87 years into the ceremony, the Oscars are still unabashedly about the movies. Host Neil Patrick Harris along with Anna Kendrick performed a whizzbang ode to “moving pictures” in perfect Broadway musical style. And despite the fresh songwriting that seemed to give a nod to last year’s winners for Frozen and “Let it Go”, …
Why should I care about the Oscars? No, that’s a serious question. Because as much as I hate to admit it, I do. At their very best, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets it right by tripping and falling into a “Market Irglova & Glen Hansard” here or a “12 minute standing …
In a brief moment of creative boldness in The Theory of Everything, a young Cambridge student Stephen Hawking, played by Eddie Redmayne, ponders over a theoretical concept while pouring milk into a cup of tea. As the white milk swirls in blackness of the tea, the scene suddenly moves in reverse, the swirling moving backwards …
The Imitation Game Adapted by Graham Moore, from the book by Andrew Hodges Directed by Morten Tyldum UK | USA, 2014 Secrets are power. Whether it’s an indecipherable code controlling the fate of millions or one man’s closeted sexuality, secrets can topple the mightiest of empires. The Imitation Game follows Alan Turing’s race to break …
This column is a few days late this week, but then this was a particularly busy few days. The first three of the actual awards precursors finally arrived this week, including the New York Film Critics Circle, the National Board of Review and the Gotham Independent Film Awards. What’s the verdict? This is still anyone’s …
This week at the end of October is the point in the Oscar race where pundits begin spinning their wheels. The festivals are over, the critics’ awards haven’t started yet, and no new movies are arriving, leaving little to actually go on in terms of new predictions. Keep in mind, when an Oscar pundit talks …
The mysterious and secretive figure of Alan Turing has undergone something of a political and cultural renaissance in the UK over the past few years. A young mathematic prodigy, Oxford graduate, and cryptographer par excellence, he was ushered into the ultra top secret Bletchley Park programme during the Second World War and tasked with the impossible: to break the German military codes through a captured sequencer which could potentially offer billions of responses to any clandestine communication. Socially incompetent and ruthlessly dedicated, Turing willingly threw himself into the arena of cerebral combat, along the way erecting much of the intellectual and theoretical infrastructure of the modern computing world. But as a closeted homosexual his treatment at the hands of the authorities in the post-war period should cause the great British bulldog to hang its head in shame, with he and his team’s contribution to the continuation of civilisation remaining cloaked for over half acentury due to the Official Secrets Act. Former Prime Minister Gordon Brown would later make an official public apology on behalf of the British government for “the appalling way he was treated,” while the Queen granted him a posthumous pardon on Christmas Eve 2013.
The Hype Cycle is News Editor Brian Welk’s roundup of industry news, reviews and predictions of everything Oscar, boiled down into weekly power rankings of the buzziest and most likely contenders in this year’s awards season. The Toronto International Film Festival’s People’s Choice Award has been one of the most reliable barometers for both Best …