The annual pageant of youth, taste and class hardware bacchanal known as the MTV Movie Awards has announced its nominations for 2012, with this year's most formidable blockbuster to date, The Hunger Games, doing battle against the most formidable blockbusters of last year's calendar, including Bridesmaids, Breaking Dawn: Part I, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2, The Help, and others. And Drive loyalists rejoice! Your favorite head-shattering action-drama of 2011 has been honored with three nominations as well. Read on for the full list of contenders who will go at it in a fully-product placement-optimized Gibson Amphitheater on June 3.
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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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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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And why? Because they're based on hype. But that's OK, Ben Zauzmer — Harvard freshman, analytical whiz kid and proprietor of the new "matrix algebra"-based awards prognostication site Ben's Oscar Forecast! Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics has the science down and is soliciting interns for next year's awards-season death march. Inquire within.
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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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The Writers Guild of America gave out its annual awards on Sunday night, bestowing its hardware to the year's most accomplished film and television scribes... whose work was developed and produced under WGA rules and conditions, which disqualified Artist writer-director (and Oscar frontrunner) Michel Hazanavicius among a few others, but whatever. Congrats to all!
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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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"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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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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The most demoralizing awards season in recent memory continued over the weekend, with the Directors Guild and the Screen Actors Guild handing out their hardware to pretty much everyone you expected to receive it. I'll factor all this into Oscar Index on Wednesday for a complete-race breakdown, but here are the five basic takeaways worth keeping in mind:
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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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Days after the polarizing Red Hook Summer hit Sundance, co-writer/co-producer James McBride unleashed a passionate missive comparing the black artists' experience to cultural servitude: "You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid. Because you’re a kind of cultural maid. You serve up the music, the life, the pain, the spirituality. You clean house. Take the kids to school. You serve the eggs and pour the coffee. And for your efforts the white folks thank you. They pay you a little. They ask about your kids. Then they jump into the swimming pool and you go home to your life on the outside, whatever it is. And if lucky you get to be the wise old black sage that drops pearls of wisdom, the wise old poet or bluesman who says ‘I been buked and scorned,’ and you heal the white folks, when in fact you can’t heal anybody." [40Acres.com]
Give the Academy some credit: They made awards season fun for a little bit longer. At least my mind was blown this morning as AMPAS president Tom Sherak and Jennifer Lawrence announced The Tree of Life, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, Demián Bichir and a few other shocks among the 2012 Oscar nominations.
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We're a little more than half a day away from learning who and what will compete for the 84th annual Academy Awards -- an elite class through which Movieline's Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics had combed for four months in its fail-safe, fool-proof and bracingly handsome Oscar Index. This calls for one last sweep through each of the Academy's categories (with the exception of live-action, animated and documentary short, about which even our pointiest-headed Oscar wonk cannot speak yet with authority); check our team's work against your own, and drop back by Movieline tomorrow morning at 8:30 a.m. ET/5:30 a.m. PT as we deliver nominations, reactions, analysis and more.
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