Here’s today’s casting news:

• Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey) and Kevin Kline (Dave) are set to star in My Old Lady, directorial debut of playwright and screenwriter Israel Horovitz.
• Benjamin Walker (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) is in talks to join Chris Hemsworth in Ron Howard’s In the Heart of the Sea.
• Lance Reddick (Fringe) has been cast in his first comedic lead for debut director Scot Armstrong’s Search Party.

Hit the jump for more on each casting announcement. 

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.

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.

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.

Oscar season is in full swing, folks.  2012 has been a fantastic year in film so far, and with merely weeks to go before 2013 begins there are still a couple of highly anticipated films that have yet to be seen.  Just like last year, I’ll be running down a preview of the upcoming Oscar race during this fine Thanksgiving week, giving readers a look at what the state of the race looks like right now.  To be clear, this isn’t a personal list but rather an objective look at how things look to be shaping up.  I’ve divided each category into frontrunners, likely to be nominated, and other contenders in order to parse out where things stand at the moment.  There are multiple strong contenders in nearly every category, so this is looking to be a rather heated run to the finish line.

We’ll be looking at a couple of different major categories each day over the next four days, and we’re kicking things off with the Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress categories.  Hit the jump to read on.

As we whippersnappers start watching movies on our TVs and phones, a desperate Hollywood has turned their attentions to their steadiest and most solid base of theatergoers: the AARP crowd.  In that vein, Fox Searchlight is looking to make a sequel to this year’s surprise hit The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, based on a novel, that starred a host of, well, gray-haired actors: Judi Dench (Casino Royale), Bill Nighy (Love Actually), Maggie Smith (Downton Abbey) and Tom Wilkinson (Batman Begins), and others, including one young gun in Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire).

Ol Parker (who wrote the screenplay for the first film) will send in a treatment to the eager studio soon, the eagerness stemming from the original film having grossed thirteen times its nearly $10 million budget.  The eagerness also rests with the actors, as the principal cast is apparently keen on returning.  For more on the “gray is green” trend, hit the jump.

You might think that two-time Oscar-winner Dustin Hoffman has done pretty much everything in his prolific career, but his upcoming film, Quartet, will be his directorial debut.  Centering on a nursing home for retired opera singers, Quartet shows that not everyone ages gracefully as the egos of a few threaten to disrupt plans for the home’s annual concert.  But the show must go on!

Quartet stars Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay and Michael Gambon opens domestically in limited release on December 28th and in the U.K. on January 4th 2013.  Hit the jump to watch the trailer and clip.

The 2012 Primetime Emmy Awards were given out last night, and longtime favorite Mad Men had a pretty rough evening.  Matthew Weiner’s AMC drama was shut out in every category in which it was nominated (Christina Hendricks was robbed), denying the series a record-breaking fifth consecutive Best Drama Series Emmy in favor of Showtime’s excellent freshman series Homeland.  The cable thriller nearly swept the drama series category, even landing Damian Lewis a surprising Best Actor win over perennial favorite Bryan Cranston (Breaking Bad) and Mad Men’s way overdue Jon Hamm.  It’s hard to complain, though, as Homeland had a positively stellar first season and star Claire Danes gave a powerhouse performance as a psychologically plagued CIA analyst, for which she was awarded Best Actress.

On the comedy side of things the awards were a tad more predictable, with ABC’s Modern Family pulling off another sweep in the genre. Julia Louis-Dreyfus took home the Best Actress award for her hilarious work on Veep, and Jon Cryer inexplicably won Best Actor in a Comedy for his role in Two and a Half Men despite that show not being funny.  Hit the jump to read the full list of winners.

We’ve got a few new release dates for you this evening.  Check them out at a glance:

• Last Vegas, directed by Jon Turteltaub and starring Michael Douglas, Robert De Niro, Morgan Freeman and Kevin Kline will open December 20th, 2013.
• Stand Up Guys, the Fisher Stevens comedy starring Al Pacino, Christopher Walken, Julianna Margulies and Alan Arkin, opens January 11th, 2013.
• Quartet, Dustin Hoffman’s directorial debut starring Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay, and Michael Gambon opens domestically December 28th of this year and in the U.K. January 4th 2013.

Hit the jump for more on each film, including synopses.

The Crawley family is set to return for the third series of Downton Abbey this fall  (unless you live in the States, in which case you have to wait until the New Year).  Two new trailers have dropped in anticipation of the hit series’ return: one from Britain’s ITV and one from PBS.  The Golden Globe-winning series from Julian Fellowes stars Hugh Bonneville, Maggie Smith, Laura Carmichael, Jim Carter, Brendan Coyle, Michelle Dockery, Joanne Froggatt, Rob James-Collier and many more in this outstanding ensemble cast.  Downton Abbey returns September 16th on ITV and on January 6th, 2013 on PBS.  Hit the jump to watch the two trailers.

Edwardian soap opera Downton Abbey, which will air first on Britain’s ITV next month and then later this year in America on PBS, has added a new character to its third season sure to shake things up — Cora’s (Elizabeth McGovern) mother Martha Levinson, played by Shirley MacLaine.

For those not up on Downton history, Cora married the Earl of Grantham (Hugh Bonneville) for position while he married her for money.  Though it turned out to be a good match in the end (as they are actually affectionate with one another), there are clearly mixed feelings by the Earl’s mother, Violet, Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith) about an American having rescued their estate.  Now, several decades later, with Downton’s fortunes again on the downturn, it seems that Martha is in town for a visit (to pay some bills?) but she’ll be up against Violet’s distain and sharp barbs.  For a preview of their deliciously devilish discourse, hit the jump.

After an uneven second season (that was mercifully saved by a stunning Christmas Special), PBS’s exceptionally successful series Downton Abbey is ready to return.  The series is co-produced with Britain’s ITV, who will air Downton first in September, followed by a second run on PBS in January.  The new season will feature all of the principle cast, plus the addition of Shirley MacLaine as Lady Mary’s other grandmother.  Things are sure to get heated between the American (MacLaine) and the Queen of Quips, The Dowager Countess (Maggie Smith), as the trailer already suggests.  To view the trailer and read more about the series, hit the jump.

The first trailer for Quartet has gone online.  The film is Dustin Hoffman‘s directorial debut, and stars Maggie Smith, Billy Connolly, Pauline Collins, Tom Courtenay, and Michael Gambon as opera singers at a retirement home.  Smith plays a new resident who decides not to participate in the year’s annual concert.   “This is not a retirement home,” Maggie Smith’s character proclaims.  “This is a madhouse.”  Indeed, the movie looks incredibly slight, and yet perfectly geared to the audiences that have helped The Exotic Marigold Hotel to $121 million worldwide.  In a nutshell: your parents will probably want to see it.

Hit the jump to check out the trailer.  Quartet opens in U.K. on January 4, 2013; there’s currently no U.S. release date.

The dramedy The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, from acclaimed and accomplished director John Madden, follows seven retirees from the U.K. in need of a transformation, who find themselves spending their golden years at a rundown hotel that does not quite live up to the lush amenities pictured in the brochure.  The hotel’s naive young owner, Sonny Kapoor (Dev Patel), inherited the once sophisticated building from his father, hoping to turn it into a high-end luxury hotel.  Instead, the water and electricity are iffy at best, and India’s overwhelming contrasts are both intoxicating and frightening for these seven newcomers, who are unsure about what the future might hold.  The film stars Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Penelope Wilton, Ronald Pickup and Celia Imrie.

During this recent exclusive interview with Collider, director John Madden talked about why this premise was so attractive to him, determining what aspects of India to capture, the fact that he didn’t anticipate quite how much this entire experience would change everyone involved with making the film, and assembling such an incredibly talented cast.  He also talked about what attracted him to directing the pilot for the Showtime drama series Masters of Sex, about Dr. William Masters (Michael Sheen) and Virginia Johnson (Lizzy Caplan), the pioneers of the science of human sexuality whose research touched off the sexual revolution.  Check out what he had to say after the jump.

Tonight was the 63rd Annual Primetime Emmy Awards and the winner’s list included some great names.  Perhaps the best win of the night was Peter Dinklage picking up Best Supporting Actor in a Drama Series for Game of Thrones.  Not far behind was Kyle Chandler finally picking up an Emmy for Best Actor in a Drama Series for the final season of Friday Night Lights (the show also picked up an Emmy for Best Writing in a Drama Series).  Martin Scorsese picked up an award for his direction of Boardwalk Empire‘s pilot episode, and ubiquitous character actor Margo Martindale won Best Supporting Actress in a Drama Series for her role as Mags Bennett on FX’s Justified.

The top awards for Best Drama, Best Comedy, and Best Variety, Music or Comedy Series went to last year’s winners Mad Men, Modern Family, and The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, respectively.  Best Miniseries or TV Movie was awarded to  PBS’ Downtown Abbey while CBS’ The Amazing Race picked up another Emmy for Best Reality-Competition Program.  Hit the jump for the full list of winners.