Sasha Stone, Scott Kernen, and Jeremy Jentzen discuss the current Oscar race as shaped by the pundits and bloggers (there is no THERE there yet). I think Tom Cruise is still in play, but Scott and Jeremy disagree. We talk about The Social Reckoning, Artificial, and what the Best Picture race looks like. Lots of spicy gossip too.

Welcome to the wild and turbulent ’60s! I think, as a decade, not necessarily in film, but in history, it’s one I think about a lot. To me, it feels like the decade that most resembles what we have lived through for the last several years. Political unrest, wars, assassinations, and all the craziness in between. For my generation, maybe the 2020s are our 1960s….but with worse movies. It sort of makes sense that it is the decade of musicals and the...

The beautiful and talented Eva Marie Saint died at 102, the New York Times reports. Her best roles were in On the Waterfront, and of course, North by Northwest. Here she was winning her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GbPRWOuv5DU Here is a rundown from TCM from two years ago: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KGPrxrxxNl4 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1bA6e6V1l34 From the Times: Eva Marie Saint, who won an Academy Award in 1955 for her gripping movie debut as the shy love interest of Marlon Brando’s longshoreman in “On the...

Since I have not yet seen Artificial or The Social Reckoning and I didn't want to wade through the reviews, I hopped on a ride to our unstoppable future, actual artificial intelligence, to get a read on how these two films performed. I chat with AI almost every day because it is far preferable to wading through websites. I ask any question that comes to mind about history or climate change to fact-check. I even used AI to refinance a car loan...

Another week has gone by, and more premieres have been unveiled (specifically that of Tony Gilroy’s Behemoth! with Luca Guadagnino’s Artificial still left to screen today; reactions will follow suit), with not much really changing in the Awards Race. It’s a fascinating situation to experience, aided by years of following several Oscar years. Some things just start to “click” and make sense; like trends in an election season, there are trends that are constant in the Awards race, as pretentious as that...

A piece of interesting trivia just sent to me by reader Alexander Rodman that I thought you might be interested in: 2026, a piece of Oscar history. No other year in cinema history has brought together more directors of Best Picture winners behind new films than 2026. Nine directors have already released or are releasing new movies this year that have directed movies in the past that have won the Academy award for best picture. The 2026 list of directors is Ben...

After the reviews for Digger hit, and the catastrophic box office prospects that go along with a C+ Cinemascore, many of the pundits - myself included - doubted Tom Cruise's chances to get a nomination or to win. But as I think about Digger more, I think that kind of punditry is cowardly and wrong. Of course he deserves to be a frontrunner to win, no matter what. It's a brilliant, once in a generation, performance. Full stop. Look, no one wanted...

I have to give Alejandro G. Iñárritu some credit for Digger. He has enough intelligence to recognize the hypocrisy at play in climate hysteria. They point fingers and lay the blame all the while sucking carbon like a supercharged vacuum cleaner. Tom Cruise’s centerpiece monologue calls them out, and they don’t like it. That brief moment, like other brief flashes of brilliance, isn’t quite enough to save the waterlogged, delusional fantasy that might cap off the Peak Woke era. If the existential...

As the Oscars head for their century mark- 100 years of giving out awards- it might be useful to look at where they are now. What place do they hold in our culture now? Are they still relevant? What does the future look like? I have been covering the Oscar race since 1999. When I first got here, there were no Oscar blogs. The Oscar coverage was limited to the trades, sometimes the New York and Los Angeles Times, and Entertainment Weekly,...

Ask just about anyone who writes about film and culture, or who exists in the insulated bubble that much of our culture has become, whether Hollywood has a problem. They usually know that it does, but they refuse to name the problem. If they're comfortable—they get paid, they have access, they are invited to see movies for free—they will never want to rock the boat, much less stand up in it and tip it over, as I have done. What they won't...