It’s a welcoming party at Alexandria for Rick and company. Some suburban style bliss awaits them. Or is it? In an episode that is light on action and big on talking, “The Walking Dead” asks its harried group if this idyllic town is too good to be true. The smartest part of the episode is…
Fear and doubt surrounded our struggling group of Survivors this week. When Maggie and Sasha bring the new “friend” Aaron into the barn at gunpoint, Rick is offered up his most important decision ever for the group. “I have good news” says Aaron. A safe community, with houses and reinforced steel walls awaits them. For…
Better late than never, right? For viewers like myself who were growing restless with Shameless’s fifth season so far, “Crazy Love” is a breath of fresh air. Not only is this handily the best episode of the season, it also sits comfortably among the very best episodes of the series to date. The process of…
The last time the winner of Best Picture wasn't at least nominated for Best Film Editing was 1980 when Ordinary People won the top prize. That's a long time. To make the trend even stronger, in 2005 Best Picture frontrunner Brokeback Mountain lost out to Crash. Guess what film wasn't nominated for Best Film Editing. Boyhood had a fight on it's hand…
After the Terrence Malick style fever dream of the midseason premiere it was inevitable that The Walking Dead would simmer down this week. The entire group is featured, but after two traumatic deaths the episode focuses on how Maggie, Sasha, and Daryl deal with their grief. Maggie cries alone in the woods, staring blankly at a…
The Oscar for Best Original Song is one of the few categories that doesn't have a lot of patterns or indicators as to who will win. The only major precursor is the Golden Globe, however since the year 2000, the two kudos have matched up a whopping 4 times. Even last year when "Let It…
What's better than the same 5 guys being nominated for SAG, Golden Globes, and Oscars? Maybe the same guy winning. J.K. Simmons has swept his way through the awards season on the coattails of his now infamous character of Fletcher, the abusive jazz director that demands excellence and a commitment to honoring the greats. There's…
We have an interesting situation in the category for Best Cinematography. The last five winners were Life of Pi, Hugo, Gravity, Avatar, and Inception. So, the easy prediction is for the visual effects driven film. However, we don't have one this year. Instead there's the single-take Birdman, black and white Ida, symmetrical The Grand Budapest Hotel, period drama Mr. Turner, and Roger Deakins' Unbroken. The easy…
A few things happened this year to make Best Original Score, my usual favorite category, the thorn in my side. First, the academy disqualified the scores of Birdman and Whiplash because the former wasn't prewritten for the film and the latter because there wasn't "enough" score. That already angered me enough, but when they egregiously snubbed Gone Girl, I was furious.…
With the expansion of the Best Picture category to ten nominees/whatever they're doing with this sliding scale, Best Visual Effects has become one of the easier categories to predict at the Oscars. The winner tends to be whichever nominee is also nominated in Best Picture. Take Gravity, Hugo, Life of Pi, and Inception as examples from recent years. However,…
