Here’s a look at this week’s new Blu-ray releases, which includes the latest from Quentin Tarantino and a Criterion release of a cult classic.

• Django Unchained (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) – $22.99 (43% off)
• A Haunting in Connecticut 2: Ghosts of Georgia [Blu-ray] – $17.99 (28% off)
• Iron Man: Rise of Technovore [Blu-ray] – $19.49 (37% off)
• A Monster In Paris (Blu-Ray + 3-D Blu-Ray + DVD + Digital Copy) – $18.99 (24% off)
• Repo Man (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray] – $27.86 (30% off)

Will Smith was Quentin Tarantino‘s first choice to play Django in Django Unchained.  It was a great opportunity for the actor to finally take a chance in his safe career, but he decided to pass on the role.  In November, Tarantino said that while he met with Smith, “It just wasn’t 100 percent right, and we didn’t have time to try to make it that way.”  Smith is slightly notorious for coming in and rewriting scripts, but no one gets to rewrite Tarantino.

Smith has now commented on his side of the story, and why he chose to pass on the Oscar-winning picture.  Hit the jump for more.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

All week long, rumors have circulated about a “top-secret” event taking place in Los Angeles next weekend.  We mentioned that an announcement was forthcoming back on Monday or Tuesday, and in the time since…well, lemme tell ya:  you wouldn’t believe some of the crazy theories and rumors people emailed in to Limited Paper HQ.  We heard “it’s a Banksy show”, that “it’s definitely a Hanksy show”, that it was an all-Olly-Moss joint, that an entire crew of artists were involved and that they’d all been forced to sign contracts preventing them from revealing anything about this mystery event prior to the official announcement.  Somewhere in the middle of all that, Gallery1988’s Twitter feed promised that whatever was being planned would be a “game-changer”.  What’s the truth?  Find out after the jump.

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 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.

She may have been overlooked by the Academy, but director Kathryn Bigelow has been avenged at the box office. Zero Dark Thirty, the “controversial” CIA thriller that has been enjoying incredible success in limited release, is now a success on a much wider scale. The Best Picture nominee took first place on Friday with an estimated $9 million from 2,937 runs. With its three-day take expected to top $25 million, Zero Dark Thirty will remain on top through Sunday, giving Bigelow the first number one hit of her career. Once the presumptive pick for the top spot, Warner Brothers’ Gangster Squad had to settle for third on Friday. The R-rated crime drama, which has had its own share of controversy following the events in Aurora and Newtown, earned an estimated $6.6 million from 3,103 locations – just under the $6.7 million estimate of the new R-rated comedy A Haunted House. With Django Unchained in fourth, it looks like the four highest-grossing domestic films will all carry an R-rating this weekend – the equivalent of a solar eclipse in box office parlance. We’ll have full details tomorrow.

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.