Tuesday, January 28, 2020 at 8:30PM Gurus of Gold - current predictions
Cartoon Brew - talks to the directors of all the animated short nominees
Movie City News - David Poland thinks the Oscar season is not too short but not short enough. Eeep! We wildly disagree since the shortened season made voters even lazier than usual.
More after the jump including Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Under the Skin, Lee Grant, and List-Mania...
Saturday, January 11, 2020 at 6:36PM The 92nd annual Academy Awards are almost upon us. They're just 29 days away at this writing. We'll have the official Oscar charts back up for you as soon as is humanly possible once the potentially exciting event has occurred on Monday (they're coming down now to prep for Monday's unfurling). But until then, it's time to make final predictions.
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The sure things: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Parasite, The Irishman, Joker, Jojo Rabbit, 1917. That's six titles that we can't imagine missing on Monday morning given their success to date in precursor awards and with critics and the public. The extremely probable: Marriage Story. The only reason we've begun to worry is that there's been virtually no traction for Noah Baumbach in Best Director which suggests that people have reduced the movie to "an actor's showcase"... but then where was the SAG Outstanding Cast nomination? It's likely in but if there's a shock omission Monday morning...
Sunday, November 10, 2019 at 3:44PM by Tim
This weekend marks the 100th birthday of cinema's first cartoon superstar. On November 9, 1919, Paramount released Feline Follies, produced by Pat Sullivan and animated by Otto Mesmer, a short gag-driven cartoon starring a black cat named Master Tom; the character was an immediate hit and by the time the third cartoon featuring the character came out five weeks later (they worked fast back in those days), he'd been renamed Felix. The rest is history: Felix the Cat was a bonafide phenomenon, igniting a craze for funny, mutable animals that hasn't let up at any point in the last century. Even Walt Disney's Mickey Mouse, the cinematic icon to end all icons, was initially conceived as a blatant Felix knock-off swapping out the cat's pointy ears for circles that were easier to draw.
You might not guess that to watch Feline Follies, which feels like an artifact from a lost civilization. This is what cartoons looked like in the 1910s: empty white voids full of characters who move in straight lines with few distinct movements, speaking in speech bubbles imported directly from newspaper comic strips...
Wednesday, October 30, 2019 at 8:00AM 
Marisa Berenson, Joel Grey and Liza Minnelli at the premiere of Cabaret (1972)Vanity Fair smart piece by Mark Harris on what four Oscar campaign's (or rather the potential success thereof) might tell us about the "new" Academy including Lupita Nyong'o in Us
The Guardian talks to Marisa Berenson (Cabaret) on why she walked away from the spotlight so many years ago.
After the jump animated short Oscar hopefuls, Taylor Swift Cats news, Jeff Goldblum, a new film from The Lighthouse's Robert Eggers and more...
Wednesday, October 9, 2019 at 2:00PM By Glenn Dunks
Short films, whether they be documentary or fiction, are a curious form. What may work in a feature-length film may not work in a short and vice versa, and this can make critiquing them a sometimes tricky prospect. To sit down and watch one often means to set aside the sort of internal critical devices we may use for a feature-length film, typically eschewing the things we may normally look for in films.
By their very nature, we don’t get to spend enough time in their ephemeral worlds but I do not care for short films that feel like truncated version of larger stories. They don’t necessarily have to tell an entire story, but they have to feel like a completed thought, mood, or idea.
Some of the short documentaries that I have been watching have been just that, others less so.
