In Contention

Tag: Academy Awards

  • On the Academy’s other rule changes

    With the big news out of the way, there are a few other annual house-cleaning rule alterations that ought to be addressed.

    First up, the Best Animated Feature Film category — which seems to get a face-lift in the rule book every summer — will now have anywhere from three to five nominees. As it was, in a year with 16 qualifying titles, five nominees would be selected. Less than the magic number 16 would yield just three nominees. Now, if 13 to 15 films qualify, four of them will be nominated by the branch. Under that, I’m assuming it’s just three as always.

    VERDICT: I’m okay with this, I suppose, but the qualifying numbers still feel quite arbitrary. Still, this keep quality-heavy films that happen to be quantity-thin for animated output from being slighted.

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  • Gone fishin’

    And so we come to the end of the 2010-2011 Oscar season.  Like Jerry said, what a long, strange trip it’s been.

    Naturally, I want to thank all of the readers who make this an engaging and fun place to come to every day.  I’ve received a lot of generous notes, Tweets and comments in recent weeks regarding the overall culture of the site this season, but I really do attribute much of that to the audience.

    You’re only as good as your readership in this game, I think, but you do get what you put out there.  For our part, we strive to put out a level evaluation of a silly process while infusing it with enough of our own passions and personal considerations to hopefully steer it clear of analytical boredom, all the while refraining from taking any of it too seriously.  It’s the only way I know how to do it, frankly.  And that’s what we got back from you, as well.  So thank you for that.

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  • Oscar’s class of 2010

    (Click for larger version)

  • Nominees luncheon LIVE Q&A

    Wrapped now. Repeat in the embed below. Best quote, from James Franco:

    It was funny to me when the Academy made the announcement, because there was a lot of, ‘Oh, an obvious ploy by the Academy to bring in younger viewers.’ Yeah, duh. Is that a bad thing?

    Jesse Eisenberg had some zingers, too.

  • Ballots are out

    It’s all happening.  Via AMPAS press release, in part:

    Final ballots for the 83rd Academy Awards® were mailed today (February 2) to the 5,755 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

    Completed ballots must be returned to PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC) by 5 p.m. Tuesday, February 22. Ballots received after the deadline will not be counted.

    Listed on the ballots are nominees in 19 Awards categories. Separate ballots for five categories (Documentary Feature, Documentary Short Subject, Foreign Language Film, Animated Short Film and Live Action Short Film) will be distributed after verification of mandatory member attendance at screenings.

    Following the tabulation of the votes, the winners’ names will be placed in sealed envelopes to be opened on Oscar Night®, Sunday, February 27.

  • The In Contention Oscar pool

    You might recall the last few years we’ve used AwardsPicks.com’s Oscar pool.  The site has changed names and is now Picktainment.com, but it’s pretty much the same interface.  We’ve already got this year’s pool up and running, so head on over and make your picks.

    I haven’t settled on a way to weight the categories yet, so I’m open to suggestions.

  • ‘King’s Speech’ leads the pack with 12 Oscar nominations

    On the face of it, the nominees for the 83rd annual Academy Awards seemed fairly unremarkable. Aside from the deafening nature of not hearing Christopher Nolan’s name in the line-up for Best Director (the only true shock of the major categories), everything seemed to be within the expected parameters (even Javier Bardem sliding in, which seemed, increasingly, like a very real possibility these last few weeks).

    But then I got to looking through the craft category nominations and the real interesting beats started to surface. First and foremost, “The King’s Speech” led the field with a whopping 12 nominations, even scoring in the Best Sound Mixing category. That’s major, to say the least. And enough, along with the PGA win, to consider it the frontrunner to win the Oscar for Best Picture.

    “True Grit” wasn’t far behind with 10 nominations, including a bid for the Coen brothers in Best Director after all. Hailee Steinfeld stayed in Best Supporting Actress and Bridges was chalked up, but again, let me go back to the more intriguing crafts fields.

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  • 1/25 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Final predix edition!

    We’re just a handful of ticks on the clock before the Academy unveils its list of nominees for this year’s Oscars.  And I’m up way too early.  But for today’s round-up, it seemed like a good idea to point you to all the final predictions popping up from pundits across the web, so here’s what the “experts” are thinking…

    • Dave Karger [Entertainment Weekly]

    • Tom O’Neil [Gold Derby]

    • Nathaniel Rogers [The Film Experience]

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  • What is the most difficult category to predict this year?

    In your opinion.  I’ll be using the most agreed-upon answers as part of a contest Monday, so speak up.

  • 83rd Oscarcast posters revealed

    I always look forward to the official poster(s) for a given Academy Awards ceremony.  I remember being giddy at the Alex Ross-crafted image (however cheesy “The Gold Knight Returns” might have been as a tagline) from a few years ago.  This year we have four “inviting” you to the show.  Check them out in full after the jump.

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  • 11/9 OSCARWEB ROUND-UP: Screenwriting hopefuls, Hooper on fugly ‘King’s Speech’ poster, MPAA shamed

    • Sasha Stone on the season’s screenwriting contenders. [Awards Daily]

    • “The King’s Speech” director Tom Hooper also hates the poster everyone has been knocking. [Movieline]

    • David Poland split screens “The Social Network” star Armie Hammer. [The Hot Blog]

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  • Thank yous

    (Courtesy: Vulture)

  • Horror at the Oscars

    Anthony Hopkins in The Silence of the LambsNo, I’m not talking about the news that Martin Short and Neil Patrick Harris will be opening the show with a song and dance, but this nugget from Bloody Disgusting:

    While the Academy continues to fail to recognize horror in their prestigious festivities (has it really been 19 years since Silence of the Lambs?), Bloody Disgusting has been tipped off that the 82nd Annual Academy Awards…will feature a segment dedicated solely to our beloved genre. No word on what exactly will happen – at least it won’t feature a singing and dancing Hugh Jackman (I’m still embarrassed for him) – but it will be either an homage via clips or song about horror…If they’re going to work our way into our hearts, we need to see more than District 9 and  Inglourious Basterds getting love…

    Hm.  Thoughts?

  • OFF THE CARPET: Back and forth…forever

    (from left) Carey Mulligan and Peter Sarsgaard in An EducationThe Circuit has run its course.  With the Visual Effects Society‘s awards gala last night and the press release announcement of the International Film Music Critics Association’s list of winners this morning, it’s on to the big show.  But the excitement is ever so slightly dampened, given the drama of the final stretch.

    I recently delighted in reading David Poland and Steve Pond take the overall tone the season eventually developed to task. The former may have his head in the sand vis a vis dirty campaigning, and the latter might be (as he admits) naive to ask for a spirit of togetherness when, the fact is, jobs are on the line. But the overall gist, I’m with it.

    The Oscar season is, by its nature, reductive and combative. But let’s say it together: It’s a pointless exercise with the original and still stated intent of drumming up awareness of an industry’s product. And it is, indeed, unfortunate that what appeared to be one of the cleanest seasons I’ve ever seen was sullied in the fourth turn by the inherently craven nature of those involved — on all sides, I might add.

    But when the dust settles, what are we left with? The movies. And the movies are why we’re all here.

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  • Almost there

  • The numbers behind the Academy Awards

    This is a massive graphic, so click on the jump to check it out.  Courtesy of Business Pundit.

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  • Introducing the Oscar Guide

    OscarsAs of this moment we are 32 days away from this year’s Academy Awards celebration, taking place on Sunday, March 7.  That gives us 23 business days, so I’ve decided to launch a new feature here at In Contention: the Oscar Guide.

    Every week day this month we’ll be featuring one of the 24 Oscar categories in depth, beginning later this afternoon with the Best Supporting Actress field.  On Saturday, March 6, we’ll wrap the feature up with a look at the 10 Best Picture nominees and one more analysis before the big day.

    Each Oscar Guide entry will be accompanied by a sidebar poll asking you, the readership, what you think deserves to win in said category.  That worked out nicely last year.  (The supporting actress poll is already live.)  At the end of the run we’ll have a master list of what you all think the slate of winners SHOULD look like, and we’ll have fun discussing and (surely) debating each category along the way.

    So keep an eye out later today and throughout the month as we inch closer to the 82nd annual Academy Awards!

  • The importance of coming up with 10

    Oscar ballotSteve Pond has WAY too much time on his hands, but God love him for his brilliant little experiment that illustrates, rather clearly, the importance of filling in the entire Oscar ballot with 10 films.  You hear that Oscar voters?  To say nothing of the fact that, if you can’t come up with 10 films you liked in a given year, you should turn in your card, it is important now more than ever that you take this a little bit seriously.

    Pond assembled all the ranked critics’ top 10 lists at Movie City News and dished them out according to a typical preferential voting system, and he came up with a very important point in the midst of all that shuffling:

    And here’s the deal with my count: in two-thirds of the cases, 81 out of 122 ballots, all or part of the vote went to the critic’s first choice. But second, third and fifth choices also counted fairly often (rarely fourth choices, though there’s no good reason for that), and a dozen voters actually helped out candidates with their sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth choices.

    Richard Roeper, for instance, unknowingly cast his vote for “Fantastic Mr. Fox,” which was listed seventh on his ballot. Eric Kohn of indieWIRE did the same for “A Serious Man,” which he’d put in his eighth slot.

    Kohn’s case was a typical example of how lower-ranked films can come into play. He’d put “Sita Sings the Blues” in his number-one position – but since he was the only one to do so, that film was eliminated at the beginning of the second round of tallying. His number two and three choices, “Two Lovers” and “The Girlfriend Experience,” hadn’t gotten any number one votes and thus were never in the running to begin with. His fourth-ranked film, “The Hurt Locker,” got more than enough votes in the first round to immediately secure a nomination, so it no longer needed his vote. Finally, down in the number eight slot, was a film that was still in the hunt, and one that subsequently used his vote to help win a nomination.

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