This new Funny or Die bit featuring reigning Oscar king Jean Dujardin pushing a fictional brand of cigarettes in the suavest, most charming and youth-enticing way possible is pretty good ("And now in Cotton Candy and Snickers Bar!" I LOL'ed). Still, when it comes to animated/live-action smoke pushers, Dujardin and his partner in crime have pretty formidable competition in the infamous Happy Joe Lucky. Right down to the accordions! Who's got the kid-pleasingest cigarettes around?
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The champagne's been tippled, the winners are all celebrating, and somewhere Uggie's getting a LOT of sausages. So let's relive the highlights of the 2012 Academy Awards show! Click through for Movieline's gallery and name your favorite moment from the big night. Was it Best Supporting Actress Octavia Spencer's emotional acceptance speech? Or Descendants co-scripter Jim Rash's impromptu Angelina Jolie impersonation? Those bits and more in vivid photographic detail after the jump!
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Hollywood's biggest (and possibly most anticlimactic) night is upon us, which can only mean one thing: Movieline's third annual Oscar Liveblog Extravaganza! Join your Movieline editors and loyal readers as we parse the Academy Awards to within an inch of their glamorous lives. The fun begins on the red carpet at 7 p.m. ET/4 p.m. PT, with the Oscarcast proper commencing at 8:30 p.m ET/5:30 p.m. PT. And in any case, keep abreast of this year's Oscar class with our commentary after the jump.
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"Nothing will come from this if you win!” joked Seth Rogen as he opened his hosting gig at the 2012 Film Independent Spirit Awards. “Absolutely nothing. This won't help you get paid anymore -- if anything, it proves you'll work for nothing.” That may be painfully true for many of the indie film nominees honored today at the annual Spirit Awards, held in a tent on the beach in balmy Santa Monica. But what does it mean that the night’s big winner was the Harvey Weinstein-backed awards season juggernaut The Artist?
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Forty-eight hours to Oscar. Gut-check time — or maybe make that "gut-instinct check" time, a moment to break away from the meticulous zeitgeist-combing science of Movieline's Institute For the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics and make a few choices for myself. Not that they'll be so different, but if you can't go with a hunch where 5,765 fickle, insular industry minds are concerned, then what can you go with? We can't all be be Otis the Oscar Cat, you know. Anyway, let's make this quick:
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Each Wednesday for the past five months, my colleague S.T. VanAirsdale has fearlessly navigated the ever-shifting Academy Awards tides with his weekly Oscar Index, a gig that’s enough to make even the most intrepid seafaring mortal long for dry land. It’s in sight, Stu! By this coming Monday morning, all of our meticulously calibrated predictions, as well as our wayward hopes for our own personal favorites, will amount to little more than scraps of speared whale blubber, receding in the distance as we move toward next year’s Oscar broadcast. But let’s not get ahead of ourselves. There’s still time to savor the last-minute glitter wave. To that end, here are my own Oscar predictions for each category, followed by the candidates I wish would win.
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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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Academy Awards ballots are due today at 5 p.m. PT, and procrastinators in the actors' branch might do well to take note: One of your eldest peers has an upset or two in mind.
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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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From Meryl Streep to Martin Scorsese and awards season juggernaut The Artist, Hollywood's finest came out in full force Sunday in London for the 2012 BAFTA Awards. (Get the full list of BAFTA winners here.) Hit the jump to see who dazzled on the red carpet and celebrated backstage at the last big hurrah before the Oscars.
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Stop me if you've heard this one before: The Artist made off with Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, and and fistful of other hardware at tonight BAFTA Awards ceremony in London, its final stop before the silent film's Oscar express pulls into the Kodak Theater terminus on Feb. 26. Meryl Streep also won a key awards-race victory as the institute's Best Actress, while Octavia Spencer and Christopher Plummer continued their own hot streaks in the supporting categories. Read on for all of 2012's winners, and drop back by Movieline on Wednesday to find out how the latest developments affect our Oscar 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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Banned in France! Well, kinda: Movie posters featuring Oscar-nominated Jean Dujardin, up for Best Actor for his turn as a silent film star in the sweet and wholesome The Artist, have been deemed too racy by French censors who recommended that certain billboards for Dujardin's French language film Les Infidels (The Players) be taken down. Judging from the film's redband trailer, Les Infidels is a comedy that features lots and lots of sex. Dirty sex. Upside down sex, suggest the naughty, naughty posters!
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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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"At 2 P.M. on Tuesday, January 31 Councilman Tom Labonge will present The Artist with the 'Made In Hollywood' honor to the film’s cast and crew. Including Academy Award Nominee Michel Hazanvicious [sic], Academy Award Nominee Jean Dujardin, Academy Award Nominee Bérénice Bejo, Missi Pyle, Penelope Ann Miller, Beth Grant, David Cluck – 1st Assistant Director, Richard Middleton- Executive Producer, Antoine De Cazotte- Executive producer, Heidi Levitt- Casting Director and the Los Angeles crew. The Honor will be presented at RED Studios which substituted for Kinograph Studios in the film. 846 North Cahuenga Boulevard Los Angeles, CA 90038-3704. Be it further resolved that the Los Angeles City Council does name this day, January 31, 2012, as The Artist Day in the City of Los Angeles." Yikes! Time is running out! Start getting sick now! [Press Release]
