Oscar Telecast Retrospective Part 4: Home Stretch

With six categories still to go the time crunch was clearly being felt by the producers, as they sped through the two music categories and onto the final four.

This is where I sounded my loudest cheer and my most prolonged groan of the night, in rapid succession.

Firstly, despite the fact that it was largely foreseeable for weeks in advance, hearing Quincey Jones announce Ennio Morricone (followed by “My brother, congratulino!”) was a tremendous thrill, as was watching him embrace fellow legend John Williams while the house rose to its feet. Bar none, the most special moment of the night.

My Award Nominations: Supporting Actor

There was a lot more to choose from in the supporting ranks than among the leading men this year. I could list my top twenty picks and still not have mentioned everyone worth mentioning. My picks for Best Supporting Actor:

Oscar Postmortem Pt. 4: Telecast Highlights

I always record the Oscars so I can go back and rewatch it later the same week.

It's practically a necessity since I'm often so distracted with my prediction lists and my agony and ecstasy over the winners and losers and whatnot, that I miss some of the little moments that make this whole meat parade worthwhile!

There are still glimmers of fun left in this barbaric slaughterhouse that was once known as awards season. So allow me to parse through the 3+hour telecast and highlight the diamonds in the rough. And believe me, it was rough.

Things didn't start off so bad, though. Rather than force host Neil Patrick Harris to struggle through an opening monologue, they fed him one solid joke and then he was off to the races with his song-and-dance routine, "Moving Pictures".

This show got 99 problems, but graphic design ain't one!

Lovely sets and animated title cards.

One Category at a Time: Actor

It seems every year that Best Actor is, if not the most competitive Oscar category, then certainly the cruelest. Every season we see at least a half dozen nomination-worthy performances unable to make the final five. The whole Selma and #OscarsSoWhite controversy may have unwittingly made a thespian martyr of David Oyelowo for his tragic snub, but he's in good company with the likes of Jake Gyllenhaal, Ralph Fiennes, Timothy Spall, Channing Tatum, Oscar Isaac, Ben Affleck, Miles Teller, Matthew McConaughey, Andy Serkis, and the late great Philip Seymour Hoffman on the sidelines. There just isn't enough room.

It makes it particularly true that it's an honour just to be nominated for these five men, a couple of whom can relax and enjoy the show with the knowledge that they won't be winning. For those of us who follow this awards madness closely, however, it will be the one suspenseful acting award of the night, as we nervously wait to see if a beloved veteran can fend off the late advances of younger A-listers with more typical Oscar roles.

"Ornithologist, philatelist, philanthropist, Oscar nominee."

Will DGA-BAFTA Weekend Clafiry Some Tight Races?

Final Oscar balloting started today, right on the cusp of a weekend that will unveil the winners of the Directors Guild of America and the British Academy of Film and Television. A number of the Oscar categories still feel maddeningly close a full three weeks after they were announced, so the pending results of this weekend's kudos could be the litmus test we need.

Or they could just be a bunch of red herrings.

Take the Best Actor race, for instance:

My Award Nominations: Best Actor

It seems that every year there are more brilliant leading male performances than five spots can possibly do justice to. Hey, Academy, forget Best Picture... THIS is the category you should expand!

I had no easy task settling on five for Best Actor. Ask me again tomorrow and there could be five new names entirely!

SAG Awards bolster 'Birdman' for Best Picture, but not Best Actor...

Well, if you don't count Best Stunt Ensemble (which went to the solid work in Unbroken where I had guessed The Hobbit), I aced my SAG predictions...

... and I'm not entirely happy about that.

First of all, let's not dwell on the supporting races or on Best Actress. Those categories are all but sealed up with Patricia Arquette, J.K. Simmons, and Julianne Moore all coming out on top in their respective categories.

Let's also not dwell on Birdman's well deserved victory in Best Ensemble. It may not have been my absolute first choice but its cast was excellent and makes a fine winner. If you want to theorize about how "easy" it is for a movie about ACTING to win with the Screen Actors Guild, go ahead, but this is a merited honour for an outstanding collective performance.

What I think we do need to talk about is Best Actor. I had an unsettling feeling that tonight would be the night when frontrunner Michael Keaton would finally be unseated by Eddie Redmayne for his much more awards-typical performance as Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. I don't want to give the impression that I begrudge Redmayne any accolades he receives for his impressive physical transformation, but this is not the outcome I wanted to see.

Awards Season Primed for Defining Weekend with 2 Key Guilds...

For many pundits, the Oscar race has already settled into a predictable groove, with many people picking Boyhood as the odds-on favourite.

I... am not convinced. Not yet, anyway.

Yes, Boyhood has been winning Best Picture prizes left, right and centre for the last two months, but let's put things into a bit of context: Every award it's collected all season has been from some critics or media group. It's the sort of ambitious, artistically inspired movie that was always going to appeal to them, but these people don't vote on Academy Awards.

There is an Oscar season from years past that immediately springs to mind when I consider the pattern of this season thus far: The 2010/2011 season, in which
The Social Network won every critics honour under the sun before its momentum was snatched away by The King's Speech. When was it that the eventual Best Picture winner made its move? --- At the Producers Guild of America Awards.

Golden Globes live blog

6:44
The stars are arriving. The show will start in an hour and a bit. Pumped up!!!

(You can read lots of fashion snark on Twitter, including from me, but I'll keep this space clear until the show starts)

NBR pipes up for 'A Most Violent Year'

The significance of the National Board of Review is always debated when they chime in each December. Since it isn't really a critic group or an industry organization, they can sometimes make choices that will certainly not be reflected by the Academy two months down the road. Then again, sometimes those odd choices can serve as a nifty exposure boost for a low-profile contender (remember Jacky Weaver back in 2010?)

This year, it's J.C. Chandor's A Most Violent Year that could benefit the most from their singular taste, picking up mentions for stars Oscar Isaac and Jessica Chastain in addition to the Best Film honour. As a small film just on the outside of the Best Picture bubble (kinda like Chandor's All Is Lost, ultimately an under-seen awards disappointment last year), this could do a real service to the film.

Review - Birdman

Ids, egos and superegos collide and combust (in a single take!) on stages as concrete as the Broadway theatre and as fantastical as the imaginings of a self-obsessed actor in Alejandro González Iňárritu's Birdman. As in the myth of Icarus, to which his wily script often alludes both visually and verbally, Iňárritu has high-flying ambitions for what is possibly his most personal film to date. But rather than crash and burn, his satiric slant on the artist's odyssey soars magnificently on its dark feathery wings.

Michael Keaton stars – in a performance that vies to redefine his career – as Riggan Thompson, a washed-up former movie star seeking respect and validation by directing and starring in his own adaptation of Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love on Broadway. He had once played a popular superhero (the eponymous Birdman) in a series of lucrative but disposable comic book blockbusters that brought him fame and fortune, but not artistic fulfillment.

Now, some twenty years after hanging up his dopey bird suit, he's risking so much more than just his money and reputation by mounting this prestigious production. The tenuous relationship with his recovering drug addict daughter (Emma Stone), his fragile sense of self, and even his grasp on reality hang in the balance while the pressure mounts.

Sunday Top Ten: Batman characters; the movies + The Animated Series tag team

With the recent release of a teaser poster and trailer for The Dark Knight Rises, I can't be the only one who's had Batman on the mind lately.

Everyone has a favourite Batman character (well, except for people who don't care about Batman, but they're just an urban legend), but with so many different incarnations of all the heroes and villains having been contributed over the decades, it's hard to give a consistent assessment of each one. Do you have a favourite continuity? The 1960s Adam West TV series, maybe? Any of the films by directors Tim Burton, Joel Schumacher, or Christopher Nolan? I can tell you right now my definitive Batman canon is the fantastic Warner Brothers cartoon from the 1990s, whose dark and mature treatment of the material made for an atypically grown-up childrens program. For kicks, I'm appraising ten character combos that team up the performances from the major motion pictures with their animated doppelgangers.