Here’s today’s latest casting news:

• Chris Pine (Star Trek) and Jake Gyllenhaal (Donnie Darko) are in discussions to join Into the Woods, the Rob Marshall-adaptation of the Broadway musical that stars Johnny Depp and Meryl Streep.
• Christoph Waltz (Django Unchained) has joined Stephen Gaghan’s The Candy Store, which stars Robert De Niro, Jason Clake and Omar Sy.
• RZA (The Man with the Iron Fists) and Catalina Denis (Sleepless Night) will join Paul Walker in Brick Mansions, the Camille Delamarre-directed remake of Luc Besson’s District B13.

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement.

Director Tim Burton’s long-developing biopic Big Eyes is finally moving forward.  The filmmaker first became attached to the pic back in 2010, when he sparked to a script by Ed Wood scribes Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski that he intended to produce.  The film’s story focuses on the artistic coupling of Margaret and Walter Keane.  Walter became famous in the 1950s and 60s for paintings featuring saucer-eyed kids, though it was the shy Margaret who really did the work.  Margaret eventually tired of the misplaced credit, which led to a divorce and a heated court battle to prove authorship of the paintings.

Ryan Reynolds and Reese Witherspoon became attached to play the couple early last year, but now a different promising duo of actors will be bringing The Keanes to life on the big screen with Burton in the director’s chair, as Christoph Waltz and Amy Adams have signed on to topline the pic.  Hit the jump for more.

With director Chris Wedge’s animated adventure comedy Epic set to debut at the end of May, we were recently granted a behind-the-scenes preview of the Blue Sky and 20th Century Fox production.  While the trailer gives a nice idea of the world the film exists in, the footage we were shown – some of it still a work in progress – was absolutely beautiful.  On a storytelling note, many have drawn comparisons between Epic and that of 1992′s FernGully: The Last Rainforest and 1989′s Honey, I Shrunk the Kids and those comments are certainly not unfounded.  Though Epic is aimed at audiences too young to have seen either of those films when they opened, there is much more to the story here than just a rehashing of familiar elements.

Featuring the voices of Amanda Seyfried, Josh Hutcherson, Christoph Waltz, Beyonce Knowles, Pitbull, Jason Sudeikis, Steven Tyler, Aziz Ansari, Blake Anderson, and Judah Friedlander,  Epic opens in 3D on May 24, 2013.  Hit the jump for more on our behind-the-scenes preview and here’s the new trailer. 

A new trailer has been released for the animated film, Epic.  The story tells of a hidden land deep in the forest where the battle between the forces of good and evil continues under our very noses.  A teenage girl is magically transported into their secret universe by shrinking down to their size, where she must combine forces with an assortment of colorful characters in order to save both worlds.  This trailer doesn’t give me much hope for the movie.  The main focus is “Look at all the celebrities we gathered to do voice work!”  Instead, that voice work comes off particularly distracting at points since I’m not seeing characters but seeing Aziz Ansari and Christoph Waltz in a recording booth.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  The film also features the voices of Amanda Seyfried, Josh Hutcherson, Colin Farrell, Pitbull, Jason Sudeikis, Steven Tyler, Blake Anderson, Judah Friedlander, and Beyoncé Knowles.  Epic opens in 3D on May 24th.

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.

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.

Quentin Tarantino has teased a third film to complete his Rewritten History trilogy, following up on Inglourious Basterds and Django Unchained. Last night, Saturday Night Live made a strong pitch for what that film could be with the parody Djesus Uncrossed.  On the third day after his crucificxion, Jesus returns to life, rolls away the stone in front of the tomb, and sets out on a vendetta against the Romans who crucified him.  Or “Row-Maans,” as St. Peter (Taran Killam impersonating Brad Pitt) calls them when he leads the apostles to join in the fight.

It works in large part because I could see Tarantino making a revenge-based version of the Christ story that would be just slightly less wacky.  The production designer gets in a lot of nice stylistic touches in, too, including more blood and gore than I was expecting for a broadcast comedy, even after midnight.  Check it out after the jump.

It’s been about ten months since the last episode of Funny or Die series Between Two Ferns with Zach Galifianakis, but I guess to make up for the delay, they’re breaking out all the stars.  In the first of a two-part “Oscar Edition”, the show’s guests include Jennifer Lawrence (Silver Linings Playbook), Naomi Watts (The Impossible), Christ of Waltz (Django Unchained), Anne Halfway (French Movie), and Amys Adams (The Master).  Watching these brief interviews, I wish they were expanded out into full segments, but I’ll take as much of Between Two Ferns as I can get.

Hit the jump to check out the latest episode of Between Two Ferns.

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.

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 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.

While Jamie Foxx plays the title character in Django Unchained, Leonardo DiCaprio steals the show as the villainous plantation runner and slave owner, Calvin Candie.  This new featurette shows director Quentin Tarantino and cast members Foxx, Kerry Washington and Samuel L. Jackson commenting on the amazing performance by DiCaprio.  It interesting to see how the veteran actor approached the difficult subject matter and to hear the actors talk about his transformation.  The featurette also highlights some footage from the movie, so if you haven’t seen Django Unchained yet, this may have a few spoilers for you.  Otherwise, hit the jump to watch the video.

When people speak of America’s great history, there should be an asterisk involved.  This is a great country with a rich history, but it’s a history that also involves genocide of Native Americans and the enslavement of Africans.  But we considered it civilized, and no country wants to recognize its barbaric behavior (even Barbarians probably thought they weren’t so bad).  In the classic western, we see American West mythologized with heroes and villains.  In the spaghetti western, we see how a foreign country (Italy) reexamined the values of our westerns.  In his new film, Django Unchained, writer-director Quentin Tarantino takes the western to the American South of 1858, and reconsiders the civility of our “great history.”  At turns painfully hilarious and explosively violent, Django Unchained doesn’t have the narrative tightness of Tarantino’s previous features, but it retains all of the thoughtfulness and style the filmmaker has become known for.

Legendary director Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained is exactly what the trailer promises – exciting, violent, satirical, vengeful and shocking – for the entire 2 hour and 45 minute run time.  Starring Jamie Foxx as a newly freed slave who sets out with an unlikely partner (dentist-turned-bounty-hunter Christoph Waltz) to find and rescue his wife (Kerry Washington), Django Unchained follows the duo as they track her to a plantation owned by vicious playboy Calvin Candie (a ferocious Leonardo DiCaprio), whose long time family slave, Stephen (an almost unrecognizable Samuel L. Jackson), is also out for blood.  Fans of the director will not be disappointed; this film is everything we hoped for and more.  Click here to watch three clips and here’s all our previous coverage.

At the New York press day, Waltz talked about how Tarantino chose him for the role, deleted scenes and why he’s happy with the final product, how much changed on set and more.  In addition, while Waltz ended up not starring in The Muppet sequel, he revealed that he’s probably doing a cameo and it sounds like it involves dancing with Miss Piggy! Hit the jump to see what he had to say.