Linky Pudding

Buzzfeed It's official Will & Grace (& Karen & Jack) is returning to NBC for a ninth season. The series ended on May 18th, 2006 over 10 years ago but their recent one-off election special got everyone excited again. 
AV Club supposedly that long hinted at Eastern Promises sequel will start shooting in only two months and supposedly Viggo Mortensen and Vincent Cassell will return. We'll believe this when I see it but would be happy to do so
Criterion Ira Sachs on Rainer Werner Fassbinder's classic Fox and His Friends

Arnaud Trouvé offers up César nomination predictions. If you can read French you'll enjoy it more
THR It's Octavia Spencer for "Woman of the Year" and Ryan Reynolds for "Man of the Year" at Harvard's annual Hasty Puddings celebration. Someone cast them in a rom-com together!
Coming Soon Sony Pictures Animation slate to come from The Smurfs onward
About Last Night a long lost interview/profile of Mikhail Baryshnikov from 1998. Just because! 
Boy Culture Betty White interviewed for her 95th birthday this week
Paste Manuel on One Day at a Time's successful resuscitation of the theater/tv hybrid of the multi-cam sitcom
Decider in Joe Reid's new Oscar column he talks to me about three Oscar races: Actress, Director, and Supporting Actor. Here's an excerpt:

My fantasy is that Ralph Fiennes, easily the single most Oscar-worthy actor who can’t seem to ever catch Oscar’s eye, is nomination morning’s biggest shock for A Bigger Splash. The key word in that sentence being “fantasy”.

HMWYBS: "The Turning Point"

Bancroft & Maclaine reminisce in The Turning PointBest Shot 1977 Party. Chapter 2
The Turning Point (1977)
Directed by: Herbert Ross
Cinematography by: Robert Surtees

When The Turning Point is remembered today, on the rare occasion that you hear it name-checked, it is nearly always in connection to its status as Oscar's all time loser (11 nominations without a win). That "achievement" was later shared when Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) met the same Oscar fate, entering the competition as a very big ticket and coming away empty-handed. It's surely no coincidence that both films are women's pictures. Oscar has grown increasingly wary of films about and for women over their 88 year history; that's not a mark on the films themselves but a stain on film culture and the Oscars. 1977 was in some significant ways, the very last Oscar year to be dominated by women. The sole "boys" movie up for the top prize was Star Wars, which perhaps also not coincidentally became the film which most Hollywood films aspired to be thereafter. Yes, 80% of the Best Picture nominees in 1977 were actually about women. Can you imagine it?!? That's a huge percentage which has, alas, not happened again in the 39 years since. Most Best Picture years since have been the reverse of those numbers, when in a more sane world it'd be about 50/50 since, you know, that's actually how the human race breaks down. 

Bronze. I think this is trying to be the film's signature image, but there are two many climaxes preceding it and following it to quite pull it off.

But now we're straying into Oscar stats when what we really want to talk about is this ballet melodrama and its gauzy prettiness. Worthy of 11 Oscar nominations? Surely not but that's not because of its subject, its genre, or its cast of accomplished women... 

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