February 28th, 2016
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It’s Oscar day and, if all goes to plan, I will be live-blogging the ceremony tonight. Here is the list of nominees marked according to predictions from our readers, and my personal wishes. Nominees in Bold are the ones predicted to win by our readers (we’ll have a full rundown of the predictions at noon, after the contest ends). If I am predicting a different film, those are in Italics. Meanwhile, the nominees I want to win, but don’t think will win, are Underlined. There are a few categories where the film I really think deserves the award was not even nominated, plus a few I don’t have a real opinion on.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s not too late to enter our Oscar competition, and win all Best Picture nominees on Blu-ray or DVD.
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February 18th, 2016
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With our annual Oscar Prediction contest underway, now is the best time to look at the nominees and try and figure out who the favorites are and which films should just feel honored to be nominated. Today we look at Best Feature-Length Documentary. Last year, this category was in chaos. This year, we have a favorite, a long shot with a shot, and then the rest.
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January 15th, 2016
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The Oscar nominations were announced at 5:30 am Pacific time. Nothing is good that early in the morning. Worse still, this was a terrible year for snubs, especially when it comes to diversity of the nominees. The voters for the Oscars are 94% white and 77% male... but that's still more diverse than the list of nominees. The Revenant led the way with 12 nominations and it is expected to win a few of those, while it is a serious contender in most of the categories it was nominated in.
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January 12th, 2016
It is a busy week for first run releases with four of them on this week's list. Of these, The Martian is the biggest and the best. It would have been the Pick of the Week except for two things. One, the screener is late. Two, David Bowie passed away over the weekend. He died after an 18-month battle with cancer and just two days after his last album came out. This is the the most poignant Rock'n'Roll death since Freddie Mercury and it seems fitting to give Blackstar the title of Pick of the Week.
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November 25th, 2015
Awards Season begins with the Independent Spirit Awards nominations. There were definitely some surprise nominees this year, but that also meant there were some unfortunate snubs as well. The overall leader was Carol, which just opened this past weekend. This is great timing and should help its box office numbers, as well as its chances throughout Awards Season. Its six nominations were one ahead of Beasts of No Nation and Spotlight. (One of Spotlight's was the Robert Altman Award, which has no nominations, just one winner.)
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July 22nd, 2015
The $10,000 club was led by Irrational Man with $175,312 in five theaters for an average of $35,062. While this was the best average of the weekend, it was the weakest opening weekend for a Woody Allen movie since You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger. The Stanford Prison Experiment was next with an average of $18,757 in two theaters. Its reviews are good, but not great, so its chances to expand significantly are still just 50/50. Up next is a pair of wide releases, Ant-Man and Minions, which earned averages of $14,841 and $11,430 respectively. The final entrant in the $10,000 club was Bajrangi Bhaijaan with an average of $10,239; however, it was playing in 256 theaters and arguably it had the most impressive opening for any limited release this week. This is the second weekend in a row a Bollywood film did this well on the per theater chart.
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July 17th, 2015
There are very few films on this week's list that have a real shot at earning mainstream success. I would like to think Court or A Hard Day could do so, but they are both foreign-language films and that's usually too big of an obstacle to overcome. Mr. Holmes has both the cast and the reviews to thrive, but it is playing in more than 300 theaters. That might be too many to thrive. Let's hope I'm being too pessimistic.
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