Seth MacFarlane got mixed reviews as host of the 2013 Academy Awards.  But the audience grew to 40.3 million viewers over the previous year hosted by Billy Crystal —more importantly, the audience grew younger, with 20% more 18-34 viewers.  This year’s telecast producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron will return to oversee the 2014 Oscars and have reportedly asked MacFarlane to host again.  A source tells Just Jared:

“After defending his performance, the producers reached out to Seth and invited him back to host the show again.  He’s not sure if he’s going to do it, but he has to decide within the next couple of weeks.”

MacFarlane has stated he does not want to host again, tweeting “No way” shortly after the ceremony.  If he changes his mind, I would like to see him try again.  MacFarlane was admittedly hit-or-miss his first time around, but I would like for my generation to have a Bob Hope/Billy Crystal type—a go-to host.  The most important step toward that goal is to give a natural talent several chances to refine his approach.  I believe MacFarlane is qualified.  Next year’s Academy Awards are set for March 2, 2014.

The Academy has announced some important dates for its 86th and 87th Academy Awards ceremonies.  Next year’s Oscars will be held on Sunday, March 2nd, while 2015’s Oscars will take place on February 22nd.  Nominations for the 2014 ceremony will be announced on January 16th.  The move for the 2014 Oscars means there will be yet another extended amount of time between when the nominations are announced and when the actual Oscars take place, so ready yourselves for yet another long awards season.

The prolonged period between the nominations and the ceremony means that voters should have enough time to see everything, but it also means that the studios’ campaigns get pretty intense as we start hating films that we actually used to like simply because their “Oscar-worthiness” is being shoved down our throats.  Nevertheless, there’s no lack of awards material set to debut later this year, so the 86th Academy Awards should be another interesting ride.

You’ve read our predictions, you’ve read all of our Oscar coverage, and tonight the winners of the 85th Academy Awards will be announced.  As I’ve done in past years, I will be live-blogging the ceremony and some of the red carpet.  Seth MacFarlane is hosting this year’s ceremony, and I’ve got a good feeling that he’ll do a solid job.  Of course, it’s the Oscars so there will be plenty of silliness both intended and unintended, and I’ll be providing my thoughts on all of it throughout the night.

My live-blogging will kick in around 8:00pm (EST) and then just keep refreshing the page for my latest thoughts on the 85th Academy Awards.  I’ll also be tweeting (cross-platform mockery!), and you can follow me on Twitter at @MattGoldberg.  We’re almost at the finish line of the 2013 awards race.  Let’s brave Hollywood’s self-congratulatory ceremony together.  The ceremony begins at 8:30pm (EST).

Adam and I briefly talked about our predictions on the latest episode of The Collision, but we know your Oscar pool needs more guidance.  It’s a rough year, and a lot of Oscar ballots are going to go down in flames.  Last year, I played the wild card on my Oscar predictions and lost big, but this year I’m going to try and be a bit savvier.  However, I’m going up against Collider’s Oscar guru, so if you’re going to copy one of our cheat-sheets, it’s probably best to cheat off Adam.

Hit the jump for who we think deserves to win and who we think will win at the 85th Academy Awards.  Be sure to come back Sunday night when I’ll be live-blogging the ceremony.  Adam and I will also be tweeting the Oscars, so be sure to follow us @AdamChitwood and @MattGoldberg, respectively.

On this special mid-week episode of The Collision, we will be talking about the 85th Academy Awards.  We wanted to bring this one to you a little early, so you’ll have time to listen to it before the ceremony Sunday night.  We’ll be talking about the surprise nominations, the awards race since the nominations were announced, our predictions, and more.  As always, we’ll be finishing up with our recommendations.

Click here to listen to the new episode of The Collision, click here for the previous episode (“The Die Hard Franchise, Legacy, and A Good Day to Die Hard“), click here to add the podcast to your RSS, and click here to find us on iTunes. To keep up to date with The Collision, you can follow us on Twitter at @MattGoldberg, @AdamChitwood, and @DrClawMD (Dave Trumbore). Hit the jump to check out the trailers for this week’s recommendations.

This is one of the toughest Academy Awards in recent memory when it comes to predictions.  Usually, prediction ballots live or die based on the shorts section coupled with a few surprises.  But a number of major categories are up for grabs this year including Best Director and Best Supporting Actor.  It looks like Argo is the favorite to nab Best Picture, but even some prognosticators are sticking with Lincoln and Silver Linings Playbook.  So who can we turn to when it comes to making an accurate prediction?  Puppies, of course.  On Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, five puppies had the option of nine bowls of kibble, each labeled with a different Best Picture nominee.  It’s a highly scientific method of predicting the winner, and I wish that the puppies could vote.  They’d probably do a better job than this moron of an Academy voter.

Hit the jump to check out the video, and click here to read Adam’s “The Road to Oscar” series.  The 85th Academy Awards will be held this Sunday at 7pm EST on ABC.

Even if you hate the Oscars, you’ll love what artist Olly Moss has done for the official 85 Years of Oscar poster.  We previously showed you individual posters by various artists for this year’s Best Picture nominees, but Moss’ work outshines them all.  He’s taken every single Best Picture winner and tried to fit them into the Oscar statue in one image.  Some of these are particularly brilliant (it took me a few moments to figure out how he represented 2001′s winner, A Beautiful Mind), and it’s a fun game to try and guess the each year’s Best Picture winner from Moss’ poster alone.

We know that Gallery1988 is teaming up with the Academy for something big this Thursday through Sunday.  They are giving away 100 of each of the Best Picture nominee posters, and it will be interesting to see if they do anything special with the Moss poster.  More details should be announced in the next day or so.  Hit the jump to check out Moss’ 85 Years of Oscar poster and find out how you can buy it now.  The 85th Academy Awards will be held on February 24th at 7pm EST on ABC.

The Avengers was the highest-grossing film of 2012, so it’s no surprise that some of its cast would be presenting at this year’s Academy Awards.  The film is nominated for Best Visual Effects (although the momentum seems headed in the direction of Life of Pi), and the Academy has sent out a press release announcing that most of the superhero team will be presenting this year’s awards.  Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Ruffalo will be presenting together, and I wouldn’t be surprised if they’re presenting for the technical categories (Visual Effects, Sound Mixing, and Sound Editing).  I assume Chris Hemsworth and Scarlett Johansson were unavailable.  In any event, I hope the guys will have some witty banter, and even if they don’t, I’m sure Downey will make it entertaining anyway.

Hit the jump for the press release.  The Academy Awards will be held on February 24th at 7pm (EST) on ABC.

Now that the nominations have been announced, the fact that Seth MacFarlane is hosting the 85^th Annual Academy Awards on February 24^th has become that much more real for the funnyman.  The creative force behind the animated series Family Guy and co-creator of American Dad! and The Cleveland Show, MacFarlane made his feature directorial debut last summer with Ted, which he also co-wrote, produced and voiced the title character for, and that went on to be one of the highest-grossing films of the year.

While talking to TCA members after the nominations were announced, MacFarlane said that they can get more specific in their jokes, now that they know who the nominees are, how he never thought he’d be offered the hosting gig, that he hopes to talk to former host Billy Crystal before showtime, that he figures there will be some singing involved, and even shared his own past Oscar memories.  He also said that, although a sequel hasn’t officially been signed off on yet, a sequel to Ted looks promising and that everyone involved wants to do it.  Check out what he had to say after the jump.

Last year was James Bond’s 50th anniversary, but Hollywood isn’t quite finished celebrating 007.  The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that this year’s Oscar ceremony will pay tribute to the film franchise by including a “special sequence”.  It would be very cool if producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron could get all six Bond actors onto the stage, but I get a feeling that Sean Connery would want no part of it.

I also wonder if this tribute dashes any hopes of Skyfall picking up a Best Picture nomination.  Yes, genre movies are always a long shot, but the Academy can nominate up to films for Best Picture, and Skyfall was a critical and box office success.  We’ll have to wait and see how much love Bond gets when nominations are announced on Thursday, January 10th at 5:30am PST.  The Oscars will be held on Feburary 24th.  Hit the jump for the press release.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have reduced the number of eligible foreign films to nine.  For those who don’t know how the Best Foreign Language Film category works, every foreign country can submit one movie for consideration.  That list has now been whittled down to nine movies, and five of these nine will get Oscar nominations.  The films on the shortlist are Amour (Austria), War Witch (Canada), No (Chile), A Royal Affair (Denmark), The Intouchables (France), The Deep (Iceland), Kon-Tiki (Norway), Beyond the Hills (Romania), and Sister (Switzerland).

Amour is the frontrunner for the win based on critical acclaim, but I’ll put my money on The Intouchables since I think the Academy will go with the feel-good caretaker movie as opposed to the remind-us-of-our-fragile-mortality caretaker movie.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced tonight the 15 films that made the shortlist for Best Documentary at the 85th Academy Awards, narrowed down from 126 qualifying submissions.  Some of the notables include Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Bully, Chasing Ice, The Imposter, Searching for Sugar Man, and This Is Not a Film.

Hit the jump for the full list.  For more on the Oscar nominee landscape, check out our previews for Best Picture/Director, Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Actress, and a rundown of the animated/screenplay/technical awards.

Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced that Family Guy and Ted creator Seth MacFarlane will host the 85th Annual Academy Awards.  If this news hadn’t been sent out in a press release, I would have trouble believing it.  In recent years, it looked like the Academy had moved away from hosts that would do anything more than playfully poke fun at the ceremony or the stars.  They wanted a celebration of themselves, and by hiring screen actors like Hugh Jackman, Anne Hathaway, James Franco, Alec Baldwin, Steve Martin, and Billy Crystal, they got their entertainment (for viewers at home, it’s been a mixed bag).  MacFarlane is more of a return to the Jon Stewart and Chris Rock mold except MacFarlane can be so much harsher.  If the producers let MacFarlane deliver the kind of jokes he does on Family Guy, you’re going to hear a pin drop at the theater.  But for the rest of us, we should be in for an entertaining broadcast.

Hit the jump for the press release.  The 85th Annual Academy Awards will be held February 24, 2013.

The Oscars are finally over.  The front-runner, The Artist, won the awards race by picking up Best Picture, Best Director (Michael Hazanavicius), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Costume Design, and Best Score.  There were also some big upsets as “locks” like The Tree of Life for Best Cinematography and Rise of the Planet of the Apes for Best Visual Effects were no match for Hugo, which ended up taking those categories and three more (Sound Editing, Sound Mixing, and Art Direction).  As for nice surprises…not really (unless you loved Hugo).

It was a forgettable year for the Oscars, and Billy Crystal, turning in his safe, predictable, and family-friendly routine was the perfect fit for a year that screamed “Don’t rock the boat!”  Last year’s Oscars took a chance on pairing Anne Hathaway and James Franco, and the show was a mess.  This year, they played it safe and the ceremony was still dull.  Quite simply, there was no films to root for and the “upsets” were for the establishment.  It was also funny to have the show and actors celebrate the theater when audiences are moving to OnDemand services, and studios are trying to make the theatrical release window even shorter.   Hit the jump for a full list of the winners, click here for mine and Adam Chitwood’s Oscar predictions (he did way better than me), and click here for my live-blog of the ceremony.

We’re here at last.  The seemingly endless award season has reached its zenith/nadir.  I have never been less enthusiastic for the Oscars.  And I used to love the Oscars.  I loved the competition, I loved seeing the films and actors I loved get recognized with Hollywood’s highest honor, and this year I hardly have anything or anyone to root for.  This year, it’s mostly “Yeah, I can live with that.”  I know the awards don’t really matter, I know that the voting body is old white men, and I know my Oscar predictions are probably going to go down in flames (if you’re still trying to figure out your Oscar ballot, go with Adam’s picks; I’m playing the odds).

But this live-blog will keep me sane.  Sharing my frustrations and mockery with you fine people will help me get through this charade.  My live-blogging will kick in around 8:00pm (EST) and then just keep refreshing the page for my latest thoughts on the 84th Academy Awards.  I’ll also be live-tweeting (cross-platform mocking!) and you can follow me on Twitter at @MattGoldberg.  Together, we will survive.  The ceremony begins at 8:30pm (EST).