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.

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.

Last night, the Motion Picture Sound Editors handed out their 60th Annual Golden Reel Awards.  Life of Pi was able to pick up Sound Editing (Music) and Sound Editing (Dialogue and ADR), but Skyfall stepped in to net Sound Editing (Special Effects and Foley).  Les Miserables took an easy win with Sound Editing (Music in a Musical Feature Film), but any of these contenders could emerge victorious on Oscar night.  Les Mis has the benefit of changing how singing was recorded during shooting (live instead of playback), Life of Pi is looking like the heavy favorite to take the technical categories, and Skyfall could play the spoiler.  Keep in mind that the Best Sound Editing category also has Best Picture-favorite Argo as well as Django Unchained.  Like most of the categories at this year’s Oscars, it’s anyone’s game.

This week on Blu-ray the latest James Bond film hits home video, a swell new coming of age pic is released, and the final season of a Showtime staple hits HD.  Briefly:

• Skyfall (Blu-ray/ DVD + Digital Copy) – $19.99 (50% off)
• The Perks of Being a Wallflower [Blu-ray] – $16.99 (32% off)
• Bully [Blu-ray] – $12.99 (57% off)
• The Kid with a Bike (Criterion Collection) [Blu-ray] – $30.38 (24% off)
• The Man with the Iron Fists (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) – $22.99 (34% off)
• Nurse Jackie: Season Four [Blu-ray] – $24.99 (37% off)
• The Sessions [Blu-ray] – $19.99 (33% off)
• Silent Hill: Revelation (Two-Disc Combo Pack: Blu-ray + DVD + Digital Copy + UltraViolet) – $22.99 (34% off)
• Weeds: Season Eight [Blu-ray] – $19.99 (50% off)

Hit the jump for special features details.

We would have been happy with Casino Royale; we really, really would. Daniel Craig’s debut as James Bond was such a revelation – such an infusion of modern cool into 007’s timeless sensibilities – that he could have spent the remainder of his tenure doodling on a napkin and we still would have deemed him a success.  So we accepted the flawed nature of Quantum of Solace without raising much fuss; enjoying its eccentricities and letting its middling status slide with the assumption that Craig’s ride would be more of the same. Little did we know that the best was yet to come: the inestimable Skyfall, which not only affirmed the character’s relevance for the 21^st Century, but set a new standard for all future entries in the series.  Best Bond ever?  Goldfinger may edge it by the thinnest of margins, but even then, I’m inclined to give it a little space on the podium.  Hit the jump for the review.

If you need more proof that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is insane, look no further than Roger Deakins.  Deakins is one of the greatest cinematographers of all-time, and before this year, he had racked up nine Oscar nominations without ever taking home the statue.  He picked up his tenth nomination this year for Skyfall, and tonight he won the Feature Film Award from the American Society of Cinematographers.  It was his third award from the ASC after having won in 1995 for The Shawkshank Redemption and in 2002 for The Man Who Wasn’t There.  He also received a Lifetime Achievement Award from the ASC in 2011.  Oscar prognosticators are still putting Life of Pi as the favorite to win Best Cinematography, but perhaps tenth time will be the charm for Deakins.

Hit the jump for the press release.  The 85th Academy Awards will be held on February 24th at 7pm EST on ABC.

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 Oscars picture is starting to emerge.  Last night, Argo won the Producers Guild Award for Best Picture, and tonight Ben Affleck‘s drama has won the Screen Actors Guild Award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture.  With tonight’s win, Argo is slowly moving towards being the first film since Driving Miss Daisy to win Best Picture at the Oscars even though the director didn’t pick up a nomination.  Like Driving Miss Daisy, Argo will have managed the incredible task of directing itself.  The night’s other film actor winners included Daniel Day-Lewis, Jennifer Lawrence, Tommy Lee Jones, and Anne Hathaway.  It will be interesting to see how these will match up with the Oscar winners.  Over on the TV side, Downton Abbey broke Homeland‘s awards-streak by picking up Best Performance by an Ensemble in a Drama Series.

Hit the jump for the full list of winners.

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.

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 Broadcast Film Critics Association announced the winners of the 18th annual Critics’ Choice Movie Awards tonight.  While Ben Affleck was noted as the lesser of the Best Director snubs when Oscar nominations were announced this morning, the BFCA named Affleck Best Director and his Argo Best Picture.  They feature genre awards—action, comedy, and sci-fi/horror all have their own Best Picture category—so there’s a bit of an “everybody gets a trophy” philosophy.  But that allowed Jennifer Lawrence to pick up two trophies: Best Actress in an Action Movie (The Hunger Games) and Best Actress in a Comedy (Silver Linings Playbook).  Silver Linings Playbook earned four total; the Best Comedy winner brought Lawrence’s co-star Bradley Cooper Best Actor in a Comedy and the rest of the cast Best Acting Ensemble.

The four primary acting awards went to major Oscar contenders Daniel Day-Lewis, Jessica Chastain, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Anne Hathaway.  But the BFCA also found room for Collider favorites Skyfall, Looper, and Cloud Atlas.  See the full list after the break.

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.

In anticipation of the announcement of the nominations for the 85th Academy Awards tomorrow morning, the American Society of Cinematographers has announced its list of nominees for outstanding achievement in cinematography.  Roger Deakins was singled out for his gorgeous work on this year’s Skyfall, as was Claudio Miranda for the breathtaking Life of Pi.  The list of nominees is rounded out by Seamus McGarvey for Anna Karenina, Danny Cohen for Les Miserables, and Janusz Kaminski for Lincoln.

Deakins has been nominated by the ASC for a total of 11 times now, winning for The Shawshank Redemption and The Man Who Wasn’t There.  Shockingly, he has never won an Academy Award despite being nominated for fantastic work like The Assassination of Jesse James, No Country for Old Men, and True Grit, but this could very well be his year.  Hit the jump to read the full press release, and click here to read my predictions for tomorrow’s Oscar nominations.  The ASC Awards will be held on February 10th.

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.