With the 85th Academy Awards looming closer, we here at Collider thought now would be a good time to take a look back at Oscar race thus far.  It’s been a wild and somewhat nutty 12 months, as we’ve seen numerous contenders rise and fall (and some rise back up again) in the contentious hunt for Oscar gold.  We’ve already run down the ebbs and flows of the Best Supporting Actor category, and today we’ll be taking a look back and how the race played out for Best Supporting Actress.

The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards have been announced, and it’s quite a whirlwind of nominees.  As expected, Lincoln landed the most nominations with 12, followed with Ang Lee’s Life of Pi which nabbed 11.  The big story here, though, is the Best Director category.  Shockingly, only two (two!) of the DGA nominees for Best Director made the Oscar cut: Ang Lee and Steven Spielberg.  The rest of the category was filled out by Benh Zeitlin for Beasts of the Southern Wild, David O. Russell for Silver Linings Playbook, and Michael Haneke for Amour.  It was almost guaranteed that Ben Affleck and Kathryn Bigelow would be landing nominations for Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, respectively, but shockingly neither made the cut.  Apparently those films just directed themselves.  Based off today’s nominations, it now looks like it’s (surprisingly) down to Lincoln vs. Silver Linings Playbook for the big win.

Hit the jump to check out the list of nominees, and click here to check them against my predictions (somehow I predicted the Best Picture and Supporting Actor categories perfectly).  The 85th Academy Awards will take place on February 24th.

At last, Oscar is upon us.  Back in November I shared a look at the early awards season race by way of our 2013 Oscar Preview articles, and now nearly two months later there’s still quite a bit up in the air.  This truly is one of the more exciting awards races in recent years, as 2012 is so stacked with quality that there are a surprising number of uncertainties this close to the Academy Awards ceremony.  Nevertheless, I am once again foolishly going to attempt to predict how the Oscar nominations will shake out when they’re announced tomorrow morning, January 10th.  Hit the jump to check out my predictions.

The nominations for the 2013 Independent Spirit Awards have been announced, and Oscar hopefuls Silver Linings Playbook and Moonrise Kingdom lead the pack.  Both films picked up nominations for Best Feature, Director, and Screenplay with Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper landing acting noms for SLP and Bruce Willis garnering a swell Best Supporting Actor nomination for his work in Moonrise Kingdom.  Beasts of the Southern Wild, Bernie, and Keep the Lights On round out the Best Feature nominees, while The Perks of Being a Wallflower and Safety Not Guaranteed were singled out for the Best First Feature award.  Also, Matthew McConaughey pulled double nominations for his stellar work in this year’s Magic Mike and Killer Joe, landing a Best Supporting Actor and Best Actor nod, respectively.  Notably shut out of the race entirely was Leos Carax‘s critically-lauded Holy Motors.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of nominations.  The winners of the 2013 Spirit Awards will be announced on Saturday, February 23, 2013.

Oscar season is in full swing, folks.  2012 has been a fantastic year in film so far, and with merely weeks to go before 2013 begins there are still a couple of highly anticipated films that have yet to be seen.  Just like last year, I’ll be running down a preview of the upcoming Oscar race during this fine Thanksgiving week, giving readers a look at what the state of the race looks like right now.  To be clear, this isn’t a personal list but rather an objective look at how things look to be shaping up.  I’ve divided each category into frontrunners, likely to be nominated, and other contenders in order to parse out where things stand at the moment.  There are multiple strong contenders in nearly every category, so this is looking to be a rather heated run to the finish line.

We’ll be looking at a couple of different major categories each day over the next four days, and we’re kicking things off with the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories.  Hit the jump to read on.

[This is a re-post of my review from the 2012 Sundance Film Festival.  The Sessions opens tomorrow in limited release.]

In the movies, pretty adults are supposed to have sex. The male lead and the female lead need to be our idealized selves in an ideal relationship and they need to have attractive people sex. But in the real world, people find a way to fall in love and get it on even if they don’t have chiseled abs or amazing breasts. And then there are those people where, due to their physique, we wonder if sex is even an option and we’re sure that thought has crossed their minds as well. And no matter our physique, we’ve all probably wondered if we’ll ever find love. Those thoughts—of finding love and sex—crossed the mind of writer and poet Mark O’Brien. At the age of six, O’Brien’s body was ravaged by polio and he was placed in an iron lung, which he could only leave for a few hours at a time. As John entered his 40s, he still hadn’t had sex or found love, and in Ben Lewin‘s The Sessions—a movie based on O’Brien’s real experiences—he searches for both. The Sessions comes right up to the line of being painfully sentimental and mawkish, but strong direction and amazing lead performances make the film inspirational, funny, and genuinely heartwarming.

Four clips from the upcoming drama The Sessions have been released.  The movie stars John Hawkes as writer and poet Mark O’Brien, whose body was ravaged by polio when he was a child and stuck him in an iron lung for the rest of his life.  However, he still wanted to have sex and intimacy, and so he found a sexual surrogate (Helen Hunt) to help him learn the intricacies of intercourse.  The pic made waves earlier this year when it debuted to a rapturously positive response at the Sundance Film Festival (read Matt’s review right here), with many singling out the fantastic performances from Hawkes and Hunt.

Hit the jump to watch the clips.  The film also stars William H. Macy and Moon Bloodgood.  The Sessions opens in limited release on October 19th.

A bit of a release date shuffle today and man are these titles hard on my lisp:

• Sinister, the horror thriller from director Scott Derrickson and starring Ethan Hawke and Juliet Rylance moves back a week from October 5th to October 12th, 2012.
• The Sessions, from director Ben Lewin and starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt and William H. Macy moves up from October 26th to October 19th, 2012.
• The Starbuck remake by Ken Scott (the writer/director of the original 2011 film) has been bumped from September 28th of this year to March 29th, 2013.  Starbuck stars Vince Vaughn, Chris Pratt and Cobie Smulders.

Hit the jump for synopses and posters.

The first clip from The Sessions has gone online.  The movie stars John Hawkes as writer and poet Mark O’Brien, whose body was ravaged by polio when he was a child and stuck him in an iron lung for the rest of his life.  However, he still wanted to have sex and intimacy, and so he found a sexual surrogate (Helen Hunt) to help him learn the intricacies of intercourse.  This debut clip explains how Hunt’s character isn’t a prostitute even though O’Brien pays her for sex.  It also provides a glimpse of the excellent performances from Hawkes and Hunt.  I caught the movie at Sundance (back when it was called The Surrogate) and though it was really terrific, so I can’t wait for more people to get a look at it.

Hit the jump to check out the clip.  The Sessions opens October 26th.

Here’s a new batch of posters to complement the ones we posted earlier today:

• A look at a Chilean martial artist, Marko Zaror, trading in his fists for a shotgun in Robert Rodriguez’s Machete Kills.  The sequel, starring Danny Trejo in the title role, drops sometime next year.
• Two new Spanish posters from Rich Moore’s animated feature, Wreck-It Ralph.  Featuring the voices of John C. Reilly, Sarah Silverman, Jack McBrayer and Jane Lynch, Wreck-It Ralph comes out on November 2nd of this year.
• An official poster for The Sessions from writer/director Ben Lewin.  The Sundance 2012 Audience Award Winner stars John Hawkes, Helen Hunt and William H. Macy.  Look for it in theaters starting October 26th.

Hit the jump for the new posters and synopses.

The first trailer for the drama The Sessions (previously The Surrogate) has been released.  The movie stars John Hawkes as writer and poet Mark O’Brien, whose body was ravaged by polio when he was a child and stuck him in an iron lung for the rest of his life.  However, he still wanted to have sex and intimacy, and so he found a sexual surrogate (Helen Hunt) to help him learn the intricacies of sexual intercourse.  The film debuted at the Sundance Film Festival earlier this year to a rapturous response, with many singling out a superb performance from Hawkes.  Matt called the film “inspirational, funny, and genuinely heartwarming” in his review, and he’s actually double-blurbed in this first trailer.  Hawkes, Hunt, and William H. Macy are just about as good as it gets (pardon the pun), and this trailer promises a moving, funny, and hopefully insightful film not about robots, explosions, or aliens, but about people interacting with people.

Hit the jump to watch the trailer, and you can also check out Steve’s interviews from Sundance with Hawkes and Macy if you missed them.  The Sessions opens on October 26th.

One of the best-received films at this year’s Sundance Film Festival was The Surrogate.  The movie stars John Hawkes as writer and poet Mark O’Brien, whose body was ravaged by polio when he was a child and stuck him in an iron lung for the rest of his life.  However, he still wanted to have sex and intimacy, and so he found a sexual surrogate (Helen Hunt) to help him learn how maintain an erection, have prolonged sexual intercourse, etc.  Click here to read my positive review.

Fox Searchlight has announced that they will release the film on October 26th, but it will now be called Six Sessions, which refers to the number of sessions the surrogate has with O’Brien.  I can understand the change since the word “surrogate” is usually associated with pregnancy.  The movie will serve as a nice bit of limited-release counter-programming against the wide release films Alex Cross, Fun Size, Of Men and Mavericks, and Silent Hill: Revelations 3D [Box Office Mojo].

In the movies, pretty adults are supposed to have sex.  The male lead and the female lead need to be our idealized selves in an ideal relationship and they need to have attractive people sex.  But in the real world, people find a way to fall in love and get it on even if they don’t have chiseled abs or amazing breasts.  And then there are those people where, due to their physique, we wonder if sex is even an option and we’re sure that thought has crossed their minds as well.  And no matter our physique, we’ve all probably wondered if we’ll ever find love.  Those thoughts—of finding love and sex—crossed the mind of writer and poet Mark O’Brien.  At the age of six, O’Brien’s body was ravaged by polio and he was placed in an iron lung, which he could only leave for a few hours at a time.  As John entered his 40s, he still hadn’t had sex or found love, and in Ben Lewin‘s The Surrogate—a movie based on O’Brien’s real experiences—he searches for both.  The Surrogate comes right up to the line of being painfully sentimental and mawkish, but strong direction and amazing lead performances make the film inspirational, funny, and genuinely heartwarming.

Today, the 2012 Sundance Film Festival announced their In-Competition line-up, and that means we’re about to get a boatload of new images from upcoming films.  After the jump you’ll find synopses and the first images from The End of Love (starring Mark Webber, Michael Cera, and Amanda Seyfried), Filly Brown (starring Gina Rodriguez, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Edward James Olmos), The First Time (starring Dylan O’Brien, Brittany Robertson, and Craig Roberts), and The Surrogate (starring John Hawkes, Helen Hunt, and William H. Macy).

The 2012 Sundance Film Festival runs from January 19 – 29th.

Helen Hunt, Aaron Paul, and Maggie Grace will star in Steven Bernstein’s indie dramedy Decoding Annie Parker.  Variety reports that “the story centers on the irrepressible Parker, a breast-cancer patient who stops at nothing to solve the mystery behind her illness, despite the beliefs of the medical establishment.”  There are no details on who the actors will play, but I think it would be a safe bet that Hunt will be playing the title role.  Bernstein, who was the DP on [Correction: Like Water for Chocolate, not Water for Elephants]  and Monster, will be making his directing debut on the feature.  He and Adam Benstein co-wrote the script based on a true story.  Filming is set to begin later this month in Los Angeles. [Updated: A spokesman for the film has told us that Samantha Morton (In America) will play Parker. Hunt will play scientist Mary-Claire King, Grace is Sarah, her assistant, and Paul has been cast as Parker's husband.]

It’s interesting that Paul continues to take smaller, indie projects as his hiatus films as opposed to his equally-talented Breaking Bad co-star Bryan Cranston.  While Cranston is co-starring in the musical Rock of Ages, the drama Argo, and the remake of Total Recall.  Meanwhile, Paul recently signed on to another indie dramedy, Smashed.  I’m not saying one is better than the other, but it’s interesting to see the diverging paths of their film careers.