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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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We’ve been paying a lot of attention to Argo of late in regard to the Oscars, but there are some big races that don’t involve Ben Affleck’s film. Most notably, there’s a competitive Best Actress race going on.

Many pundits have made it out to be a competition between Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence, with the latter far out in the lead. While I agree that the Silver Linings Playbook actress is certainly ahead of her Zero Dark Thirty competitor, I do think she has to watch out for Emmanuelle Riva in her rear-view mirror. The sleeper candidate from Amour may just wake everyone up on Oscar night and steal the trophy.

Riva is immensely deserving of her nomination, but up until recently, it didn’t seem like many thought she had a legitimate shot at a win. I’ll confess to being there for a while, but the more I think about it, the more it seems like she’s at least the dark horse or spoiler of the category, if not the current alternative to Lawrence. Read the rest of this entry »

By Scott Feinberg
The Hollywood Reporter

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Every week through the Oscars on Feb. 24, The Hollywood Reporter’s awards analyst Scott Feinberg will release a new “Feinberg Forecast,” a post in which he recaps the most noteworthy awards-related news of the past week and shares his latest assessment of the standings in each of the major awards categories. (For more information about Feinberg and how he arrives at his projections, as well as a key for the various colors and acronyms that appear throughout them, scroll to the bottom of this post.)

By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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If you’re like me, you’re still recovering from the surprises that the Academy threw us on Thursday. In an attempt to try and move away from figuring out the “why” of the Oscar nominations last week, I decided to look at the “when” and “where” of the films and performances that were nominated. I’m curious to see which release period of the year and which film festivals were the most effective launching pads for award nominees in 2012.

It’s no secret that certain periods of the year and certain festivals are lighter than others. Fests like Tribeca and months like January just don’t jive with Oscar. In fact, I recently looked at the festival season in a previous article (found here) to see which ones contributed the most awards players this year. Likewise, when I removed the late-season releases a week or so ago from the Oscar race (found here), I found just how many contenders are from the last few months of the year.

Now that we have the nominees for the Academy Awards at our disposal, we can look at the main categories and see if there’s anything more we can learn. Did any one film festival wind up doing especially well? Was there a choice period of release for the movies and performances that were cited by Oscar voters? Let’s take a look …

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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Aside from the Academy Awards, no ceremony has as much pomp and circumstance to it each year than the Golden Globe Awards. While the Golden Globes don’t have the same cultural legacy that the Oscars do, the former is definitely an event that affects the latter at times. Most years, the influence on Oscar is there, but it’s minimal. This year, however, we could be looking at a time when Oscar voters are looking to the Globes more than ever before.

The reason for this added interest is the new timeframe for Academy members to vote. Usually there’s more distance between the Globe nominations and the Oscar nominations, which is not the case here. This makes the Globes a show to look forward to more than is usual.

I’m not going to outright list the things to most look forward to with the Golden Globes this year, but there are a lot, and they don’t all have to do with the Oscar race. One can see what the Hollywood Foreign Press does this year and enjoy it independently of what eventually goes down with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. There will be simple pleasures on display for all awards show and movie fans to enjoy.

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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I always enjoy looking at alternate versions of the Oscar race. It’s just an experiment, but there are still a number of interesting dynamics that I notice about the year in awards contenders when playing around with eligible films.

In years past, I’ve wondered what were the No. 11 films in the two years that Oscar had a guaranteed crop of 10 Best Picture nominees. I’ve also considered what the Oscars nods would have looked like if you removed every contender that was actually nominated. This time around, I’m trying something a little different.

With the Academy only days away from announcing their noms, I wanted to look at how the race would look if you took out any of the contenders that hit in the final part of the year. Essentially, if you disqualified the films that went into release after September, what might the Oscar nominations look like this week?

Read the rest of this entry »

By Sean O’Connell
Hollywood News

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This turned out to be a very good day to conduct Zero Dark Thirty interviews.

As I sat across from Jessica Chastain and Jason Clark to discuss their roles in Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, the uncompromising thriller about the military’s efforts to unearth Osama Bin Laden was collecting Best Picture votes from the New York Film Critics Circle. The group also handed its Best Director prize to Bigelow while Greig Fraser won for his cinematography contributions. (The final scene, an expertly shot raid on Bin Laden’s Pakistani hideout, alone likely earned him the award.)

By Scott Feinberg
The Hollywood Reporter

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Zero Dark Thirty, written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow — who both won Oscars for their last film, 2009′s best picture winner The Hurt Locker — screened Sunday for press on both coasts. The film provides a two-hour-and-40-minute overview of America’s nearly decade-long effort to hunt down Osama bin Laden. As a moviegoing experience — as it was in life — it is a long, cerebral and emotionally draining story, but it holds interest throughout. And thanks to a minimalist but powerful star turn by Jessica Chastain — an Oscar nominee last year for The Help — as well as the filmmakers’ painstaking attention to documented detail and remarkable third-act re-creation of the Navy SEALs’ fateful mission, it is worth the journey. As with fellow best picture Oscar hopeful Argo, you knows how it ends before it begins, and yet you can’t help but sit nervously on the edge of your seat as it nears its resolution.

By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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If there’s one thing that the movie industry loves (besides money, of course), it’s a good David vs. Goliath story. Each year, as the Oscars race heats up, there’s always a focus on whether independent movies in contention can take the prizes from big studio films.

Over the past decade or so, the tide has turned toward indie flicks more than was historically the norm. Recently, though, a situation has developed in which studios are trying harder to get back in the game but sometimes lag behind their smaller competition. This year proves an especially interesting case, since in most of the categories it looks like studio offerings will have a good chance to best the indies.

It’s hardly a guarantee, and it’s still very early, but any Oscar prognosticator worth his or her salt is leaning toward bigger studio films and performances in at least half of the big 8 categories (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Original Screenplay). In fact, while it could be an even split, I’d put forward that we could just as easily see seven of the eight big ones go studio, which is pretty rare these days. The nominations are still over a month away, but the tea leaves can already be read, to one degree or another.

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By Sam Negin
Theater Editor & Columnist

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*This post will be updated occasionally to reflect updated information.

A new Broadway season is about to begin and, with it, new life has been brought to my posts. After over 900 posts, 50 comments, over 325 Tony nominees and over 75 winners in the two-and-a-half years I blogged independently about the Tony Awards, I am proud to be joining the team at ScottFeinberg.com.

Without any further ado, I would like to begin with a look ahead at the Broadway shows that will be coming up this year. I have made this list as comprehensive as I could given what information is available but, as is often the case, there is much more data available right now about the fall season (September through the winter holidays) than the spring season (Christmas through the Tony Awards in June) on Broadway. I will update this post with more details as information becomes available.

The list of shows we expect to see this year, and whose producers hope will rack up the highest possible number of Tony nominations, includes:

Read the rest of this entry »

By Samuel Negin

Every year around this time, buzz surrounding who will hand out that year’s Tony Awards begins to bubble up. Some of this year’s names have been released and include some of the biggest names in theater. Interestingly, however, some Hollywood names have come up, as well.  On the list for 2012 are: Amanda Seyfried, who stars in the upcoming film adaptation of Les Miserables, Paul Rudd, Sheryl Crow (who is composing the score for the upcoming Broadway adaptation of the film Diner), and Nick Jonas, who recently closed out the Tony-winning Broadway revival of H2$. Other presenters include Tyler Perry, Jessica Chastain (who will star in the upcoming revival of The Heiress), Jim Parsons (star of the current revival of Harvey), five-time Tony-winner Angela Lansbury (currently appearing in Gore Vidal’s The Best Man), 2011 featured actress Tony-winner Ellen Barkin, Bernadette Peters, Candice Bergen, Christopher Plummer, James Marsden, Mandy Patinkin, and the composers of The Book of Mormon — Trey Parker and Matt Stone. The awards ceremony will be held at the Beacon Theatre on June 10th and will be hosted by Neil Patrick Harris.  Additional presenters will be announced throughout the week.

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