Pop Culture

Oscars 2014 Nomination Reactions

grandbudapesthotelHoo boy has it been a morning (ahem… three days ago. This may have sat as a draft for longer than I meant). Pretty disappointing all around, to be honest, so let’s take it bit by bit. As with the Golden Globes, we’ll divide this in four categories this time, along the twin axes of Surprise vs. Not Surprise and Good vs. Bad.

Quick note: as a reminder, as a general rule, you cannot complain about something being a snub if you can’t also say who should have gotten the spot instead.

Unfortunately, the category of Unexpected and Bad easily has the most notes, so let’s start there and get it out of the way: Continue reading →

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Golden Globes 2015: TV Reactions

fargoEven later than the movie results, it’s time to talk about the TV Golden Globes category. At this point, it’s practically an afterthought but that’s appropriate considering that that’s kind of how the Hollywood Foreign Press Association treats the TV awards.

The best and worst part about the TV Golden Globes is that they make really weird decisions, most of which would never happen on the Emmys. Note the lack of wins for Jim Parsons or anything from Modern Family. We’re going to break the awards down into different degrees of expected and unexpected.
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Oscars 2014: Nomination Predictions

theoryofeverythingIt’s that time again! Today and tomorrow are the most exciting days of the awards season year. Today is the day of posting wild speculations on who’s going to get nominated, and tomorrow we already get to see if we were right. The Oscars themselves are great, but it’s also the end. This is the high point of the season, with the maximum number of possibilities still in play. Whee!

Best Picture

Let’s start off with a bang. As I said a bit in the Golden Globes prediction piece, the two frontrunners are Boyhood and Birdman, with the addition here of Selma. Both of the British Mid-Century Genius Biopics have held on strongly, and Grand Budapest Hotel has gotten so much traction that it’s hard for me to not imagine it getting a nomination. Foxcatcher has been getting pushed hard, it feels like. As we all remember, there can be between 5 and 10 nominations in this category. I am sure the following films are getting nominated. Continue reading →

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Golden Globes 2015: Movie Reactions

BirdmanTime for the post-mortem! Quick and dirty version because it’s already Wednesday…So things break down into three possible categories as we analyze the options between Expected and Unexpected and whether the win was Good or Bad. If things went as expected, they aren’t bad, because it means I was right. If things did not go as I expected, they were either right or wrong (and don’t worry, I will tell you all about it. As though that’s a thing you would worry about.)

In the Expected category, we have most of the evening. Boyhood won for Drama and Richard Linklater won Best Director for directing it, Julianne Moore won in Actress – Drama, Michael Keaton won for Actor – Comedy/Musical, Patricia Arquette won for Supporting Actress, and JK Simmons won for Supporting Actor. Those were all chalk, and can reasonably be considered as frontrunners in their respective categories at the Oscars. At a minimum, expect them to all be nominated on Thursday.

Now let’s do the Unexpected, and we’ll go least surprising to most surprising. Continue reading →

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Golden Globes 2015: Movie Predictions

nightcrawlerIt’s an admirable thing, to put on one’s To Do list on October 26th, “Write too-early Oscars post.” It’s kind of less admirable when you don’t get that post written by January, by which time the critics associations and most guilds have given awards, half the movies have already come out, and oops, the Golden Globes already have nominations out. To say I’m behind on this Oscar season is an understatement.

But that’s not going to stop me! Let’s talk arbitrarily about the Globe nominations before the ceremony happens and I miss it all, shall we? Continue reading →

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The 2014 Primetime Emmy Awards

EmmyAward (2)I am bad at predicting things. I correctly predicted 12 out of 26 awards that were given out tonight, bringing me to an accuracy of 46%. I did successfully predict that I would be a wreck during the Robin Williams tribute. Of course, the rest of the In Memoriam reel already had me in a weak emotional state because they included Don Pardo saying “It’s Saturday Night Live!” paired with reminding me of just how many people died this past year.

The voters really chose to latch onto a show in each genre and give it as many awards as it could possibly give. My optimism led me astray in comedy and instead of the Orange is the New Black sweep that I had hoped for, most of the honors went to Modern Family again. Also, Emmy voters, why didn’t you like Fargo? Fargo was excellent. And it’s not even like your weird FX aversion kept you from recognizing it because you totally gave Allison Tolman’s award to Kathy Bates for another, worse FX show.

A breakdown of the categories accompanied by my predictions from last week follows after the jump.
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2014 Emmy Predictions: Comedy

ORANGEComedy! Finally a genre with multiple shows and categories that I care about. Will Orange is the New Black take down Modern Family? Or any other show? Seriously, the Emmy voters heard that Modern Family was edge during its first season and haven’t gotten over that since. Julia Louis-Dreyfus did win best actress in a comedy last year and the show has gotten far fewer nominations this year than it did in years past so maybe they’ve finally clued in and have started to take notice of other shows.
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Snowpiercer: The Original Graphic Novel

snowpiercer_vol_1_the_escape_coverNote: the following post contains spoilers for the Snowpiercer graphic novel as well as the film. Proceed at your own risk. This blurb is safe, real spoilers after the jump.

As you all know, I loved Snowpiercer to death. So much so that I decided to actually- gasp- read the source material. Here, for your edification, is a breakdown of the book vs. the movie.

A Complete List of Similarities in Snowpiercer, Book and Movie:

  1. There’s a train.
  2. There’s a stratified class system.
  3. All of humanity lives on the train and everything else is cold.

And that’s it. No, really. Continue reading →

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2014 Emmy Predictions: Miniseries and Movies

1400693634000-XXX-NORMAL-HEART-jy-4915-cropToday we will be covering miniseries and movies, one of the more interesting Emmy genres. In 2011, all of the miniseries and movie categories were smashed together because there wasn’t enough competition for them to remain separate. Then FX decided that since American Horror Story was going to tell a different story each season that it could compete as a miniseries and the television academy agreed. I had come around on this but then HBO decided that even though True Detective runs on the same model that it was strong enough to compete as a drama.

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