Word: oscars
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Julius, their extravagantly gay friend, is a book and film reviewer whose former potential has waned through his years of bohemian dissipation. His might be said to emulate the dictum of his personal idol, Oscar Wilde: “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” The problem is, in his excessive zeal for personality as an aesthetic, he has neglected to perform any “actual sustained endeavor...
...almost all cases, the critics' groups had anticipated Oscar nominations at least half of the time, and they often foretold the winners. Last year, for instance, the Boston group gave prizes to three who would be Academy winners (Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote as best actor, Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line as best actress, and Ang Lee for directing Brokeback Mountain) and three that didn't win but were nominated (Brokeback Mountain as best film, Paul Giamatti in Cinderella Man for supporting actor and Catherine Keener in Capote for supporting actress). Of the L.A. critics' prizes, two went...
...Over the four years of my survey, the best predictor of Oscar glory was the National Society of Film Critics (with 27 points on the Oscrit scale), followed by the National Board of Review (25), L.A. (24), Boston (23) and New York (20). Perhaps the NSFC has an advantage because it votes in early January, long after the other critics have convened. That group has three or four weeks to sniff out the zeitgeist and, more important, get a perspective on the serious holiday films the rest of us have been shown in early December and have little time...
...Once in a while the critics' awards will have little overlap with the Oscar nominations. It happens when critics go crazy for some genre-bending effort - like Far from Heaven in 2002 or A History of Violence last year - that most Academy members just don't get. But that's the exception, not the rule. In general, all five groups are reliable forecasters of Oscar nominations...
...Over the next few weeks, the publicity people will crank up their machinery around our prizes. The winners will rehearse the speeches they'll give at our awards parties, always saving the best lines in case, just in case, they need them on Oscar Night (Feb. 25). And we critics crawl back in our holes, happy at the anonymity. You see, we don't think it's our job to herald the Academy nominations. We're mainly interested in writing judiciously about the medium we love, and noodging people to challenge themselves, once in a while, at the movies...