Also in Thursday's round-up of news briefs, the Academy approves some new rules for the next Oscars. A crime thriller gets a North American home and is headed to theaters. And, Charlize Theron is teaming on a story about a recently slain war journalist.
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*: As determined by Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics after crunching 23 weeks of data from the awards cognoscenti and beyond. Thank you for reading; our work here is done.
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You know that when two of the most respected pundits in all of Oscardom argue (within days of each other!) for curtailing both the epic Academy Awards season race and the ceremony in which it culminates, patience for all this crap is wearing thin. With that in mind — and also considering that the "race" for most of these categories ended weeks or months ago — who's up for an Oscar Index lightning round? (The entire staff at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics raises its hands.) OK, then — to the Index!
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"Let's have a moment of silence for the suffering Oscar bloggers as they enter the most trying and mortifying weeks of their labors." Such was Glenn Kenny's tweeted lament earlier this week -- one eerily anticipating today's latest, sanity-thrashing edition of Oscar Index. And that's just its effect on readers! You really don't want to see the catatonic pall saturating Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. On the other hand, we're gonna make a fortune recycling this mounting pile of wine bottles. To the Index!
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A gaggle of right-wing functionaries is furious with Clint Eastwood and Chrysler, with no less than Karl Rove calling out the actor-director-inspirational halftime huckster for a Super Bowl ad that Rove and others perceived as a thinly veiled reelection endorsement for President Obama. Wait, what?
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It's a little difficult for the specialists at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics to come into work these days, what with the pall of predictability settling in over the awards landscape and the painstaking studies into backlash physics yielding less and less of practical substance. What's a frustrated kudologist to do? Besides drink for the next four weeks straight, I mean. Let's look for ideas and encouragement for all in this week's Oscar Index.
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There's good news and bad news to begin this post-nomination, next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-last installment of Oscar Index. The good news? It's kind of almost over! The bad news? Oy. Please don't make me repeat it.
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Smack in the middle of a two-week frame yielding two awards shows and a pair of nomination announcements that will culminate in this year's Oscar nods, the researchers at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics have gained minimal insight into where the Academy may take the 2011-12 awards race in next Tuesday's final nominations. Or maybe they're all just sleeping. It's been that kind of year. Let's check their work in this week's Oscar Index.
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What a week at Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics, where the pundits' hustle harmonized with the guilds' bustle to create a heavy-duty wake-up call for some otherwise dormant awards-season underdogs. They also telegraphed danger for a few juggernauts once thought unassailable. What does it all mean as we head into the Critics Choice and Golden Globe Awards weekend? To the Index!
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The first Oscar Index entry of 2012 finds Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics a little hungover from the holidays and lot bored from the protracted inertia of awards season. Not even this week's Producers Guild Award nominations could do much to shake up a contest that appears to be both wide open and solidifying into place at the same time. Let's investigate...
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Well, this should go pretty fast: The holiday week has offered a dearth of new narratives to trace and pulses to take, with only one film demonstrating any significant mobility in the studies coming out Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. Let's get to it!
Screw Christmas. Forget Hanukkah. To hell with New Year's. There is only one holiday we celebrate in the dank, windowless labs of Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics, and that is Oscar Night. Thus the latest edition of Oscar Index, offering all the festive year-end joy you can possibly stand. Let's get to it!
Just when you thought that the future of pop culture couldn't look more dismal, TMZ reports that Clint Eastwood's family is planning a Kardashian-like reality series on which the screen legend has every intention of appearing.
Ah, Thanksgiving. A time for gathering with the fam, eating turkey, and violently disagreeing with Aunt Sue about the validity of Justin Bieber's paternity suit and a cornucopia of other assorted pop culture-related topics while passing around the cranberry sauce. We're here to help make sure those awkward lulls in conversation don't devolve into interrogations into your actual personal life with 15 movie-related topics to keep the relatives squawking, bickering, and debating... at least 'til the pumpkin pie.
As Lily Tomlin's Ernestine once said, "There's nothing like a Hoover when you're dealing with dirt." Clint Eastwood's J. Edgar could use more dirt: This is a sensitive, sympathetic portrait of a scummy little man, an earnest attempt to map the contours and contradictions of a complicated son-of-a-bitch. But it's all too earnest, to the point of serving, unwittingly or otherwise, as an apologia. Even Eastwood's attempt at a poignant Hoover death scene fails to hit the mark: I for one would want to stick the guy with a pin to make sure he was really dead.
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