February 28th, 2016
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It’s Oscar day and, if all goes to plan, I will be live-blogging the ceremony tonight. Here is the list of nominees marked according to predictions from our readers, and my personal wishes. Nominees in Bold are the ones predicted to win by our readers (we’ll have a full rundown of the predictions at noon, after the contest ends). If I am predicting a different film, those are in Italics. Meanwhile, the nominees I want to win, but don’t think will win, are Underlined. There are a few categories where the film I really think deserves the award was not even nominated, plus a few I don’t have a real opinion on.
If you haven’t done so already, it’s not too late to enter our Oscar competition, and win all Best Picture nominees on Blu-ray or DVD.
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February 20th, 2016
With our annual Oscar Prediction contest underway, now is the best time to look at the nominees and try and figure out who the favorites are and which films should just feel honored to be nominated. The Best Original Screenplay category isn't the most lop-sided category we will highlight, but it is also not very competitive.
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January 15th, 2016
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The Oscar nominations were announced at 5:30 am Pacific time. Nothing is good that early in the morning. Worse still, this was a terrible year for snubs, especially when it comes to diversity of the nominees. The voters for the Oscars are 94% white and 77% male... but that's still more diverse than the list of nominees. The Revenant led the way with 12 nominations and it is expected to win a few of those, while it is a serious contender in most of the categories it was nominated in.
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January 9th, 2016
The BAFTA nominations were announced and you can read them on their site... in alphabetical order. Alphabetical order is very useful in most circumstances, but not here. On the other hand, the nominees within each category are not presented in alphabetical order. ... Are the BAFTAs trolling us? As for the actual nominees, the big winners here are Bridge of Spies and Carol, both of which earned nine nominations. For Carol, this is just another impressive score, but this was a pleasant surprise for Bridge of Spies.
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November 2nd, 2015
Inside Out was one of the monster hits of the summer earning more than $350 million domestically and $800 million worldwide. This makes it the third biggest hit in Pixar's history. Is it also one of their best? Or was it swept up in the "irrational exuberance" we saw at the box office this summer?
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June 20th, 2015
Inside Out earned first place during its first day of release with an estimated $34.238 million on Friday. By comparison, the most recent Pixar film, Monsters University, pulled in $30.47 million during its first day of release. With Jurassic World in second place with $29 million on Friday, could Inside Out pull off a surprise weekend win?
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June 19th, 2015
For the past few months, 2015 had been struggling to keep pace with 2014. Worse still, 2014 wasn't a great year at the box office either. However, that changed with the record-breaking release of Jurassic World. Even if the film falls 60% this weekend, it will still lead the way over Inside Out. For the first time in their history, a Pixar film is expected to open in second place, but they have a good shot of continuing their record of having an opening weekend between $62.58 million and $70.47 million (which has been true of all but three of their films since 2001). That's incredible reliability. Dope is the other wide release, but it is barely opening truly wide and the worst case scenario has it failing to reach the top five. This weekend last year, there were five films that earned $10 million or more. This year, there might be just two. However, last year, Think Like a Man Too was the top film with under $30 million. Jurassic World might earn three times than and Inside Out should at least double that. 2015 should be carried on Jurassic World's wave and easily come out on top of the year-over-year competition.
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June 1st, 2015
May turned out to be softer than anticipated with The Avengers: Age of Ultron missing expectations by about $100 million. Additionally, only Pitch Perfect 2 really topped expectations. May 2015 kept pace with May of 2014, more or less. June doesn't have any films as strong as Age of Ultron, but there are two films that should have no trouble getting to $200 million. Those two films are Jurassic World and Inside Out and I'm not sure which one will turn out to be the biggest hit of the month. Last June, the biggest hit was Transformers: Age of Extinction, but both Jurassic World and Inside Out should top that film, albeit by small margins. On the other hand, last June had four other films that reached $100 million, while this time around only Spy! and Ted 2 have a real shot at that milestone. 2015 is stronger at the top, but has weaker depth. It will be interesting to see if 2015 will keep pace with 2014 over the course of the full month.
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June 19th, 2013
Hayao Miyazaki is one of the best animators working today, if not they best. He's created a number of masterpieces and even his weaker efforts are worth watching again and again. Recently two of his films were released on Blu-ray, Howl's Moving Castle and My Neighbor Totoro. The screeners arrived a little late, but I finally got to the reviews this week. Where do they fit in Hayao Miyazaki's filmography? And are they worth picking up?
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