Oscar Prediction Revisions. Plus: Screener Land.

The Oscar charts are now fully updated for November. Peruse and report back! For any of you leaving for the holiday early Happy Thanksgiving!

Can The Way Back get a makeup nom
for all those wounds, sunburns and
life-threatening health issues?

So here's a momentary giving of thanks: I'm truly grateful for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences no matter how often I grouse about their choices. The Oscar race is fun. Plain and simple.

Here is the prediction chart index...
I'd love some feedback on the male acting prizes, in particular. I don't think it's so clear yet in either category though we have two handfuls of "likely" players.


Gold Derby recently released a list of which screeners have arrived in the mail for voters. This is the first year I've been receiving them with regularity thanks to the BFCA membership but I have been mysteriously denied The Karate Kid. Hmmmm. You can add 127 Hours, Greenberg, Let Me In, Stone, Made in Dagenham, Inside Job and Black Swan to that list of movies that have gone out to voters. As usual the studios are cutting it close. Are all the studios hoping that theirs are the last films screened before voting? Voting for the BFCA, for example, kicks off on December 6th. That's but two weeks away.

I've yet to screen: Barney's Version, Biutiful, Black Swan, Burlesque, The Fighter, Frankie & Alice, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Pt. 1, How Do You Know, The King's Speech, The Illusionist, Love and Other Drugs, Rabbit Hole, Somewhere, The Town, The Tourist and True Grit. The list above will clue you in immediately as to why festival trips are so crucial. Otherwise you get months behind. So that's roughly 1 a day for me before voting. Can I do it?

It's more complicated than it sounds ...though these are good problems to have. (One mustn't bitch about having too many potentially good movies to see.) First one has to align the screenings -- I already had to cancel 2 of those 16 to see the 1 press screening of Burlesque. Now, this might seem like a foolish choice but it's CHER. So shut it, haters! Then there's the not so small matter of my actual life (not without boring uncinematic demands), plus the very not small matter of writing about the same movies (an even larger chunk of time), interviews (Tilda where are uuuuu?), plus the other 2010 movies like documentaries, foreign film submissions, random arthouse things (Claire Denis's White Material has opened. I must make time.) Thankfully after the BFCA voting I'll have another 3 weeks before my own hand-made awards show begins with which to fill in any holes. But in short: I-N-S-A-N-I-T-Y.

Most of the people in the awards game from journalists to bloggers to publicists to golden hopefuls won't be getting much sleep until late February. Here we go.