We’re only a short week away from the 85th Academy Awards, and with the close of Oscar season approaching, we’d thought this would be a nice opportunity to take a look back at how some of the races have played out, chronicling the ebbs and flows of the past 12 months or so that got us to where we are today.  We’re kicking things off with one of the more open categories: Best Supporting Actor.

One important thing to keep in mind when looking at the Oscars is that the race is incredibly fluid.  A film could be the clear frontrunner in a category one week, then might stumble to second or even third place in the ensuing weeks.  With this series of articles, we’ll be looking at exactly how much each race has changed, starting with Best Supporting Actor.  Hit the jump to read on.

While the Oscar-nominated animated shorts take a little time to pick up some momentum, most of these live-action nominees find a way to grab you immediately by introducing a mystery of some kind.  One begins with a suicide attempt, another starts with a kidnapping, one features a man with a mysterious camera that can record shadows, and another opens with the striking image of children casually carrying around AK-47s.  More than animated films, live-action short movies can provide a notice to audiences and studios that these are talented filmmakers worth putting on your radar.

Hit the jump for my reviews of the 2012 Oscar-nominated live-action short films: Henry, Asad, Death of a Shadow, Curfew, and Buzkashi Boys.

I adore animation, and it bums me out that most animated features are so formulaic and safe.  I understand that they have to be widely-appealing due to the high production costs, but it keeps the animated form mostly constrained to family films.  The Oscar-nominated animated shorts allow us to have a peek at an animated world that can break boundaries, and show us the potential of the medium when it doesn’t have to appeal to all ages.  Unfortunately, most of these nominees are fairly safe, although it seems like they were all required to avoid dialogue.  The majority of the shorts are still entertaining, but there’s a runaway winner in the pack.

Hit the jump for my reviews of the 2012 Oscar-nominated animated short films: Paperman, Fresh Guacamole, Head over Heels, Adam and Dog, and Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”.

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.

Last week, BAFTA premiered special posters for their Best Picture nominees.  Today, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences had followed suit by teaming up with Gallery1988 and various artists to create posters for this year’s Best Picture Oscar nominees.  There are some impressive posters, and I’m curious to see if they’re going to go on sale at some point.  The Academy’s website lists the dimensions and type of production (screen print), which leads me to believe that these might be available for purchase some day.  I’m sure there are plenty of readers who would love to get their hands on Mark Englert‘s print for Django Unchained. [Update: Gallery1988 has tweeted the following: "G1988 x The Academy. Official. 2/14 - 2/17. More soon." so it looks like you should get your wallets ready, and keep an eye on their official website.]

Hit the jump to check out the posters.  The 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.

When it was first announced that Seth MacFarlane would be hosting the upcoming 85th Academy Awards, most expected that the musically-inclined MacFarlane would include some sort of music element in the show. Indeed, ABC announced today that this year’s Oscars will feature a tribute to movie musicals of the past decade.  Producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron revealed that they will showcase three movie musicals from the past ten years during the ceremony: Chicago, Dreamgirls, and this year’s Best Picture nominee Les Miserables.

Though I’m admittedly a big fan of movie musicals, I find it odd that the program has restricted the field to films from the past ten years.  There’s so much great matieral to be mined from the 30s, 40s, and 50s that MacFarlane could knock out of the park.  Nevertheless, We don’t know if MacFarlane will be handling the tribute alone, with some help, or if another party altogether will run the showcase.  Could we be in for a Seth/Stewie “They Both Reached for the Gun” rendition?  We’ll find out on February 24th.  Hit the jump to check out trailers for all three films followed by the press release.

Those worried that the upcoming 85th Annual Academy Awards ceremony might go by without a show-stopping moment from Adele can now rest easy.  It was announced today that the soulful Grammy hoarder will indeed perform the track “Skyfall” at the ceremony, which is nominated for Best Original Song for its inclusion in Skyfall.  This decision felt like a bit of a no-brainer.  The Oscars have been trying for years to find a way to draw a larger TV audience, and when you have the chance to get Adele onscreen belting out a fantastic Bond theme, you just don’t pass that up.

It’s unspecified whether the other nominated artists will perform their songs as well, but I wouldn’t mind seeing host Seth MacFarlane sing his nominated track from Ted.  The 85th Academy Awards will be held on February 24th.  Click here to revisit the full list of nominees, and hit the jump to take a listen to “Skyfall” once more.

Since Seth MacFarlane is hosting this year’s Oscars, it’s not much of a surprise that his Ted co-star Mark Wahlberg will be making an appearance alongside the foul-mouthed teddy bear.  Ted was one of the biggest hits of 2012, and it would almost be a letdown to not see the duo show up in some capacity.  Wahlberg confirmed the appearance on the talk show Anderson Live, and I’m curious to see if they’ll be presenting an award, or if it will just be a comic bit.  Either way, this year’s ceremony is shaping up to be pretty entertaining with MacFarlane as the host.

Wahlberg also confirmed that writing is underway on the script for Ted 2.  In a recent interview with Steve, Wahlberg says he plans to shoot Transformers 4 and then move on to Ted 2.  Hit the jump for Wahlberg’s appearance on Anderson Live.

What’s the best course of action should you ever find yourself a boring married person who’s hesitant to cash in “movie favors” due to the fear that your return favor will come in the form of the next four Katherine Heigl movies? Align yourself with like-minded boring married people and schedule yourself a significant-other-free triple feature. This advice comes directly from my own playbook and is the reason why this week’s Top 5 is arriving a little earlier than usual; so that I can make time to check out Gangster Squad, Zero Dark Thirty, and Django Unchained all in one glorious day. While you likely didn’t come here for relationship advice, as an added bonus to an already robust palette of content, I’m confident that you’re getting your time’s worth and then some.

All creative thinking pertaining to movies and how we can watch them while in a relationship aside, this week saw the announcement of the 2013 Oscar nominations, a little Evil Dead remake set visit coverage, Gangster Squad interviews with Ruben Fleischer and more, a healthy portion of posters and images from Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers, and developing news regarding Christopher Nolan potentially taking on Interstellar as his next directorial effort. All of the above resides in brief recap and link form after the jump.

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.

When we announced that Seth MacFarlane would be hosting the 85th Annual Academy Awards back in October, we were cautiously optimistic that he had plans to do something wildly inappropriate on such a big stage.  Now, a few Oscars promos featuring MacFarlane have been released and they’re far tamer than I would have expected.  Has MacFarlane been neutered into submission already?  Maybe it’s all a smokescreen and he’s just playing along until he exhausts the live feed’s censorship buffer. If you missed them early this morning, check out the list of nominations for this year’s Oscars.  The 85th Annual Academy Awards will be held February 24.  Hit the jump to watch MacFarlane’s Oscars promos.

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.

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.