With the Academy Awards coming up in the next few weeks, the entertainment world is abuzz with who deserves what. And because of this year's expanded best-picture category, there are even more actors and films to fawn over.
Unfortunately, along with Oscar nominations comes the usual pretentiousness—"If you haven't seen An Education, then you're missing out [...]
Be still, my horrified heart. We perhaps all knew it was coming, but now it's official: The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences believes that Avatar was one of the best films of 2009. (Guess the "sciences" portion of the institution's name means more than the "arts" this year.)
Very, very few surprises among the [...]
Morning, readers.
*Today: Oscar nominations! They're in. Like as not, we'll have a spot of blog commentary from Tricia Olszewski, who's filing dispatches from sunny SoCal. They say it's 70 out there this a.m.; Tricia should maybe bring her editor along next time. just informed me that she canceled her L.A. trip and is, in fact, [...]
Good morning! Sundance continues! Yesterday saw the premiere of The Runaways, the eponymous biopic of the all-girl hard rock band that spawned the careers of Lita Ford and Joan Jett.
But the buzziest film of the weekend, Waiting for Superman, is on a slightly dryer subject. No, it has nothing to do with the Flaming Lips. It's the [...]
If your regular T-shirts are mistaken for ironic ones, you begin sentences with “polls say…”, and you thought it was OK to see Avatar twice, because once was in 3D, it might be time to head on down to Nerd Nite at DC9. Nerd Nite was born in Boston, reared in New York, and eventually [...]
Good morning! Vampire Weekend, the world's most beloved/most reviled/only Ivy League Afro-pop band, is releasing its much-anticipated sophomore record, Contra, next week. Press copies just went out, and the band posted the entire disc to its MySpace page yesterday—meaning, a lot of you probably have this on your hard drive already. The band was smart to [...]
Avatar is not on critic Tricia Olszewski's list of the best films of the year. Nor is much of the 2009's year-end Oscar bait. In terms of quality, Olszewski writes in our Arts in Review issue, it hasn't been a terribly joyful holiday season, but 2009 still contained plenty of films to get excited about. [...]
In this week's column, Ross Douthat ascends the pulpit to lambaste "The Gospel According to James." (I think he means James Cameron.) Douthat's beef? That Avatar, Cameron's decade-in-the-making opus, is merely a "long apologia for pantheism," 161 minutes of New-Agey sermonizing about the perils of preemptive strikes, imperial genocide, Manifest Destiny, carbon emissions, and, presumably, [...]
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Thanks, Fox!! From Allied Publicity:
I’m sure you have all seen the trades and reviews running and I know that has brought up some concern and questions. Given that a lot of outlets are running their reviews we know that it is not fair to ask everyone [...]
