Academy Award

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced the 10 semi-finalists in the animated short film category of the 2010 Academy Awards. Thirty-seven entries had originally qualified in the category. They are: The Cat Piano, Eddie White and Ari Gibson, directors (The People’...

By tomoneil • Pete Hammond points out an interesting change in the rules for Oscar nominations: "Beginning this year, anyone who has ever been nominated at any time for an Oscar in a category outside of their own area will now be allowed to also nominate in that race too." As per Pete, "This means multi-h...

According to The Hollywood Reporter, Uma Thurman will star opposite Pattinson in "Bel Ami." Based on the famous Guy de Maupassant short story, "Ami" follows young journalist George Duroy (Pattinson) who deviously jumped from the bed of one of Paris' most influential women to another to...

By James The Animation Blog reports that Disney bought the cover of Daily Variety last week to promote Up not only for Best Animated Feature, but for Best Picture as well. The L.A. Times says Fantastic Mr. Fox’s impressive showing during it’s qualifying run and it’s critical success may make it a stron...

By The Huffington Post News Team LOS ANGELES — James Caan is seeking a divorce from his wife of 14 years. Court records in Los Angeles show "The Godfather" actor filed... LOS ANGELES — James Caan is seeking a divorce from his wife of 14 years. Caan, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his role as Sonny Corleone in "The Godfa...

By Emily Christianson O'Neil's special interest is how the awards affect each other, particularly the top film prizes that can be viewed as one single gold derby with the Oscars as the finish line. Consider what happened to "Chariots of Fire," for example. In 1981, it emerged from obscurity to win awards at the Ca...

By David Thomson Frank Langella will be 72 on New Year's Day, and he is ready. I was going to add "at last". Because for decades he seemed an uneasy actor on screen. His stage reputation was beyond dispute, and people said that he looked the part – tall, dark and thirsty – when he did Dracula (1979). But he wasn't rea...

By tomoneil If "Nine" doesn't prove to be a strong best picture contender for Weinstein Co., then maybe "Inglourious Basterds" will emerge as a front-runner? Or maybe not. When Gold Derby heard how popular it is with Golden Globe voters and predicted it would win best picture at the Oscars, it triggere...

Has Philip Seymour Hoffman ever picked a bad role? Ever since he came into the public eye, Hoffman has chosen A-list parts from the stage to the screen. (Although there's a 'Law & Order' episode with his name on it that we're dying to see.) His first major pic was a memorable minor part in 'B...

By editor The festival programme will include a comprehensive retrospective of Lozinski's work. Academy Award nominated Marcel Lozinski has been a productive filmmaker since 1972. In his documentaries Lozinski potrays people living under socialism and questioned the prevailing social cond...

By tomoneil Therefore, by process of elimination, it looks like Tarantino is the likely front-runner, which means "Inglourious Basterds" is probably ahead for the top Oscars too. DGA will have hiked influence over the Oscars this year since there's a major gap — five weeks — between the kudos this ye...

By tomoneil Golden Globes expand animation race to five nominees Quiz: What film ties the record for most Oscar nominations? Quiz: Who wrote the most best-picture winners at the Oscars? Inside track on the Oscars' best picture and best director races

Judy Garland in A Star Is Born (top); Brigitte Helm in Metropolis (middle); Jean-Paul Belmondo, Jean Seberg in Breathless (bottom) Turner Classic Movies‘ first-ever TCM Classic Film Festival, which will be held on April 22-25, 2010, in Hollywood, will feature the world premiere of a n...

By Eric D. Snider In a post yesterday about the honorary Academy Awards given out over the weekend, I said this about one of the recipients, Roger Corman: "Corman, who has directed more than 50 films and produced nearly 400 (!), has never been nominated for an Oscar, probably because all of his movies are te...

Originally planned for a spring 2010 release from Fox Searchlight, the movie has been thrust into a Dec. 16th limited U.S. run and Crazy Heart is well and truly in the Oscar race after Amelia crashed and burned and isn’t the awards banker the studio had hoped.

By tomoneil Oscars to arrive late at the 'Precious' party? Inside track on the Oscars' best actor race Quiz: Who wrote the most best-picture winners at the Oscars? Inside track on the Oscars' best picture and best director races Quiz: What film nabbed the most Oscars without winning best picture?

By tomoneil Inside track on the Oscars' best picture and best director races Taylor Swift sweeps CMAs and makes history Ooops — strike '2012' off your Oscars best-picture list Oscars rewind: 'Slumdog Millionaire' tied for most European Film Awards nominations

Two-time Academy Award-winning actor Denzel Washington will star in the 2010 Broadway revival of late playwright August Wilson's Fences, according to the New York Times.

Director/choreographer Adam Shankman has only been the co-producer of the Oscars for three weeks. But Shankman and his co-producer Bill Mechanic, former head of Twentieth Century Fox, have managed to lock down the biggest part of the job, the host. We talked to Shankman about wrangling v...

By tomoneil Flashback: Oscars hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin on 'SNL' Oscars predix for best pix from 16 experts Quiz: Can you spot the Oscars' nominee for best actor? Oscars quiz: Can you spot the only best actress nominee? Woody Allen: An Oscar for Adolf Hitler? Photo credit: NBC

By tomoneil In 2001, Goldstein issued his earliest odds on the best-picture race, betting on "Ali" in August — long before he saw it and seven months before the Oscar ceremony took place — with 4-to-1 odds. "Ali" wasn't even nominated; "A Beautiful Mind" triumphed.

By tomoneil • Jeff Wells embeds the new trailer for "Green Zone" and wonders why Universal bumped this new pic by Oscar nominee Paul Greengrass ("United 93") to March. Theorizes Jeff, "They figured the Academy would never nominate two Iraq War movies for best picture, and that 'The Hurt Locker' was to...

The shocking omission of "Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire" from the list of Gotham Awards nominees has triggered an uproar. Does this mean that there's a backlash against the likely Oscars contender since it swept top awards at the Sundance and Toronto Film Festivals? Wi...

If it's the middle of October and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences hasn't announced either a show producer or host for the upcoming ceremony people are going to start whispering. In fact, a very small group of people -- some of them Academy members -- are going to get a wee bit ne...

By tomoneil However, that may be a big plus for its Oscar hopes. Hollywood voters have always been accused of having blind veneration for Marxism even after the rise of Stalinism and Maoism and the fall of the Iron Curtain. Five years ago Meryl Streep won an Emmy for her fawning portrayal of a heroic Eth...

By Daniel Getahun(noreply@blogger.com) In other words, I feel like Diablo Cody's gimmick is making high school students talk like witty, culturally-informed 30 year-olds - like Diablo Cody. And most of the one-liners were from her daily conversations. And that deserves an Oscar? And a BAFTA? And a WGA Award? And 17 other Best Scr...

By Jeremy Kay Awards season campaigning is like that. It's a sophisticated barrage of screenings, on-stage Q&A sessions, TV ads, screenings, appearances on the talk-show circuit, screenings and DVD screeners that bleeds into the psyche until the voters who decide these things are blubbering...

By Alex Billington A few weeks back when I was at the Telluride Film Festival, my friend Peter Sciretta (of SlashFilm) and I caught up with Oscar nominated director Jason Reitman to talk about his new film Up in the Air, which we had both just seen (read my review). As you know, from my coverage of Telluride, the g...

By Marshall Fine Jennifer pops up in Needy's kitchen later that night, covered with blood and spewing black vomit. The next day in class, however, Jennifer seems none the worse for wear. When male classmates start turning up brutally disemboweled, Needy eventually figures out that Jennifer is responsib...

By Gregory Weinkauf That genius -- né Melvin Kaminsky in New York in 1926, world-renowned as Mel Brooks -- received a glorious tribute Friday night at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' Samuel Goldwyn Theater, in Los Angeles. The capacity event was open to the public, and yet sustained a cozy fam...

By Xan Brooks, Jason Solomons, Andrew Pulver And finally, Jason meets Courtney Hunt, whose feature directorial debut Frozen River scored two nominations at this year's Oscars: best screenplay for her and best actress for Melissa Leo's gutsy portrayal of a woman forced into people-smuggling to make ends meet. Hunt shares why she c...

By Jason Solomons, Xan Brooks lt;p>On this edition of Film Weekly, Ryan Fleck, co-director of the Oscar-nominated Half Nelson, joins Jason Solomons to talk about his new film <a href="http://www.guardian.co.uk/film/movie/126617/sugar">Sugar</a>, a subtle take on the American dream through t...

By Brad Balfour It had a very sizeable Japanese audience before the Academy Award but the box office has more than doubled [to over $60 million] after the Academy Award, yet there's a part of me that wishes it wouldn't take an Academy Award for it to get that big.

By Marshall Fine When Departures won the Oscar in February as best foreign-language film, no one was more surprised than director Yojiro Takita. But then, Departures was a... When Departures won the Oscar in February as best foreign-language film, no one was more surprised than director Yojiro Takita.

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By tomoneil Can 'Watchmen' win over the Oscars? Cheers and boos for the Oscars show Live blogging the Oscars Get Gold Derby on Twitter. Join the Gold Derby Group at Facebook. Become friends with Tom O'Neil on Facebook. Get Gold Derby RSS feed via Facebook. RSS Feedburner. RSS Atom.

Shadow and movies and light and it's almost 11 pm, do you realize that? I really thought you people were going to bring this in on time... ish. We were doing so well, and then it's like, we have four awards left and suddenly they take ten minutes each or something. Here's a montage of the current best...

By Hugh Hart Despite the Academy's longstanding bias against popcorn flicks, Ledger is expected to win the Best Supporting Actor trophy Sunday. (The Academy also managed to toss six technical category nominations in the direction of Christopher Nolan's Batman epic.)

By Hannah Pool Are you going to the Oscars? Yes. I'm looking forward to it. It's my first time at the Oscars. It was my first time at the Baftas, the Golden Globes, Screen Actors Guild, my first English film, my first everything. It couldn't have been a better first.

By tomoneil Nominated for 11 awards at the 1974 Oscars, "The Godfather: Part II" won six: best picture, director (Francis Ford Coppola), supporting actor (Robert De Niro), screenplay (Francis Ford Coppola, Mario Puzo), music score and art direction. In the best picture derby, it beat Coppola's ot...

By tomoneil By winning best picture at the BAFTA Awards, "Slumdog Millionaire" just became the second film, after "American Beauty," to sweep the top prizes from all of these awards: Golden Globes, National Board of Review, Critics Choice and the four guilds — producers, directors, writers and ac...

By tomoneil Considering how restrictive the Oscars are about membership, let's guess that no more than half of that BAFTA gang also belongs to the Oscar academy. My guess is that means that there's probably an overlap of 1,000 voters between the two voting groups, which both have between 5,000 and 6,0...

By Andrew Pulver, Jason Solomons First up, Cruz tells Jason about her extreme gratitude for her Bafta and Oscar nominations, playing the seductive and unhinged Maria Elena in Vicky Cristina Barcelona, and how she ended up playing go-between in the mutual admiration society of Pedro Almodóvar and Woody Allen.

By Jason Solomons, Catherine Shoard Next, Jason gets together with Catherine Shoard to review the reunion of Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet in Revolutionary Road (clue: it ain't Titanic), Jean-Claude van Damme's comeback film JCVD (not Charlie Kaufman) and the reissued Barry Lyndon ("extraordinarily prescient a...

By orfilms@gmail.com (slashfilm.com) In this episode of the /Filmcast, Dave Chen, Devindra Hardawar, and Adam Quigley discuss their thoughts on this year’s deeply unsatisfying Oscar nominations, reflect on the intellectual bankruptcy of a Tom and Jerry movie, and vehemently debate the merits of Alan Ball’s Towelhead. We...

By Kyle Buchanan The year-end demolition derby that is Oscar season is ramping up, and among the next big films to face the gauntlet is Gus Van Sant's Harvey Milk biopic, Milk. Already the recipient of oodles of pre-release buzz (so there, says Focus Features), its release Wednesday will cap a period of rea...

By James Rocchi Alex Gibney's Enron: The Smartest Guys in the Room won acclaim for its inventive, expressive but journalistic and rigorous expose of the facts and finances behind a story that came to represent turn-of-the-millennium capitalism gone mad. Now, with Taxi to the Dark Side, which opens tod...

By James Rocchi In an Esquire piece celebrating "The Casting Mistake of the Year," Joel and Ethan Coen explained how Josh Brolin wound up cast in one of No Country for Old Men's lead roles: "Our movie version of Cormac McCarthy's No Country for Old Men had Tommy Lee Jones in place -- no mistake there -- as a cr...

By James Rocchi What movies are going to be snubbed by Oscar because they don't speak Hollywood's language? Does Into the Wild play better for Baby Boomers than younger audiences? Can Once get a second chance? And do movie journalists have a responsibility to reflect the Oscar race, or to try and influen...

By Cory Doctorow Cory Doctorow: Escape Pod, the killer science fiction story podcast, is running all the Hugo nominees for best short story, starting with Tim Pratt's wonderful "Impossible Dreams," about a film-geek who discovers a video store from another dimension. He went to the Sci-Fi shelf—and ha...