2012 Oscars Update: PGA (Producers Guild) Nominations
When trying to guess what’s going to be nominated (and especially win) Best Picture, the Producers Guild is typically the most important guild to look at. Since 1990, when they started giving out awards, they’ve been wrong on the Best Picture winner six times (which we’ll talk about when they actually hand out a winner). So that’s a pretty good compass for that.
As for nominations — it’s more helpful now that we have (up to) ten nominees to gauge their effectiveness. Example: In 2009 (the first year of the increased nominees), the PGA nominated what ended up being eight of the ten Best Picture nominees (the two they didn’t get were A Serious Man — which had major guild support — and The Blind Side — which nobody saw coming. They nominated Star Trek and Invictus instead). In 2010, they had nine out of ten the same. The one difference was that they nominated The Town instead of Winter’s Bone (which got major guild support). And last year, they got 7 out of 9, which is a bit more problematic, since they nominated ten films. But, the three they had nominated that weren’t nominated for the Oscar were Bridesmaids, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and The Ides of March. And most people consider Dragon Tattoo the one that would have been the #10 nominee had they not done the sliding scale thing. They missed Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (which, like The Blind Side, no one really saw coming) and Tree of Life (which, again… guild support).
So that’s the set up here. After the jump (look at me… all professional-like. I fucking hate how much I love that), we’re gonna list what was nominated and what that probably means for the Oscars. (more…)
The 2013 Film Release Calendar: February
The Film Release Calendar is something I do each year to preview the upcoming year’s slate of films. It started as both a way for me to start paying attention to what was coming out (since I was really slacking around the time I started the blog) and to be able to see how well I know myself and how much I know exactly what I’m gonna think about a movie before I even see it.
What I do is, I go through the list of films scheduled to come out in a given year (using my go-to article, Wikipedia’s year in film article), month by month. I write down what they’re about, who’s in them, and generally what my thoughts are on what I see. And then I guess what I think I’m gonna rate it when I see it. Because at this point — I’ve seen so many movies — I know what a movie is gonna be. I’m running about a 70% correct percentage on guessing stuff in January. Plus, that aside, it also gives me a chance to see what movies, come the end of the year, surpassed (or fell way below) my expectations (or everyone’s). So it’s not all just a chance for me to talk about how awesome I am (since, believe me… I’m gonna do that anyway).
Today, we’re looking at all the films that are currently scheduled to come out in February: (more…)
Pic of the Day: “I remember when my daddy gave me that gun. He told me that I should never point it at anything in the house, and that he’d rather I’d shoot at tin cans in the backyard. But he said that sooner or later he supposed the temptation to go after birds would be too much, and that I could shoot all the blue jays I wanted, if I could hit ’em, but to remember it was a sin to kill a mockingbird.” “Why?” “Well, I reckon because mockingbirds don’t do anything but make music for us to enjoy. They don’t eat people’s gardens, don’t nest in the corncrib, they don’t do one thing but just sing their hearts out for us.”
