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).

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.

I adore animation, and it bums me out that most animated features are so formulaic and safe.  I understand that they have to be widely-appealing due to the high production costs, but it keeps the animated form mostly constrained to family films.  The Oscar-nominated animated shorts allow us to have a peek at an animated world that can break boundaries, and show us the potential of the medium when it doesn’t have to appeal to all ages.  Unfortunately, most of these nominees are fairly safe, although it seems like they were all required to avoid dialogue.  The majority of the shorts are still entertaining, but there’s a runaway winner in the pack.

Hit the jump for my reviews of the 2012 Oscar-nominated animated short films: Paperman, Fresh Guacamole, Head over Heels, Adam and Dog, and Maggie Simpson in “The Longest Daycare”.

Those worried that the upcoming 85th Annual Academy Awards ceremony might go by without a show-stopping moment from Adele can now rest easy.  It was announced today that the soulful Grammy hoarder will indeed perform the track “Skyfall” at the ceremony, which is nominated for Best Original Song for its inclusion in Skyfall.  This decision felt like a bit of a no-brainer.  The Oscars have been trying for years to find a way to draw a larger TV audience, and when you have the chance to get Adele onscreen belting out a fantastic Bond theme, you just don’t pass that up.

It’s unspecified whether the other nominated artists will perform their songs as well, but I wouldn’t mind seeing host Seth MacFarlane sing his nominated track from Ted.  The 85th Academy Awards will be held on February 24th.  Click here to revisit the full list of nominees, and hit the jump to take a listen to “Skyfall” once more.

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.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has narrowed down the contenders for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling Oscar for the upcoming 85th Academy Awards.  The shortlist includes showy stuff like Hitchcock and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, along with the more subdued work like Looper, Lincoln, and Snow White and the Huntsman.  The one to watch for the win, though, is Rick Baker’s excellent makeup effects from Men in Black 3 as Baker has previously won this award 7 times, including for 1997′s Men in Black.  Notably left out of the race is Cloud Atlas, which put makeup to heavy use in order for its ensemble of actors to play multiple roles, switching race and gender.  Response to the film’s makeup work was fairly split, but I’m surprised it didn’t at least make the Oscar shortlist.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of all seven films that remain in competition for the Best Makeup and Hairstyling trophy.  The nominations for the Oscars will be announced on January 10th, followed by the ceremony on February 24th.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced tonight the 15 films that made the shortlist for Best Documentary at the 85th Academy Awards, narrowed down from 126 qualifying submissions.  Some of the notables include Ai Weiwei: Never Sorry, Bully, Chasing Ice, The Imposter, Searching for Sugar Man, and This Is Not a Film.

Hit the jump for the full list.  For more on the Oscar nominee landscape, check out our previews for Best Picture/Director, Best Actor/Actress, Best Supporting Actor/Actress, and a rundown of the animated/screenplay/technical awards.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has unveiled its shortlist of 10 films that will contend for the Best Visual Effects Oscar.  The films that have made the cut include The Dark Knight Rises, Cloud Atlas, Skyfall, The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, and Disney’s John Carter.  The list is full of impressive blockbuster fare from 2012, but as we were reminded last year (Hugo over Rise of the Planet of the Apes) the winner of the category tends to favor a Best Picture nominee.  As Ang Lee’s adaptation of Life of Pi includes stunning visual effects and is an early favorite to land a Best Picture nomination, prognosticators would do well to keep their eye on that film as the race moves forward.  That said, there’s not exactly a lack of great work to thumb through, so this should be an interesting category.

Hit the jump to check out the full list of contenders, and leave your thoughts on the shortlist in the comments.  The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards will be announced on January 10th, followed by the ceremony on February 24th.

Here’s where things get interesting.  Over that past few days we’ve been taking an early look at the 2013 Oscar race, running down the contenders in a number of categories including Best Supporting Actor and Actress, Best Actor and Best Actress, and Best Animated Feature, Screenplay, and technological category quick picks.  We’ve now come to our final installment, Best Picture and Best Director, and these two races are shaping up to be incredibly interesting. Hit the jump for the full rundown.

We’re continuing on with our weeklong preview of the upcoming 85th Academy Awards, and after running down both acting categories it’s time to take look at some of the other races.  Today we’ll be looking at the Best Animated Feature, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best Original Screenplay categories in depth, and I’ll also make some way-too-early quick picks in the technical categories.  The fun begins after the jump.

The 2013 awards race is in full swing, and what better way to spend the Thanksgiving holiday then to take a closer look at how the categories are shaping up thus far?  Over the next few days we’re providing a bit of an overview of what the state of the race looks like at this point in time.  Yesterday we ran down the contenders for Best Supporting Actor and Best Supporting Actress, and today we’ll be taking a look at the fiercely competitive categories for Best Actor and Best Actress.  Hit the jump to read on.

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.

It looks like the Academy of Arts and Sciences has decided to stick with a more traditional show in step with this year’s Billy Crystal-hosted ceremony following the James Franco/Anne Hathaway fiasco of 2011.  Though many were intrigued to hear that the Academy was circling Jimmy Fallon as a host for the 2013 Oscars with SNL’s Lorne Michaels eyed as the show’s producer, ABC wasn’t so hot on the idea and discussions with the two fell apart before a deal materialized.  The search continued, and today it was announced that Craig Zadan and Neil Meron (NBC’s Smash, The Bucket List) have been chosen to produce the ceremony.

The duo has an extensive musical background, as they were behind the feature film adaptations of Hairspray and Chicago, as well as Broadway’s revival of  How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying.  One would expect a strong music-centered show, but the two tell THR that they haven’t made any cemented decisions yet, adding that the show’s content/tone depends on what movies are nominated.  I guess the Academy could have chosen someone with a worse background to run the show, but I really would have loved to see Michaels shake things up.  Nevertheless, with producers solidified we should expect an announcement regarding the host sooner rather than later.