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.

My Award nominations: Visual Effects

Let's be honest: For just about everybody, this year's visual effects contest has basically consisted of one movie, and then everything else. But that doesn't mean that the pretenders shouldn't be acknowledged for their stellar work.

So read about the best Visual Effects work of the year (plus the other four) after the jump.

Review - Pacific Rim

In yet another summer bursting at the seams with sequels and franchise tentpoles, some of us can be forgiven for chomping at the bit for any blockbuster that wasn't made simply to sell tickets to an established fanbase of some proven brand. We get it this year in the form of Pacific Rim, Guillermo del Toro's sloppy kiss to the subgenre of “kaiju eiga”; the Japanese monster movie. It's debatable whether or not Pacific Rim is the best of this year's big, loud, spectacular summer blockbusters, but it cannot be denied that the movie is big, that it is loud, and that it is spectacular.

The original premise behind Pacific Rim – “original” insomuch that it was not directly adapted from preexisting source material, although decades of kaiju eiga and anime/manga, from Godzilla to Neon Genesis Evangelion and more, serve as its inspiration – was initially concocted by screenwriter Travis Beacham. In his story, we are plunged into a world that has been at war with malicious alien life for some years now. A brief expository prologue sets the stage: from a space-time rift between two tectonic plates on the floor of the Pacific, skyscraping monstrosities (the kaiju) emerge and lay waste to coastal cities.