Academy Award

By Erik Davis Are members from the documentary branch of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences being paid to short list some films over others? That's what it sounds like director James Toback was alluding to when he spoke to the New York Times recently about how his buzzed-about documentary...

By Eric D. Snider The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences documentary committee has watched the 89 eligible docs that were submitted and whittled the field down to 15 finalists, from which the five Oscar nominees will be chosen. But before we even get there we gotta talk about the snubs.

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By Christopher Campbell And here's another perfect example of a good remake: Zhang Yimou's version of the Coen Brothers' neo-noir cult classic Blood Simple, which Peter excitedly wrote about back in July. The film now has a title, The First Gun (aka Amazing Tales: Three Guns), and an international trailer, whic...

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...

By Scott Weinberg The director of Atonement, The Soloist, and Pride & Prejudice is jumping into the action pool? That's what The Hollywood Reporter indicates: Director Joe Wright, best known for Oscar-friendly drama, is about to sign on the dotted line to helm Hanna, which THR describes as a La Femme...

By Eric D. Snider As you've probably already heard, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is shaking things up at this year's Oscars by having 10 Best Picture nominees instead of five, and by moving the honorary awards (read: the boring part of the show) to a special ceremony of their own. That cere...

By Elisabeth Rappe One of these events is the Starz Denver Film Festival, which is going strong in its 32nd year. After partnering with Starz, over the years, we've played host to Crispin Glover, Frank Marshall and Kathleen Kennedy, Will Smith, Ang Lee, and enjoyed every on-the-cusp-of-Oscar movie of the p...

By Jette Kernion I'm so pleased to learn from IndieWIRE that five animated features will probably be in the running for a 2009 Academy Award. If fewer than 16 films are eligible, then only three films end up on the list of nominees. But the shortlist released today by The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Scie...

Related articles from The Envelope, Animated Views and more.

By William Goss Well, it's November, which means the awards contenders are steadily coming out of the woodwork, and just as we have the Academy Awards to look forward to, we also have their fine print to tolerate. The first of this year's disqualifications naturally come from the music end of things, the s...

By Monika Bartyzel I don't remember who made me sit down and watch Wim Wenders' Buena Vista Social Club, but the moment I did, I was enamored. It wasn't so much that I loved the cinema; frankly, I remember nothing about it, even if it did earn itself an Academy Award nomination for Best Documentary. I was smitten w...

By Eric D. Snider One thing about the Academy Awards' Best Foreign Language category that separates it from the acting, screenplay, director, and best picture categories is that in order to vote, Academy members must prove that they have actually seen all five nominees. In a way, this is good: it means the...

By Monika Bartyzel It was a complete Academy Awards smash, winning almost all of its nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. Kim Voynar's review stated: "Boyle, stepping outside the UK to focus his lens on India, seems to have freed himself here to bring his brilliance as a director to its ful...

By Erik Davis Yeah, I'll say it: Daniel Day-Lewis' performance in There Will Be Blood is not only one of the best we've seen in the last couple of decades, but I'll go as far as to say it's one of the best performances by a male actor that I've ever seen. Day-Lewis won the best actor Oscar last year for his role a...

By James Rocchi John Rosow (Shannon) lives and works and drinks -- and does a far better job of the last thing in that list than the first two -- in a shabby office in Chicago. The phone rings. Get to the train station by 7, he's told. Board the Zephyr Express from Chicago to L.A.; there's a man to follow. An old friend i...

By James Rocchi Which year-end lists are really worth caring about? What films got a boost from the Broadcast Film Critics and Golden Globe nominations, like Happy-Go-Lucky, and which ones got lost in the shuffle? What's Iron Man doing on the AFI Top Ten Films List, anyhow? And what long, epic films are p...

By Jeffrey M. Anderson It's hard to ignore the Oscar polish involved in Revolutionary Road; an Oscar-winning director, Sam Mendes, reunites the stars of the Oscar-gobbling Titanic. To that end, Mendes does his best to make the film look serious and prestigious. And if you give it a cursory glance it's possible t...

By Cinematical staff But don't believe the hype -- or, more importantly, look past it; if a complicated, messy personal life were all it took to deliver a great performance, Paris Hilton and O.J. Simpson would have more Oscars than Katharine Hepburn. Rourke's work as Randy is physical, invested, powerful and sp...

By James Rocchi Playwright and director John Patrick Shanley can tell you where his film Doubt, starring Phillip Seymour Hoffman, Meryl Streep and Amy Adams, came from; as it's being released into a busy Oscar season with high expectations, he can't quite tell you where it's headed. The Oscar-winning s...

By James Rocchi As the director, co-screenwriter and star of Appaloosa, Ed Harris follows up his Oscar-nominated work as an actor-director in 2000's Pollock with an adaptation of Robert B. Parker's novel, revolving around two old friends and partners (Harris and Viggo Mortensen) in 1882 New Mexico tr...

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 Kim Voynar There Will Be Blood continues to stand firmly in fifth place on the Oscar watch list for Best Picture over at Movie City News' Gurus o' Gold, with Atonement still pretty firmly in the top slot. Beneath Atonement, the Gurus have No Country for Old Men, American Gangster, and Charlie Wilson's...

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 James Rocchi Does the end-of-the-year overload of prestige pictures and big festivals hurt more movies than it helps? What are a few smaller movies that, while wonderful, might get overlooked in the Oscar rush? And what's coming up for the end of October to chill and haunt moviegoers around Hallowee...

By James Rocchi Curious about what goes on behind-the-scenes at some of your favorite film-related websites? Who are the men and women behind the sites you browse, click, curse and celebrate? With Cinematical's new podcast, The Rocchi Review, we'll be taking a bi-weekly look at the online film commun...

By James Rocchi Wondering about what the buzz is in the world of film? Well, why not download this newest edition of Coming Distractions -- Cinematical's weekly podcast? This time around, I'm joined by Cinematical's Managing Editor Kim Voynar. Kim and I talk about the box office performance of Apocalyp...

By James Rocchi Welcome to yet another edition of Cinematical's podcast, Coming Distractions. As ever, I'm your host, Cinematical editor-in-chief James Rocchi, and this week's co-host is Cinematical's Scott Weinberg. This week, we're talking about everything from Google's acquisition of YouTube...

By Christopher Campbell No time is more perfect, then, for Evil to finally arrive in the States. On the surface it seems very familiar, reminiscent of Hollywood films and not altogether inaccessible to American audiences, but it also has the depth and substance we expect from our imports. This Swedish film was als...