'Manchester', 'Moonlight' and 'La La Land' Lead Early Critics Awards

It has begun. Awards season is "officially" underway after what has been a busy seven days of early -- and I mean ridiculously, unnecessarily early -- precursor citations. The main takeaway: In a studio year as lack-lustre as 2016 was, it looks like critically acclaimed indies will be leading the race, namely Barry Jenkins' Moonlight, Kenneth Lonergan's Manchester by the Sea and Damien Chazelle's La La Land, while some sneak-peek twitter reactions to Scorsese's recently screened Silence paint it as a major last-minute lurker that could crash the party.

The National Board of Review got the ball rolling last Tuesday, handing Manchester four prizes including Best Film, Best Actor and Best Screenplay. Moonlight trailed with a pair of wins for Jenkins' direction and Naomie Harris' incredible performance.

The New York Film Critics Circle followed up two days after with three prizes apiece for both Manchester and Moonlight, but at the eleventh hour voted in favour of La La Land as Best Film (not an unprecedented move for that group).

That same day, La La Land went on to dominate the Critics Choice nominations with 12. Again, Moonlight had a prominent showing with 10, Manchester with 7 (Full list of nominees will appear at the end of the post with some quick takes).

The LA Film Critics Association rounded out the week by naming Moonlight the best of the year just this afternoon. The film also won Best Director, Supporting Actor and Cinematography. La La Land only earned a single prize from the west coast crew (for music), but was runner-up in five other categories, making it the most represented title in the group's day of announcements. Hmmm... were they afraid giving it multiple wins would smack of homerim?

Inside Out dominates Annie Awards

While all eyes were on the DGA last night, ASIFA-Hollywood held its annual Annie Awards. It was a great night for Pixar Studios, which scooped every single eligible category, mostly for Inside Out (quelle surprise), although The Good Dinosaur was tossed one very deserving consolation win for its visual effects.

As a nice change, the organization added a category for Independent Feature Animation. Is it a ghetto category? Sure. But small, scarcely distributed animated films would never stand a chance against widely seen studio fare. I'm delighted to see Ale Abreu's wonderful Boy and the World took this prize, and hope that it helps ensure the continued success of international GKIDS pickups in future awards seasons.

Equally delightful was the decision to give Best Animated Short to Don Hertzfedlt's brilliant World of Tomorrow. Fingers crossed for the Oscar!

Check out all the feature film winners after the cut.

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actress

Another busy Saturday in awards land. The Annie awards will name their top achievements in animation (are we expecting anything other than Inside Out?), while the DGA may provide us with our strongest clue as to who's really leading this year's opaque Best Director race. If anyone other than Adam McKay wins, will we see a split on Oscar night? If it's George Miller, do we really think he can turn the same trick with AMPAS? Not to jinx it or anything, but that would be the single coolest Oscar win I've ever seen... Too cool to actually happen, I'm sure.

As for me, I'll be taking care of my acting categories this weekend. Let's get the ball rolling with Best Supporting Actress, which hasn't been this competitive in years (and that's without fraudulent leading ladies posing as supporting players).

'Dragons 2' Secures its Oscar-by-Default Position

DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2 took home six Annie Awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Directing for writer-director Dean DeBlois. With the Golden Globe also in hand and the former frontrunner out of the way, it's looking more and more like the beloved franchise will get to bask in Oscar glory.

Speaking of that former frontrunner, Academy snubees Phil Lord and Chris Miller did get a consolation prize for Best Writing, as appropriate a place as any to honour The LEGO Movie's meta comedy stylings.

Among Dragons' remaining Oscar competition, The Boxtrolls won two richly deserved trophies (for its immaculate production design and Ben Kinsgley's inimitable performance), while Big Hero 6 took home only one (albeit a hard-earned one for it cool animated effects).

But Disney can take solace in that fact that their Best Animated Short Oscar contender Feast won its correlative category here. The crowd-pleasing toon is indeed a formidable threat for the Academy Award.

Sadly, GKIDS offerings Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya were too modest to impress the organization. See all the winners after the cut.

'Boxtrolls' leads ANNIE Award nominations

The New York critics weren't the only ones sounding off this Monday, as ASIFA-Hollywood released their loooong list of nominees. Laika's The Boxtrolls hauled in 13 nominations, the most of any contender in the field. Clearly there's a lot of respect for the craft, and rightly so.

Not too far behind with ten nominations of its own was DreamWorks' How to Train Your Dragon 2, which would be my preference for the win, but I'm not getting my hopes too high. There's a logical argument to be made that the hipness of The LEGO Movie will lead it to victory this season. We shall see.

The Best Animated Short category, meanwhile, features five of the contenders on the Oscar shortlist.

Check out all the film nominees after the cut, with some subjective commentary:

Frozen leads Annie Award winners

Frozen won five ANNIE Awards tonight including Best Animated Feature, further solidifying its stranglehold on the Oscar. But as the ANNIEs have been more prone to doing in recent years since adjusting their voting system, the wealth was spread out a bit. Monsters University won a pair and The Croods won three. Even The Wind Rises surprisingly popped up as the winner for Best Writing.

Over in the Short Subjects category, Oscar frontrunner Get a Horse won the day, so make of that what you will. Seems like as decent an Oscar prediction as any.

Check out the feature film winners after the cut.

Annie nominations kick off a crowded December

It must be December, because lists of nominations, top tens, and critics' superlatives are officially upon us. Today, ASIFA-Hollywood dropped their bloated slate of nominees for the 41st Annie Awards, and the Golden Satellite nominations were announced. If those two groups don't quite have you titillated (neither of them move the needle much in terms of influence on the awards race), then look forward to the coming days when we can expect announcements from the New York critics, LA critics, and the National Board of Review.

But back to the Annies...

In the feature film categories, Monsters University and the likely Oscar frontrunner Frozen lead the way with ten nominations. Following with nine are The Croods and Despicable Me 2 (no, I'm not inclined to count the latter's short film Puppy or its nominated TV commercial towards its total).

Speaking of shorts, the only ones to pop up both here and on the Academy's shortlist are Disney's Get A Horse! (the presumed frontrunner), the NFB's Gloria Victoria (a fringe contender if ever there was one), and the BBC's Room on the Broom (from the makers of the 2011 nominated short The Gruffalo). So make of that what you will.

Best Animated Feature

• A Letter to Momo - 
GKIDS
• Despicable Me 2 - 
Universal Pictures
• Ernest & Celestine
 - GKIDS
• Frozen - 
Walt Disney Animation Studios
• Monsters University - 
Pixar Animation Studios
• The Croods
 - DreamWorks Animation
• The Wind Rises
 - The Walt Disney Studios

Busy night for industry kudos with DGA, ADG, and Annie Awards

Oh what a night. Lots of precursor announcements to parse through, the biggest of which was the Director Guild of America, awarding their top prize to Ben Affleck for his Oscar hopeful Argo. At this point it can hardly be called a surprise to see Affleck picking up more hardware, especially after last weekend's PGA and SAG victories. Indeed, it could be that his Best Director "snub" by the Academy turns out to be one of the biggest deceptions in recent Oscar history, because it's looking like Argo may have been the unbeatable frontrunner all along. Time will tell.

In the documentary category, Malik Bendjelloul continued his awards season sweep for Searching for Sugar Man, likely on way to the Oscar. I liked the movie, but is it too much to ask the film industry to spread the wealth a little bit. There were other good documentaries this year, y'know.

Annie Award nominations

Nominations for the 40th annual Annie Awards have been announced by ASIFA-Hollywood. Leading the pack are the prize hopefuls from the Mouse House: Pixar's Brave and Disney's Wreck-It Ralph each landed ten nominations. ParaNorman and Hotel Transylvania took eight apiece. DreamWorks' Rise of the Guardians nabbed six.

More than ever, the organization feels like one with a severe identity crisis. In order to quell backlash from the realization a few years back of a disproportionally DreamWorks-based voting membership, they have been continually tweaking their voting process to cast a very broad net. It's more of a dishonour not to be nominated! And yet they still manage to miss obvious achievements in several categories. How does Brave not get cited for storyboarding? How does Frankenweenie lose out on character design? How do Wreck-It Ralph leads John C. Reilly and Sarah Silverman get passed over for Alan Tudyk's broad impersonation of Ed Wynn in Voice Acting?

All in all, take it with a grain of salt. This group is hardly an influential one when it comes to the awards race.

Also nominated here are Animated Short shortlisters Paperman, The Longest Daycare, and Head Over Heals.

Best Animated Feature
Brave – Pixar Animation Studios
Frankenweenie – The Walt Disney Studios
Hotel Transylvania – Sony Pictures Animation
ParaNorman – Focus Features
Rise of the Guardians – DreamWorks Animation
The Pirates! Band of Misfits – Aardman Animations
The Rabbi’s Cat – GKIDS
Wreck-It Ralph – Walt Disney Animation Studios

Rango triumphs at Annie Awards

To the Annies' credit, they did a not-so-bad job of spreading the wealth at their annual awards. The Dreamworks-dominated voting body turned out to be more of a non-factor, chalking up only two wins for Kung Fu Panda 2 and nothing for Puss in Boots. Rango took five awards, including Best Animated Feature and Best Writing. Tintin, Rio, Winnie the Pooh, and Arthur Christmas also walked away with hardware in hand.

For kicks, I actually watched the show on live stream, and Oh. My. Lord. What an unmitigated train-wreck. Host Patton Oswalt was clearly having much more fun than anyone else in the room (he did confess to being "so high right now" at one point, but we'll never know if that was just his tongue in his cheek, or a concealed bag of weed). To be fair, he does seem unshakably at home on the stage, and with a bit more structure, I think he'd make a killer awards show host.

Structure, however, was in short supply at this affair. Bill Nighy was announced winner of the award for voice acting, only to walk out of the hall and never return! Tweets abound that he was in the bathroom at the time. True or not, he certainly wasn't in the room, leaving presenters Kathleen Kennedy and Frank Marshall clumsily killing time while everyone waited. They eventually moved on, as Nighy made no appearance. Funnier still, the award was for Arthur Christmas, but they played the theme music from the PBS children's cartoon series Arthur.

I thought things couldn't possibly get more awkward than that, but the next presenter proceeded to read the winner for Best Preschool TV Program from the wrong envelope! This led to a confusing delay that was both hilarious and excruciating, while Patton himself marched out on stage to sort things out. Co-presenter Jason Marsden, meanwhile, delighted in photographing the awkward situation with his iPhone.

These are only the highlights from a shoddily put together evening. The whole thing kinda makes me appreciate the oft-maligned Oscars a little more. I may have high-standard complaints about the show every year, but at least it's done professionally.

Anyway, full list of feature film winners after the cut.

ADG, Annie preview

Not much to do nowadays but twiddle our thumbs waiting for February 26th, but at least some scattered guild announcements will keep us from nodding off to sleep.

The Art Directors Guild will have its say tonight, where I expect Oscar nominees Hugo and Harry Potter will come up big in the Period and Fantasy categories respectively. They seldom show much imagination in the Contemporary category, which usually goes to whatever nominee has the most Best Picture buzz. At that, I'll make my guess for The Descendants, even though it should be The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by a country mile.

Meanwhile, the Annie Awards also land tonight. I'm not sure how they'll be distributed, but you can expect the feature film categories to be shared between Dreamworks' Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots.

ANNIE nominees (there sure are a lot this year!)

The animation academy never fails to impress me with their irrelevance. As though their blatant Dreamworks predisposition isn't conspicuous enough, they've now gone and produced a slate of nominees by far more enormous than any they've produced before, and in what I consider to be the weakest year for animation in half a decade. Still, they're the only major awards body for the medium, so it bears acknowledgment.

It also bears acknowledgment that despite such a long Best Animated Feature shortlist, Rango is the only one that also grabbed nods for Writing and Directing. Is it still the frontrunner after all these months? I didn't love it by any stretch of the imagination, but it certainly bests most of its fellow nominees (not that I've seen all of them yet).

Best Animated Feature

A Cat in Paris – Folimage
Arrugas (Wrinkles) - Perro Verde Films, S.L.
Arthur Christmas – Sony Pictures Animation, Aardman Animations
Cars 2 – Pixar Animation Studios
Chico & Rita – Chico & Rita Distribution Limited
Kung Fu Panda 2 – DreamWorks Animation
Puss In Boots – DreamWorks Animation
Rango – Paramount Pictures and Nickelodeon Movies
Rio – Blue Sky Studios
Tintin – Amblin Entertainment, Wingnut Films and Kennedy/Marshall

Best Animated Short Subject

Adam and Dog – Lodge Films
I Tawt I Taw A Puddy Tat – Warner Bros. Animation
La Luna – Pixar Animation Studios
(Notes on) Biology – Ornana Films
Paths of Hate – Platige Image
Sunday – National Film Board of Canada
The Ballad of Nessie –Walt Disney Animation Studios
The Girl and the Fox – Base14
Wild Life – National Film Board of Canada and Studio GDS

Annie Award winners: Dragon dominates

How to Train Your Dragon owned the Annies, winning all ten of the feature animation categories. Who could've seen that coming, right? (wink, wink)

It's a pity that the Dreamworks-dominated voting body of the International Animation Film Society-Hollywood wasn't thoughtful enough to spread the love around to some other talent who really deserved it more than How to Train Your Dragon in some categories, but the expectation that this would happen does soften the hurt. Plus, a sweep for this delightful fable is by far less outrageous than the Kung-Fu Panda sweep two years ago. Consider this one last "hooray!" for the film before it loses the Oscar. And it is nice to see John Powell win at least something this season for his wonderful score.

Best Animated Feature: How to Train Your Dragon
Best Directing in a Feature Production: Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, How to Train Your Dragon
Best Writing in a Feature Production: William Davies, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders, How to Train Your Dragon
Best Animated Short: Day and Night

The rest after the cut.

WGA, ADG, Annie Preview

Having won the USC Scripter prize just last night with Ben Mezrich, Aaron Sorkin is likely to continue The Social Network's screenwriting winning streak with an Adapted Screenplay win at tonight's WGA awards. Any winner other than him would be a total shock.

As for Original Screenplay, intriguing scenario. David Seidler's soon-to-be-Oscar-winning script for The King's Speech is ridiculously ineligible, of course, so who takes it? Could they tip a hat to Christopher Nolan in consolation of his Director snub by the Academy? Could the general affection felt towards The Fighter push its team of writers to a win? Or will this be the one major industry prize Lisa Cholodenko (along with Stuart Blumberg) can lay claim to this season? I'm hoping for and predicting the latter. The Kids Are All Right is just too good a movie for her to go completely unrewarded this year.

Let's not forget two other industry groups announcing their winners tonight; The ADG and the Annie Awards.

I see The King's Speech, Alice in Wonderland, and Black Swan emerging victorious with the art directors, while the animation academy will probably provide How To Train Your Dragon with a hearty love fest, given how much of their organization is composed of Dreamworks employees.

Annie Award nominations. woo...hoo.

The Annie Awards have always been highly suspect do to the strong membership bias towards Dreamworks, even prompting Disney to remove itself from the organization.
This year's nominations reflect that state of affairs rather acutely, given the heaps of nominations for How to Train Your Dragon and Megamind. The Disney studio's gems Toy Story 3 and Tangled were still written in to the three main categories, but it looks like How to Train Your Dragon will be the big winner this year.

Best Animated Feature
* Despicable Me – Illumination Entertainment
* How to Train Your Dragon – DreamWorks Animation
* Tangled – Disney
* The Illusionist – Django Films
* Toy Story 3 – Disney/Pixar