Last year, Mondo put together a fun little event for the 2012 Academy Awards:  a few days prior to that Oscar Sunday, Mondo announced that a series of brand-new posters (all of which were based on that year’s Oscar-nominated films) would be dropping throughout the Academy’s broadcast.  Everyone dug the idea, the whole thing went off without a hitch, and—most importantly—waiting on a drop gave all of us something to focus on whenever watching the Oscars became too much to bear.

And so, when the Mondo guys announced they’d be doing it all over again in 2013, we were pumped (as were many of you).  But once that excitement died down, we were left wondering which of 2012’s Oscar-nominated films would get the Mondo treatment…and which of the rumors we’d been hearing would turn out to be true.  Answers to those questions (and many more) await you after the jump, folks.

I just finished live-blogging the Oscars.  My brain hurts.  It wasn’t a very good show, and it was a ceremony unworthy of all the great films we saw in 2012.  Briefly, the prognosticators were correct and Argo took Best Picture.  Ang Lee won his third Oscar and his second Best Director Oscar for Life of Pi, a film that also took home awards for Best Cinematography, Best Score, and Best Visual Effects.  In the acting categories, Daniel Day-Lewis won Best Actor for Lincoln, Jennifer Lawrence won Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook, Christoph Waltz won Best Supporting Actor for Django Unchained, and Anne Hathaway won Best Supporting Actress for Les Miserables.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of winners.

The 63rd annual American Cinema Editors Eddie awards were held last night, honoring editorial achievements from the world of film and television.  The list of nominees included familiar titles from the awards circuit, such as Argo, Life of Pi, Brave, Frankenweenie, Homeland and Breaking Bad, along with some less-talked-about documentary fare and non-scripted television series.  Hit the jump to check out a list of the winners from the 63rd annual American Cinema Editors Eddie awards.

Is an Argo Best Picture win now inevitable?  The 2013 British Academy of Film and Television Awards (BAFTA Awards) were handed out this evening, and director Ben Affleck’s thriller continued its domination of awards season by landing the Best Film and Best Director prizes.  The BAFTAs have always been an important bellwether for predicting Oscar, but they may be even more in tune with the Academy this year as a rule change allowed the entire BAFTA voting body to vote on every award (like the Oscars), instead of writers only voting for screenplay, actors only voting for acting, etc.

Les Miserables won the most BAFTAs of the night, taking home four trophies including Best Supporting Actress for Anne Hathaway (duh) and Best Production Design (over Anna Karenina? Really?).  The winners actually lined up pretty closely with my current Oscar predictions, though most were surprised to see David O. Russell take home the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar over Lincoln and Argo.  Jessica Chastain and Jennifer Lawrence were also overtaken in Best Actress by Emmanuel Riva for Amour, who has emerged as a strong possibility in a tough category.  Hit the jump for the full list of winners.

As we move closer towards the 85th Annual Academy Awards, a number of other awards ceremonies are taking place to honor the best of moviemaking in 2012.  One such ceremony is the 3D Creative Arts Awards which were held Wednesday night, and director Ang Lee’s Life of Pi swept a number of categories including Best Live-Action 3D Feature and 3D Sequence/Moment of the Year for the fish flying over the boat scene.  The ambitious adaptation is coming off a strong showing at the Visual Effects Society Awards earlier this week, and looks to be a solid contender at the Oscars in the technical categories.

Elsewhere at the 3D Creative Arts Awards, Brave was named Best Animated 3D feature, The Avengers won Best Use of 2D to 3D Conversion, and Transformers: The Ride won Themed Attraction.  Hit the jump for the full list of winners.

Over the past year, we’ve interviewed director Mark Andrews and producer Katherine Sarafian for Brave a number of times.  Each time they’ve been great to us and last night on the red carpet at the VES Awards (visual effects) was no different.  During our brief chat we talked about what the past few months have been like, being nominated, what’s been the biggest surprise to them throughout the whole development, production, and promotion process, future projects, and I try to find out if Pixar could make a Star Wars movie.  Hit the jump for what they had to say.

If we’re going to look at the Hollywood guilds/societies as a predictor for what will win at the Oscars, then Life of Pi will be the film to beat.  Ang Lee‘s drama won four categories at last night’s Visual Effects Society Awards including Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture; Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture; Outstanding FX and Simulation Animation in a Live Action Feature Motion Picture; and Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture.  Brave also picked up four awards, but that doesn’t seem to be as much of a factor, and the Best Animated Film category is still very much in question with Frankenweenie and Wreck-It Ralph as contenders.  As for television, Game of Thrones was the unsurprising winner as the show also netted four awards.

Hit the jump for a full list of winners, and for Steve’s interviews at VES, click on the respective links for Ang Lee and cinematographer Wally Pfister (The Dark Knight Rises).

The 2013 Golden Globes have just wrapped up.  I only watched the last hour of the ceremony because the Globes no longer have their awards season power due to voting schedule changes.  Reading tweets and Facebook posts, it seems like it was a fairly entertaining show (keep an eye out for Jodie Foster‘s acceptance speech for her Lifetime Achievement Award).  As for the winners, they were very “Globes” in that they were more populist choices that are unlikely to have much bearing on the Oscars.  Argo may have had a good night at the Globes by winning Best Picture (Drama) and Best Director, but I still think Lincoln is the picture to beat when it comes to the Academy Awards, especially since Ben Affleck was snubbed for the Best Director Oscar nomination.

Hit the jump for the full list of winners.

The 85th Annual Academy Awards announced its slew of nominations yesterday, but today the American Cinema Editors guild has released their nominations for excellence in editing for 2012.  Nominees for the 63rd Annual ACE Eddie Awards in the dramatic category include Zero Dark Thirty, Argo, Life of Pi, Lincoln, and Skyfall, while the comedy or musical category includes Best Picture hopeful Silver Linings Playbook and Seth MacFarlane’s R-rated comedy Ted.  Argo and Zero Dark Thirty seem like the formidable competition in the dramatic category given how expertly both films layer and manage tension throughout their running times, and coincidentally they both share one of the same editors: William Goldenberg.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of nominees in the dramatic, comedy or musical, and animated categories, as well as documentary and television categories.  The 63rd Annual ACE Eddie Awards will be held on February 16th.

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.

The Visual Effects Society has announced the nominees for the upcoming 11th Annual VES Awards.  This year’s major players include Life of Pi, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Prometheus, The Avengers, and Battleship, all of which landed nominations for Outstanding Visual Effects in a Visual Effects-Driven Feature Motion Picture.  The VES Awards also recognize visual effects work in more dramatic fare, singling out the impressive effects of films like Flight and The Impossible.  Duking it out for Outstanding Animated Character in a Live Action Feature will be the ridiculously impressive Richard Parker in Life of Pi, Hulk in The Avengers, and Gollum and Goblin King in The Hobbit.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of nominees.  The 11th Annual VES Awards will take place on February 5th.

The nominations for the 2013 Producers Guild Awards have been announced.  The PGA’s are a fairly reliable predictor of the Academy Awards, as last year all but two eventual Best Picture nominees (The Tree of Life and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close) were PGA nominees.  This year’s contenders include expected fare like Argo, Les Miserables, and Lincoln, indies such as Beasts of the Southern Wild and Moonrise Kingdom, and critical favorite Zero Dark Thirty.  The PGA’s are also fond of singling out one “popular” choice, and in this year’s case that film looks to be the excellent Skyfall

In addition to the feature films, the PGAs also announced the nominees in television.  Drama series nominees include the usual suspects like Homeland, Mad Men, Breaking Bad, and Game of Thrones, while the comedy category is filled out by 30 Rock, Louie, Modern Family, and for some reason The Big Bang Theory.  Notably absent is HBO’s Girls and NBC’s brilliant Parks and Recreation.  Hit the jump to check out the full list of film and television nominees.  The 24th Annual PGA Awards will be held on January 26th.

A staple of every awards season is the multitude of roundtable interviews and discussions that pop up featuring said season’s top contenders.  We’ve already shared an hourlong interview with some of the Best Director contenders like Quentin Tarantino, Ang Lee, and Tom Hooper, but today a roundtable of a different sort popped online.  The LA Times put together their first ever animation roundtable as they gathered the following directors for a 60-minute discussion: Mark Andrews (Brave), Peter Ramsey (Rise of the Guardians), Chris Butler (ParaNorman), Rich Moore (Wreck-It Ralph), and Genndy Tartakovsky (Hotel Transylvania).

The resulting video is an absolutely fascinating and candid discussion between the filmmakers about the evolution of animated films, a possible renaissance of 2D animation and who’s to blame for 3D animation dominating the marketplace, breaking down social barriers and the stigma of animated movies being exclusively for kids, and more.  It’s a wonderful discussion and is well worth your time.  Hit the jump to watch.

The Annie Awards, which honor achievement in animation, have announced their best picture nominees for 2012.  According to THR, most wide-release animated films made the cut including Brave, Frankenweenie, Hotel Transylvania, ParaNorman, Rise of the Guardians, The Pirates! Band of Misfits, and Wreck-It-Ralph.  The only independent animated movie to pick up a nomination was The Rabbi’s Cat.  With this many nominees, to lose out on a nomination is a basically slap in the face, so tough luck to The Lorax (which deserves a face-slap), Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted, and Ice Age: Continental Drift.

Keep in mind that for the best picture category, a film has to be feature length.  Otherwise, Paperman would smoke all these flicks.

Would we look at Brave more kindly if it didn’t come from Pixar? Would its flaws and foibles bug us quite so much if another studio took it on? Probably not. It has so much to recommend it – its technical credentials are so strong and its characters sufficiently endearing – that its problems wouldn’t matter so much. Unfortunately, this isn’t another studio and Pixar demands standards far beyond those of mortal men.  They did so well for so long that “good enough” no longer cuts it. Brave, sadly, can’t climb any higher than that. Hit the jump for my full review of the Blu-ray.