There are some Oscar Best Picture winners that are beyond question. Their win is expected, noted and ultimately accepted because no other film can beat them in the season. Somehow, though, just by being a frontrunner a film is often the object of scorn from those who follow and write about the race. The rest of the population don’t really …
Made by Women and Hollywood. The best advocate for women and women of color in the Oscar race is Women and Hollywood’s Melissa Silverstein. It isn’t easy standing up for women because trust me, the dirty little secret out there is that the vast majority of men don’t like women who stand up for women because they think it means …
One thing I do love about this film is its focus on the female character, Jane Hawking. While it would have been great if Jane Hawking had chosen a female to adapt the work, this was clearly a passion project for the writer – and that counts for a lot. Just watching these clips you can see why Eddie Redmayne …
Gold Derby is paying out a cool $1,000 for the winner of this year’s Oscar prediction contest. Head on over to play. Tom O’Neil who runs Gold Derby asked me why, if I keep saying Birdman is going to win Best Picture, I keep predicting Boyhood. Here is my answer: 1) I have predicted no other film to win Best …
It’s an interesting thing, awards season. It is never to be taken all that seriously, we get that. It does, by no means, declare anything or mean anything except to take a snapshot of who these people are at any point in time. It doesn’t reflect what the ticket-buyers think is best and it doesn’t reflect what the critics or …
“I talked to my friends in the Academy and none of them are voting for Boyhood,” an Academy member told me. Actually, I don’t think of him as an Academy member but a smart, funny, engaged, curious filmmaker. His information greatly disappointed me. I tried not to be an asshole about it but you know, some things really can’t be …
On Sunday Night 60 Minutes aired a segment about Selma with Ava DuVernay with veteran CBS correspondent Bob Simon. Yesterday, tragically, Bob Simon was killed in a car crash on the West Side Highway in New York. He was 73.
There is something very wrong with the system the Academy has now put in place to choose Best Picture. Relying on Oscar voters to pick their five favorites of the year should result in five genuinely Best Picture nominees. But what they are saying, more and more, is that these are the five films already chosen for us by studios …
Of all the great, deserving, American filmmakers that haven’t won the Best Director prize yet, Richard Linklater is up there with the most deserving. His filmography is as original and diverse as any of his generation. In 2014 he released quite possibly the best movie of his career. To many of us it’s unthinkable that the Academy might fail to …
The Santa Barbara Film Festival premiered Niki Caro’s film for Disney, McFarland, USA to a rousing reception. I guess you’d have to be a native Californian, or Hispanic, to really get why the film is important. If you didn’t come from here it might seem like a cliched underdog sports movie. But if you come from here, if you know …
“And now, perhaps, three times in four years. Poor Harvey Weinstein. The appalling “Honor the Man — Honor the Film” campaign he’s been running for The Imitation Game has begged voters to factor in the historical importance of subject matter when the apparent reality turns out to be that Alan Turing, Chris Kyle, Martin Luther King Jr., and Stephen Hawking …
We’re about to launch into our “The Case For” series but this is a great case for Boyhood to win. The Brits aren’t caught up in the industry flurry of superhero movies, which could explain why they are as in love with Boyhood as so many outside the insular world of the Hollywood industry are:
In the most unpredictable Oscar race for Best Picture I’ve ever seen, the DGA went with Inarritu last night while the BAFTA went with Richard Linklater and Boyhood today, setting up an absolute cliffhanger. Birdman’s wins with the big guilds was something no pundit saw coming. The maxim “Nobody knows anything” has never been more apt. Even the King’s Speech …
66% of our readers so far predict Richard Linklater to win, followed by Alejandro G. Inarritu. Do you agree? Who Will win the Directors Guild? (polls) Meanwhile, over at Gold Derby just two pundits, Jenelle Reilly and Anne Thompson are predicting Alejandro G. Inarritu to win for Birdman, while everyone else is predicting Linklater. Last year, the DGA did not …
This might finally be the year that the Oscars stop being the be-all and end-all of film awards. The NAACP and the Spirit Awards are two massive awards shows that take place before the Oscars. They mean something when they mean something, and usually that means not falling in line with the consensus all of the time. In all of …
I don’t know who would ever be behind an attack on Boyhood. What I do know about people is this: it doesn’t take long for something that’s highly praised to be picked apart. “It isn’t really THAT good,” so the mantra goes. They said it about The Godfather, Schindler’s List, No Country for Old Men, Jaws, The Wizard of Oz …
Writer-director Richard Linklater’s latest and unique cinematic achievement is less about a 12-year production and more because of his almost seamless blend of the melodramatic and the quotidian. One doesn’t need a context to appreciate Boyhood, but the film does need a little defense against some younger twitterers whose reactions can be summarized as “What’s the big deal?” When Gravity came …
