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).

Alas, we’ve come to the end.  The 85th Academy Awards will take place tomorrow evening, after which the past year of maneuvering, campaigning, and controversy-drumming will be rendered obsolete as we wipe the slate clean and start the next awards season cycle anew.  Over the past six days, we’ve been taking a look back at the 2012 awards race in a number of categories, chronicling the ebbs and flows that have led us to today.  This past year was one of the more crazy awards seasons in recent memory, but at least it’s been interesting.  Today we close out our Road to Oscar feature with the final category, Best Picture.  Hit the jump to read on, and click here to read our predictions for tomorrow night’s ceremony.

I’m opening myself up to complete public failure here, but in the spirit of Oscar weekend I thought it might be fun to share with peers and readers alike my picks for tomorrow’s 85th Academy Awards. Worst case scenario, I figure, is that my picks are so woefully off base that I’m quickly offered a well-compensated position within the Republican Party as a polling analyst. High hopes, I know, but ultimately it’s all in the name of fun. Here’s to hoping you the reader will enjoy comparing your predictions against my own and sleeping better at night as a result of your superior Oscar guessing power.

My half-witted Oscar picks aside, this week’s edition features category previews plus Adam and Matt’s own predictions, Snitch interviews with Dwayne Johnson and more, a character guide to Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy, a roundup of recent Star Wars: Episode VII talk, and Sony’s PlayStation 4 announcement. Something that resembles a brief recap and link to each is starved for your attention after the jump.

For proof that 2012 was a nutty year for awards contenders, look no further than the Best Director category.  Over the past few days, we’ve been looking back how the ebbs and flows of the past 12 months have shaped the awards race in a number of categories, and one of the most dynamic shifts came with Best Director.  After the jump, we run down how the race for Oscar glory progressed over the past few months to give us the five nominees who will be vying for the gold on Oscar Sunday.  Hit the jump to read on.

A new batch of presenters has been announced for the upcoming 85th Academy Awards ceremony, and we figured now would be a good time to round up all of the presenters announced thus far in one handy story.  It was announced today that Jane Fonda, Kristen Stewart, Jennifer Garner, and Kerry Washington have joined the rather long list of presenters for the ceremony, which will be hosted by Seth Macfarlane.

We already learned that Robert Downey Jr., Chris Evans, Samuel L. Jackson, Jeremy Renner, and Mark Ruffalo from The Avengers will be presenting together, and Macfarlane has put together a tribute to movie musicals from the past decade that includes Dreamgirls’ Jennifer Hudson, Chicago’s Catherine Zeta-Jones, and Les Miserables’ Hugh Jackman, Amanda Seyfried, Russell Crowe, Anne Hathaway, Eddie Redmayne, Aaron Tveit, Helena Bonham Carter, and Samantha Barks.  Hit the jump to take a gander at the entire list of presenters, and click here to catch up on all of our recent Road to Oscar series.  The Oscars will be held this Sunday, February 24th, at 7pm EST on ABC. 

As Sunday’s 85th Annual Academy Awards loom closer, we’ve using this week as an opportunity to take a look back at how the past year’s Oscar race has played out in a number of categories.  We first took a look at the ebbs and flows in the Best Supporting Actor category, and then we chronicled the road that lead us to the Best Supporting Actress nominees.  Today we’re examining the Best Actor race, which actually seemed to be all wrapped up months before the nominees were even announced.  Hit the jump to read on.

It’s hard to believe that the 85th Academy Awards are merely just a few days away, and as evidenced by our ongoing The Road to Oscar feature, it’s been a rather nutty year awards season-wise.  In anticipation of the upcoming ceremony, someone has put together a nifty video montage that features footage from all 84 past Best Picture winners.  It’s a fun look back at Academy history as we’re reminded which Oscar winners have stood the test of time and which ones are somewhat perplexing in hindsight (I cringed when Crash popped up).

Hit the jump to take a look at the video and see how many Best Picture winners you can name.  If you’ve missed any of our Road to Oscar features thus far, click here to catch up.  Look for more Oscar goodness here on Collider in the next few days including the last few Road to Oscar entries, a special Oscar episode of our podcast The Collision, and finally our predictions for the ceremony.  The Oscars will be held on Sunday, February 24th on ABC at 8:30 ET.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Just yesterday we got a look at the 104 scores that will be gunning for the Best Original Score Oscar at the upcoming 85th Academy Awards, and today the Academy has unveiled the list of 75 songs that will be competing for the coveted Best Original Song trophy.  While the expected contenders like “Suddenly” from Les Miserables and “Song of the Lonely Mountain” from The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey appear, one of the pleasant surprises is Adele’s “Skyfall” from Skyfall.

Since Adele’s magnificent Bond track draws a few cues from the franchise’s theme, many assumed that the Academy might rule it ineligible for the Best Original Song trophy.  Not so, it appears, and now it looks like Adele just might land herself an Academy Award to keep those 47 Grammys company.  Also of note, Matthew McConaughey could find himself a Best Original Song nominee for “Ladies of Tampa” from Magic Mike.  MAKE THIS HAPPEN, PEOPLE.  Hit the jump to check out the full list.  The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards will be announced January 10th.

The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has narrowed down the Best Original Score race…to 104 entries.  The Academy has shortlisted over 100 scores from 2012 that are eligible to compete for the gold on Oscar night, including three from Alexandre Desplat alone (Argo, Rise of the Guardians, and Zero Dark Thirty).  Every year there are a few scores that are ruled ineligible for one reason or another, and this year those ineligible films include The Bourne Legacy, Moonrise Kingdom, and Rust and Bone.

For my money, the standouts of 2012 were Beasts of the Southern Wild, Looper, and The Dark Knight Rises.  I have a feeling Howard Shore’s work on The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey will end up being a favorite of mine as well.  Hit the jump to check out the full list of 104 eligible scores, and leave thoughts on your personal favorites from 2012 in the comments section.  The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards will be announced on January 10th, followed by the ceremony on February 24th.