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By Rachel Bennett
Television Editor & Columnist

The Television Critics Association’s 2013 winter tour is now underway. Rachel and Carson will be providing you with the important  takeaways from each network’s presentations all week!

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The 2013 Television Critics Association kicked off Jan. 1 and already hosted NBC, cable networks, Fox and FX, but it most recently featured ABC/Disney.

This is the first of two yearly tours that the TCA hosts, bringing  network executives, showrunners and actors face-to-face with  entertainment journalists. Essentially, this is the time to flaunt what  you’ve got. Big news can come out of these events, so here are the most  recent developments:

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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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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?

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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Age is just a number, folks. When it comes to the film industry, especially this year, we’ve seen terrific work from actors, actresses and filmmakers, both young and old. Of course, seniority does bring respect, and there are a number of awards contenders who are on the older side. The business favors the young, though, but the good ones don’t vanish when they’re on the wrong side of 30 or 40.

There are a number of strong Oscar hopefuls this year who are over the age of 55, so the purpose of this week’s list is to highlight and honor them a bit. Not all of them will wind up with nominations, but at least some of them will hear their names called. Regardless, all have added at least one more terrific bit of work to their already stellar resumes.

Some of the people listed below appear as tandems, when appropriate, since it allowed me to cite more than just 10 people — I think the more the merrier! I did try to only do that at the beginning, though, so rest easy that it won’t be a whole list full of that sort of pseudo-cheating. And, for the record, this week’s list is not reflective of any particular order-of-likelihood-of-getting-nominated, but rather just a celebration of the phenomenon and the people.

These individuals aren’t the youngest in the business, but they’re among the best, so they deserve this moment in the sun.

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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It’s no secret that the average age of an Academy member is up there. The running joke of the ceremony, in fact, is that the Oscars are solely voted on by older white men — while that’s not completely true, it’s not far off, either.

Earlier this year, the Los Angeles Times did an exposé of sorts that revealed just how much of the Academy is in this particular bracket. The piece found that Oscar voters are overwhelmingly white and male, with the average age of an Academy member at around 62 years old.

This begs the question of how voters deal with films that speak directly to them. Michael Haneke’s Amour will certainly be a litmus test of sorts this year in regard to this potential bias. The subject matter is admittedly tough, though, which complicates things a bit.

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By Joey Magidson
Film Contributor

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It’s been said that there’s more than one way to skin a cat (though I’d prefer it if everyone just stopped doing that altogether), and the same goes for launching an Oscar contender. Perhaps the most prestigious way to do so is an unveiling at a film festival. It’s a glamorous decision, even if it’s not always a winning one.

While it’s true that some Oscar hopefuls, mainly from the studios, opt to skip the festival route altogether, most contenders do launch themselves somewhere. And there’s a festival for each type of film. Whether it’s during Sundance, Tribeca, Berlin, Cannes, Telluride, Toronto, Venice or New York, plenty of potential awards players sink or swim starting at one of those festivals each year.

2012 is no exception, of course, with very few contenders skipping the festival circuit. The highest profile outlier is Zero Dark Thirty, which opted to start screening for critics late in the year. It’s sometimes a risky gamble, but so far it’s paying off for this flick.

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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 Scott Feinberg
The Hollywood Reporter

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The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has just released the official list of entries that have qualified for consideration in the best foreign language film Oscar category. Each country chose one film that released within its borders during the year leading up to Oct. 1; the language of the film need not be the official language of the country, but the principal creative talent — writer, director, producer — must hail from the submitting nation. This year, a record 71 entries were accepted.

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By Sean O’Connell
Hollywood News

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David O. Russell’s Oscar contender Silver Linings Playbook will open The 2012 Savannah Film Festival, an annual event that this year will showcase similar awards contenders like Robert Zemeckis’ Flight, Dustin Hoffman’s Quartet, the crowd-pleasing musical comedy The Sapphires and Michael Haneke’s emotionally draining Amour.

The fest will kick off on Saturday, Oct. 27. It also will conclude with a 3D screening of DreamWorks Animation’s holiday blockbuster Rise of the Guardians.

Russell’s comedy has been building awards momentum since it took home the People’s Choice Award at the Toronto International Film Festival in September. The Hollywood Film Awards announced so far that it will recognize Robert De Niro with the Hollywood Supporting Actor award, as well as Russell with this year’s Hollywood Director Award. Expect them to be the first of many prestigious award nominations Silver Linings picks up as the season rolls along.

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By Josh Abraham

The official Jury of this 65th Festival de Cannes, presided over by Nanni Moretti, revealed this evening the prizes winners during the Closing Ceremony.

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