'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.

'Boyhood', 'Grand Budapest' Win with Editors Guild

The American Cinema Editors handed out their hardware last night, honouring Boyhood's Sandra Adair in the drama category and The Grand Budapest Hotel's Barney Pilling in the muscial/comedy category. Both were nominated by the Academy.

I gotta say this Oscar category is still a complete mystery to me. It used to be that the winner of the ACE drama award always went on to win the Oscar, but that pattern has been bucked twice in the last three years. True, Boyhood could pull out the win on account of its "12 years of footage" narrative (a bit of an oversimplification, as it's actually only 12 weeks of footage amassed over 12 years), but the Academy usually goes for editing that... stands out. The greatest thing about Boyhood's montage is how invisibly fluent it is. I could definitely see something with a more rigourous cutting style like Whiplash or American Sniper taking it.

Elsewhere, The LEGO Movie won the animated category, adding more salt to the wound of its Oscar snub, while Citizenfour won the doc category for Mathilde Bonnefoy (who will actually get to take home her own Oscar since she's also a producer on the film).

One Category at a Time: Original Song

It feels strange whenever there's a year in which the music branch doesn't do something outright embarrassing. I guess you could disparage the disqualification of Antonio Sanchez's percussive Birdman score, but that's not so much a fresh embarrassment as the branch simply continuing to follow their own foolish rules.

But in regards to their Best Original Song selections, we have nothing on the level of 'Alone-Yet-Not-Alone-gate' from last year, or the hilarious two-nominee field from 2011. The music branch mostly obeyed the rules, singling out the three main songs that most people expected to be nominated, plus shining a light on couple of lower-profile tunes without any embarrassment.

Or at least without any overt embarrassment.

One Category at a Time: Animated Feature

Guys, we need to talk about Best Animated Feature. Most years, this is one category that hardly requires discussion at all. If it isn't a slam dunk victory for one obvious frontrunner (which it almost always is), then it can at least be boiled down to a two-horse race with the also-rans far in the distance. This year was shaping up to be another easy call you could use to inflate your prediction accuracy, until the biggest shocker of nomination morning. Everyone enjoys griping about presumed snubs that ultimately don't affect the outcome of the awards race, but this is one snub that has truly blown the category wide open.

The cast of The LEGO Movie is stunned by its Oscar snub!

'Birdman' Shocks as PGA Winner

I was hoping I'd be wrong about The Imitation Game coasting to a Producers Guild Award, and subsequently the Oscar, on the preferential ballot system.
I knew there was at least a decent chance of it not having quite enough support to edge out other Best Picture heavyweights like Boyhood and The Grand Budapest Hotel. Any of those three seemed like plausible victors with the guild, given how they had all the requisite Oscar nominations needed to win the big prize.

But this, I did not see coming.

Inarritu rockin' the blazer and the hoodie... and the PGA Award for Best Picture.

My Award Nominations: Best Animated Feature

I saw only six animated films last year, so it was easier for me to decide which one not to nominate (an easy choice, really). I suppose I'm being too generous in allowing five nominees for a category with so few contenders, but what of it? Only one will win (another easy choice), but the others deserve this brief moment in the limelight for merely existing. Animated movies are tedious and difficult to produce, after all. So here are my nominees for Best Animated Feature of 2014:

Boyhood Expectedly Wins Big at Critics Choice Awards

Boyhood took home lots of hardware yet again at the BFCA Critics Choice Movie Awards. This group tends to reflect the consensus opinions as to how the Academy will vote at this point in the season, plus they're a large group, so their winner selections aren't without some significance. That said, there's still plenty of wiggle room for some underdog contender to make a move between now and February 22nd.

The Grand Budapest Hotel, for instance, won the Best Comedy prizes both at the Globes and last night, despite being beaten out again in the screenplay and actor categories by Birdman. Does this suggest that Anderson's film is more loved overall than Inarritu's?

And then there are the specialty film categories. The BFCA honoured The LEGO Movie, Force Majeure, and Life Itself in the Best Animated, Foreign, and Documentary categories respectively, probably because all of them were the presumed frontrunners (or at least co-frontrunners) for the Oscar win... until all three of them got snubbed by the Academy! At least these races are still somewhat interesting at a stage of the season when most races start ossifying.

You can read some of my passing thoughts after the cut.

87th Academy Award Nominations!!!

Oscar noms are here! And as is always the case on this most exciting of mornings, the Academy had a handful of surprises to keep us interested.

I think the biggest takeaway from this year's crop is that for the first time since shifting to the variable number of nominees, the Best Picture race yielded less than nine contenders. Instead, we have eight, all of which I predicted, but my ninth prediction (Nightcrawler) was obviously less beloved than all those guilds suggested.

The nomination leaders are Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, racking up nine apiece. Close behind was The Imitation Game with eight, followed by Boyhood and American Sniper with six.

So what to glean from all this? To my eyes, this is now a three horse race between The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, and Boyhood. They are the only Best Picture nominees to additionally turn up in the three essential categories of director, screenplay, and editing.

The big losers of the day? Well, hard as it may be to think of a Best Picture nominee being a big loser, Selma has clearly underperformed with the industry, earning only two nominations total. The aforementioned Nightcrawler failed to translate its precursor love into Academy love, earning but a lone citation (at least a worthy one, for Dan Gilroy's screenplay, but ouch for Gyllenhaal!).

And what of the one-hit wonders? Films that you weren't expecting to get anything but suddenly pop up in single category thus earning the title "Academy Award nominee". There are a few of them in Best Visual Effects and Best Original Song, including The LEGO Movie which shockingly missed on a Best Animated Feature nomination (that's gotta smart for Phil Lord and Chris Miller, the presumed frontrunners until now).

Some other films did pretty well for themselves despite being outside the Best Picture conversation. Interstellar picked up five nods, including two contentious ones in both sound categories. Foxcatcher picked up five as well, but failed to gain entry to the Best Picture race. Mr. Turner picked up four in the craft categories.

I'll make some more commentaries on the individual categories throughout the morning, but I'll conclude for the moment with a quick list of best nominations and the worst snubs:

-Foxcatcher for director and screenplay...HELL YEAH!
-Captain America for visual effects...HELL YEAH!
-Ida for cinematography...HELL YEAH!
-Both Song of the Sea and Princess Kaguya for animated feature...HELL YEAH!
-Marion Cotillard for actress...HELL YEAH! (No offense to Jen, but I wasn't particularly looking forward to Cake)
-Whiplash for sound mixing...HELL YESSSSSS! Seriously, let's make this one happen.

-Glen Keane snubbed for animated short...HELL NO!
-No Theory of Everything for makeup...HELL NO!
-No Gyllenhaal for actor...HELL NO!
-No Force Majeure for foreign film...HELL NO!
-No Fury for sound...HELL NO!
-No Godzilla for, uh, anything...HELL NO!

[UPDATE:] I've tabulated my overall prediction results, and I correctly anticipated 81 of 106 nominations (I didn't attempt the shorts), identical to my results from last year! So as a tie breaker I decided to look at my early predictions to see how they compared to last year's. I guessed 34 nominees way back in May. Again, identical to last year! Am I plateauing?

Best Picture
American Sniper
Birdman
Boyhood
The Grand Budapest Hotel
The Imitation Game
Selma
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash
It's kind of odd that there was enough passion for Selma to sneak in here but that it only received one additional nomination, while Foxcatcher (which I'm delighted to see pop up in five categories!) didn't have enough support to be a ninth nominee. Five of these eight are in my top ten, but the other three don't even come close. I can't help but feel that it's one of those three that will win, but we'll have to wait for the PGA until we can be sure.

CAS Nominees include... Interstellar?

The Cinema Audio Society has named their choices for the best sound mixes of the year, and the biggest jaw-dropper is that apparently they heard something in Interstellar that the rest of us couldn't hear (literally, couldn't hear). How can this happen? And from a group of sound mixing professionals, no less!?!

I wonder if, assuming it gets the nominations, it might take both sound categories at the Oscars just because it seems on paper to be that 'type' of movie. Do the right thing, Academy: Actually listen to the films and decide what you think has the best sound.

For instance, a film like, say, Birdman (also nominated by the CAS) is a great example of a movie wherein the clarity of the sound recording and post-production mix does an excellent job of pulling you into the scene.

Two of the other nominees are ones I'm currently predicting for Oscar nods; American Sniper and Unbroken, although I have to think long and hard about the latter's real chances. Rounding out the five is Guardians of the Galaxy, which I wouldn't expect to score anywhere beyond effects and makeup with AMPAS.

The five CAS nominees, again, are:

American Sniper
Birdman
Guardians of the Galaxy
Interstellar
Unbroken

The animated contenders after the cut.

Producers Guild anoint ten, 'Selma' not among them

The PGA's nomination have landed, and the big ten are:

American Sniper - Bradley Cooper, Clint Eastwood, Andrew Lazar, Robert Lorenz, Peter Morgan
Birdman - Alejandro G. Iñárritu, John Lesher, James W. Skotchdopole
Boyhood - Richard Linklater, Cathleen Sutherland
Foxcatcher - Megan Ellison, Jon Kilik, Bennett Miller
Gone Girl - Ceán Chaffin
The Grand Budapest Hotel - Wes Anderson, Scott Rudin, Jeremy Dawson, Steven Rales
The Imitation Game - Nora Grossman, Ido Ostrowsky, Teddy Schwarzman
Nightcrawler - Jennifer Fox, Tony Gilroy
The Theory of Everything - Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Lisa Bruce, Anthony McCarten
Whiplash - Jason Blum, Helen Estabrook, David Lancaster

Par for the course. I anticipated nine of these. With American Sniper and Nightcrawler picking up steam heading towards Thursday's voting deadline, I'm inclined to believe at least one of them will crack the Academy's Best Picture lineup. But which one? I think Nightcrawler might be a touch too cool for the older demographic that dominates AMPAS, and that many of them will be eager to vote for a decent Clint Eastwood movie (his first in years, so I'm told).

Christmas Capsules (Reviews)

Things are probably going to get a bit quiet on this blog (and other award news outlets) over the next couple of weeks. All the Academy shortlists have been unveiled for applicable categories, top ten lists from most critics have been published, and at this point there's not much left to do but wait for the guilds to start piping up in the New Year.

Me, I'll be catching up with all sorts of early releases from this year as well as new ones as they open up in their plush holiday time slots. As I do, I'll keep adding my brief capsule reactions to this space, which you can check up on from time to time (I'll make an effort to tweet new entries). Consider it my Non-Denominational Mid-December Holiday Special to you, whose readership I appreciate all year round!

So have a merry Christmas, a happy Chanukah, a kwazy Kwanza, a tip-top Tet, and a solemn yet dignified Ramadan.

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.

'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: