With the Oscars less than a week away, a lot of talk has centered around who will win best supporting actor. Giamatti was the early favorite but recently Clooney has been gaining steam. I thought that it would be interesting to look at both who has won the most precursor awards and the reviews for the movies that they were in. From looking at the graph, we can see that while Paul Giamatti has won the most precursor awards, William Hurt was in the better reviewed film. Yet, Giamatti won…
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Out of the five films nominated for best foreign language film, Tsotsi and the Final Days were released in the past week. Don’t Tell, Joyeux Noël, will not be released until March and Paradise Now is already out of theatres. This bodes well for Tsotsi, the Final Days and Paradise Now. Best foreign language films released in the U.S. before final balloting is complete have won 77.78 percent of the time (FilmJerk).

Paradise Now and Tsotsi are the two films that have been the most talked…
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As of now, here are the biggest questions on Oscar night.

1. Will Brokeback Mountain win Best Picture, or can Crash pull off a monumental upset?

2. Will George Clooney walk away empty-handed?

3. Will it be Clooney, Giamatti, or possibly upstart Matt Dillon in the tight supporting actor contest?

4. Will Jon Stewart be better than Chris Rock? (well…that one shoudn’t be too hard to answer)

This brings me to ask – whatever happened to the intense Best Actor/Best Actress races? This year there’s very little suspense. Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Reese Witherspoon will…
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Over the weekend the British Academy of Film and Television handed out their awards. Don’t get too excited, folks. It would be a pretty huge mistake to confuse the British Academy Awards with THE Academy Awards. Case in point. Last year’s big winner on Oscar night – Clint Eastwood’s Million Dollar Baby wasn’t even nominated for a BAFTA (somehow it wasn’t eligible, I believe). The BAFTAS tend to reward British actors/actresses and films with a British or English connection. Previous winners include Jamie Bell, Clive Owen, Judi Dench, and Imelda Staunton. In 2004, when Peter Jackson swept every Director’s prize available for…
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The British Academy Awards were announced last night. These awards are often an indicator of how the American Academy Awards will go. Below is a list of winners in relevant categories.

Best Film – Brokeback Mountain.

The David Lean Award for Achievement in Direction – Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee.

Best Original Screenplay – Crash. Best Adapted Screenplay – Brokeback Mountain.

Film Not In the English Language – De Battre Mon Coeur S’est Arrete.
Best Short Animation Film – Fallen Art, Jarek Sawko/Piotr Sikora/Tomek Baginski.
Best Short Film – Antonio’s Breakfast, Howard Stogdon/Amber Templemore-Finlayson/Daniel Mulloy.

Best…
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Evaluating the best animated short category is not easy given that I have not seen any of the films. Five films are nominated: Badgered, The Moon and the Sun, The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello, 9, and One Man Band. None of the nominees are previous Oscar winners. However, One Man Band is a Pixar product and 9 is currently being turned into a feature film. Shane Acker, the creator of 9, won a Student Academy Award last year. The Mysterious Explorations of Jasper Morello won the Australian Film Institute award for best short animation, is…
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The nominees for best documentary short are all Oscar newbies with the exception of Steven Okazaki. Okazaki won in 1990 and is nominated this year for the Mushroom Club. The Mushroom Club examines the effects of Hiroshima sixty years later. The two other strong contenders for the win are God Sleeps in Rwanda, a film about women in Rwanda after the genocide, and the Death of Kevin Carter, a short about a photojournalist who took a photo of a starving woman in the Sudan and how doing so changed his life. I am going to go out on a…
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This will be an interesting category to watch come Oscar night. Many experts are picking Crash, which creatively weaves together the lives of many people in melting pot LA. Crash did recently pick up the Writer’s Guild award, which gives it a huge boost. But it still stops short of slamming the door on its competition. One of the biggest reasons why is what we have previously mentioned as “The Clooney Factor.” The ever popular George Clooney is up for three categories, and it seems plausible that Academy voters will want to hand him something shiny. But Best Director is…
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Best supporting actor is one of the toughest races to call. Traditionally, a safe way to pick a winner has been to ask, “Will this be the defining role for the career of this actor?” Unfortunately, this was not the career-defining role for any of the actors. George Clooney was good, but not amazing in Syriana. Matt Dillon was excellent in Crash, but had a very minor part. Dillon’s career defining film remains Drugstore Cowboy. Paul Giamatti should have won for Sideways last year, and a win here would be considered a make-up award. Jake Gyllenhaal was good but not…
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