Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

This year would've been so much more interesting without the Mirren steamroller. It's hard to begrudge her upcoming victory because she's such a wonderful actress and her performance is a remarkable one (and she's having a brilliant year, with the final Prime Suspect and the Elizabeth miniseries), ...

1981 Nearly everyone predicted a split. On Golden Pond was the predcited winner as picture and Beatty was the predicted winner. Indeed, On Golden Pond's strength was, if anything, underestimated--no doubt a factor in that split. Fonda, of course, was a slam-dunk, as was Ernest Thompson, who was som...

These are all arguable. Nobody was sure what would happen in 2002 or 2000 or 1995. (And actually, 1995 would prove my rule, about the director pulling in the picture.) You can throw 1985 into your list too. Joel Siegel, I recall vividly, was predicting The Color Purple on the morning of the Oscars-...

* If DREAMGIRLS receives the most trophies of the night (maximum 6 possible) - first time ever (or in ??? years?) that a non-BP nominee receives the most Oscars As I say in another post, Pan's Labyrinth could do this too (in fact, I think it's more likely to). I believe The Bad and the Beautiful in...

1. Scorsese pulls The Departed in with him. This actually goes along with my old rule: Never Bet on the Split. This rule has not been broken: splits are always unexpected, never predicted. The last time a split was predicted (not counting the famous 1989 exception, when Miss Daisy's director was no...

Here's a first: If LMS wins BP, it will be the first film picked up for distribution at Sundance to win and also only the second BP to have won the Independent Spirit award (The first was Platoon, which did have a major distributor, Orion, which also partly funded it. These days I don't think Plato...

I've just previewed a short documentary for a local film festival that deserves to be an Oscar nominee in '07. It's called Bridge Over the Wadi and it's by the Israeli filmmakers Tomer & Barak Heymann. They covered the first year in the life of a equal Jewish-Palestinian school on the West Bank...

I have yet to see: The Queen Letters from Iwo Jima Half Nelson The Last King of Scotland Venus Little Children Notes from a Scandal I hope to make a dent on a few of these this weekend. The only one on Franz Ferdinand's single-nominee list that I have seen is The Good Shepherd, which I think is und...

Supporting acting is a very surprising category. Remember Marcia Gay Harden´s win along with Juliette Binoche in 1996, James Coburn in 1998 and Don Ameche in 1985 among others. I´m starting to think this year of Alan Arkin. I hate to say this, but I won a local Oscar contest in '96 for predicting B...

Each case you cite, Dennis, was also that actor's second (or third or fourth) Oscar so it's worth looking at why exactly the Academy was willing, in all cases, to award them again so soon. Jason Robards' Best Supporting Actor slate was populated with two other past winners (Guiness and Schell), two...

If Murphy does lose, the release of the otherwise probably instantly forgettable Norbit during the voting period will be blamed. When the ads for Norbit started appearing--and the disastrous reviews started coming out this week (Rotten Tomatoes had it at 9% last evening)--I thought Murphy might be ...

Okay, I have to respond here. I live in Indianapolis. I've been saying this week it's the trifecta--if the Democrats can win the election (sorry Criddic), Martin Scorsese can win the DGA, followed--do I dare@--by the Oscar, and the Colts, who have choked in the playoffs repeatedly before this year,...

From The New Republic Online: January 31, 2007 Dream On: Why Dreamgirls Doesn't Deserve a Best Picture Nod. By Christopher Orr The last couple of weeks have been slow for video releases, so I thought I'd instead weigh in on the cinematic controversy of the day: the Academy's alleged snub of Dreamgi...

1952 may just be the year when Hollywood hit bottom. Production was being slashed, studio contracts were being cancelled left and right, television was the most popular medium, and the second and most damaging wave of HUAC hearings in Jan.-Apr. 1952 just about destroyed what was left of the industr...

True, and the gay men I've talked to especially love Little Miss Sunshine; in a way, selecting the gay-positive Sunshine would be a nice corrective for the homophobia that was displayed in last year's selection. Are you saying that an Oscar for Little Miss Sunshine would be the Academy's way of ato...