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).

Early Oscar Predictions: The Actresses

The annual complaint about Best Actress being a less competitive field than that of their male counterparts is perhaps more believable at this early predictive stage when scoping out potential contenders – It's no less false, it's just that the great, underrated female performances of the year haven't even been seen yet. Still, you don't have to look far to find a whole bunch of leading ladies that show a lot of promise for their upcoming films.

Review - A Snow White double feature

A pair of Costume Design nominees which bowed earlier in the year forced me to go back and play a bit of catch-up.

Mirror, mirror, on the wall, which is the most superfluous Snow White recreation of them all? Trick question. Turns out it's both of them. With fairy tale revisionism dominating studio slates recently – either because audiences are really clamouring for it or because it's cheaper than paying licensing fees for anything written in the last hundred years – 2012 ended up yielding not one, but two new takes on the girl with skin as white as snow and hair as black as night. Occupying opposite ends of the tonal spectrum, Mirror Mirror and Snow White and the Huntsman make a peculiar, if not a high quality, double feature.

Mirror Mirror is the incarnation that tries to preserve the lightheartedness we often associate with fairy tales. Lily Collins plays the raven-haired beauty who joins up with a septet of pint-sized bandits after her vampish diva of a step mother (Julia Roberts) had ordered her be taken to the woods and slain. From thence on, they both compete for the love of a dashing but comically inept prince (Armie Hammer).