This afternoon I received a copy of Posy Simmonds’s graphic novel “Tamara Drewe,” which has been adapted as a film by director Stephen Frears.  A nice bit of promotion, though I must admit, this has been way off my radar all year.  Guy was no fan at all when he saw it at Cannes, but […]

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“This is for ‘Lilo & Stitch.’”

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Now matter how many times I watch the Oscars, someone will always ask, “So what is the difference between the two sound categories?” The difference is quite significant.  It is so important that the sound branch is only one of two “tech” branches in the Academy (the other being music) that gives out two separate […]

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Some of our younger readers may think of the Academy Awards as a weekend-capping tradition, having taken place on a Sunday for the last 12 years running. However, seasoned Oscar-watchers will remember the days when, rather than rounding out the week, the ceremony kicked it off, falling on Monday so as not to interfere with […]

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A couple of weeks ago, Emma Thompson ruffled a few feathers when she dismissed the talents of one Audrey Hepburn, so it’s apparently open season on knocking gamine screen beauties off their perch. Today serves up another actor-on-actor fight, this time between two living legends of French cinema. It may be a fairer fight — […]

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Catch up with the idea behind this series here. As the 60’s came to a close, Oscar decided to embrace its dirty side and give X-rated “Oliver!” makes it quite a juxtaposition and the film remains one of the most interesting picks by the Academy, particularly as it triumphed in the “Year of the Western.” […]

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After deciding to give an Honorary Oscar to Jean-Luc Godard, it seems the Academy is having trouble tracking the auteur down: The motion picture Academy has spent almost 24 frantic hours trying to reach the iconoclastic filmmaker (“Breathless”) to inform him he’s getting an honorary Oscar — and by late Wednesday they still hadn’t been […]

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This announcement has been imminent for a couple of weeks now, but I guess the i’s (and lowercase j’s) and t’s are finally crossed and dotted. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Biutiful” will be distributed by Roadside Attractions and Liddell Entertainmnet.  Roadside also has indie “Winter’s Bone” in the mix this year and got its awards season […]

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One of the easiest Honorary Oscars to peg was probably Eli Wallach’s (the recipients were announced this morning).  Many have in fact been waiting and waiting for some kind of AMPAS recognition for the esteemed character actor, and finally, it looks like he’ll get it.  So in honor of that:

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Remember two years ago when “WALL-E” was on a destined crash course with awards glory throughout the season, then the Annie Awards (the animation community’s annual kudo fest) came along and shut the lovable robot out?  The benefactor was “Kung Fu Panda,” largely considered infinitely inferior to Pixar’s (some would say) crowning achievement. The immediate […]

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So, you’d think that five competitive Oscars — three for writing, one apiece for producing and directing — would count as an elegant sufficiency of awardage for even the most revered talent in the industry. Not so, apparently, in the case of a certain Francis Ford Coppola. In their wisdom, AMPAS brass have decided that […]

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