Hugh Jackman: A New Level Of Stardom

Australian multi-talent Hugh Jackman is now entering his second fall where his face and name seem to be popping up all over the trades. This time last year it was part of the widespread anticipation for Tom Hooper’s musical adaptation Les Miserables, in which which Jackman was the lead. A year after portraying Jean Valjean, which landed him an Oscar nomination for Best Actor, Jackman is soaring to new career highs by leading the packed ensemble of Denis Villenueve’s thrilling Prisoners, hitting theaters Friday, September 20^th.

The 85th Academy Awards: Final Predictions

Here we are at least! After months of high profile releases, critic and guild awards, and tons of speculation over nominees and potential winners, the awards season reaches its dramatic finish tonight with the best of the best, the 85th Annual Academy Awards. All season long we’ve been asking question after question – will Argo take Best Picture? Can anyone stop Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway? Who will win Best Director? Will Tommy Lee Jones or Christoph Waltz take Best Supporting Actor? Will Seth MacFarlane be one of the funniest Oscar hosts? – and tonight all questions will be answered and a handful of actors and movies will join Oscar history along side some of the best movies ever made. With the big show just hours away, here are our final Oscar predictions for all of the major categories; Who do you think will be walking with golden statues tonight?

OSCAR TALK: Best Picture (PODCAST)

Well folks, here we are at last! After months of high profile releases, critic and guild awards, and tons of speculation over nominees and potential winners, the awards season reaches its dramatic finish this Sunday with the best of the best, the 85th Annual Academy Awards. All season long we’ve been asking question after question – will Argo take Best Picture? Can anyone stop Daniel Day-Lewis and Anne Hathaway? Who will win Best Director? Will Tommy Lee Jones or Christoph Waltz take Best Supporting Actor? Will Seth MacFarlane be one of the funniest Oscar hosts? – and Sunday all our questions will be answered and a handful of actors and movies will join Oscar history along side some of the best movies ever made. To celebrate, our critics are breaking down the major categories all week long in a special series of podcasts we like to call, OSCAR TALK. With the big show just hours away, join Zack Sharf, James Hausman, and Mike Murphy as they discuss the most prestigious category of the night, BEST PICTURE, and then join in on the conversation with your Oscar predictions in the comments section. Who do you think will win? Let’s have an OSCAR TALK…

“ARGO”: Frontrunner Frustrations

Another day. Another major victory for Ben Affleck’s Argo. Surprised? Honestly, at this point, no one should be. After premiering to rave reviews at the Toronto International Film Festival in September, Argo immediately became the year’s early frontrunner for the Oscar for Best Picture, a position it seemed to solidify when it opened strongly on October 12th and grossed an outstanding $19 million during its first weekend (a remarkable total for an international thriller). In the months that followed, Argo seemed to take a back seat in the awards race as Oscar-ready pictures like Lincoln, Life of Pi, Zero Dark Thirty and Les Miserables stormed the box office with giant grosses and, for the most part, extreme critical praise. And yet, these films were only temporary frontrunners – mere distractions – for once the award season began it was clear that Argo had never really given up its seat to any of the other contenders. Now, after taking the Golden Globe, the BAFTA, and the BFCA for Best Picture, plus earning top honors from the Screen Actors Guild, the Directors Guild, and the Producers Guild, Argo is destined for glory come Oscar night; seriously, if it doesn’t win Best Picture it will be the biggest Oscar upset since Crash dethroned Brokeback Mountain in 2006. All of this brings me to the main question of this article: Is anyone else as frustrated as I am about Argo winning Best Picture? Anyone??

SAG Awards: A “Silver Lining” Night?

Tonight, the awards season reaches another milestone in the form of the 19^th Annual Screen Actors Guild Awards. By this point in the lengthy awards season process, the winners are almost always a forgone conclusion, and while that may be the case in many of the acting categories – yes, Daniel Day-Lewis is Best Actor, Jessica Chastain has the edge over Jennifer Lawrence for Best Actress, Anne Hathaway is the definite Best Supporting Actress, and without a nomination for Christoph Waltz it’ll probably be Tommy Lee Jones for Supporting Actor – the big prize is still wide open. In what is the most exciting and competitive Oscar season race for Best Picture in recent memory, the Screen Actors Guild has the potential with its Best Ensemble Cast prize (the SAG equivalent to Best Picture) to either create a definite frontrunner for the Oscars or, if things work out as they should, to shake up the race all over again so late in the game. Take a look below for a breakdown of this year’s SAG nominees for Best Ensemble Cast:

The Golden Globes: Award Predictions

Let the awards begin! After months of prestigious releases and relentless campaigning, the award season kicks into overdrive tonight with the 70^th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Unlike the critic awards, the guild awards, and the Academy Awards, the Golden Globes are voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), a group of around 90 journalists who cover the film industry in over 55 countries worldwide. Since the HFPA has a knack for honoring sophisticated, star-studded efforts, the winners here don’t always match up with that of the Oscars (for instance, they chose Babel over The Departed and Atonement over No Country For Old Men); nonetheless, the Globes are still a revered honor and this year a number of worthy films will be fighting it out in both the Drama and Comedy/Musical Categories. Below, our critics Zack Sharf and Mike Murphy take their best guesses as to who will walk away with the gold:

The 85th Annual Academy Awards: Nomination Snubs & Surprises

After months of preliminary critic group and guild awards, Oscar host Seth McFarlane and actress Emma Stone finally revealed the nominees for the 85^th Annual Academy Awards this morning. Up until 8:35am (or 5:35am for you West Coasters), the time when the pair announced who would be duking it out for Oscar gold, the Oscar nominees were still a big question mark, with only a few definite films being locks in particular categories. As expected, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln dominated the playing field with 12 nominations, followed by Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, which surprised with a lofty 11 nominations; both films clearly have passionate fans within the Academy and should be considered the heavyweights at this point. Elsewhere, the Oscar nominations celebrated award favorites like Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty, SIlver Linings Playbook, Les Miserables, and Argo, and were their typical blend of deserving (Beasts of the Southern Wild gets major love!) and maddening (did Zero Dark Thirty direct itself?); take a look below for both a full list of nominees for the 85^th Annual Academy Awards as well as Reel Reactions’ Surprise & Snubs list:

“Les Misérables”: Critical Reaction (PODCAST)

After earning rapturous praise and instant Oscar buzz after its first screening in New York almost a month ago, Les Miserables, Academy Award-winning director Tom Hooper’s ambitious adaptation of the beloved stage musical, seemed to be succumbing to severe critical backlash during the days leading up to its Christmas release date. Despite some polarizing reviews, our own Mike Murphy loved the film, awarding it an 8/10 and praising it as a rousing adaption, and the film earned a massive $18 million on opening day, the second best ever for a Christmas Day release. Even more positive is the fact that the film received a glowing A CinemaScore, indicating that audiences are truly loving Hooper’s vision of the most successful musical of all time. In our latest podcast, Mike joins Zack Sharf and Harrison Richlin, our Executive Producer here at Reel Reactions, for a candid discussion of Les Miserables; is it the greatest movie musical of all time? How well does Hooper follow up his Oscar win for The King’s Speech? Is Hathaway the future Best Supporting Actress winner? Click below and join in on the discussion:

“Les Misérables”

“To love another person is to see the face of god.”

One hundred fifty years after its conception in the mind of French author Victor Hugo, Les Misérables gets the cinematic treatment, being brought from the stages of Broadway to the big screens of multiplexes with a star studded cast and an Oscar-wielding director. Hugo’s tragedy of redemption and reconciliation has been incarnated on movie screens a few times before now, in 1935, 1995, and 1998, but never before has it been directly transferred and presented as a filmic version of the stage musical. Composer Claude-Michel Schönberg and lyricists Alain Boublil and Jean-Marc Natel combined melodic brilliance with Hugo’s epic to make for what is now the third longest running Broadway production in history, and Universal hopes to recreate the beloved show in front of a camera with desired results matching that of Chicago and Dreamgirls.

Golden Globe Nominations: Snubs & Surprises

The 2012 Awards Season hit a traditional and annual milestone today, with the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) announcing its nominees for the 70^th Annual Golden Globe Awards. Continuing its run as this year’s awards darling, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln picked up 7 nominations, the most of any film this year, while Ben Affleck’s early favorite, Argo, and Quentin Tarantino’s last minute game changer, Django Unchained, were the runners-up with 5 nominations each. While I’ve been meticulously breaking down the critic group awards, the Golden Globes are a completely different beast, breaking the film nominees into two categories – Drama and Comedy/Musical – which often produces a wide arrange of deserving and undeserving nominees. This genre split, combined with the fact that the HFPA usually favors grand, avant-guard pictures (they chose Babel over The Departed and Atonement over No Country For Old Men), often results in a show that doesn’t have too much of an effect on the Academy Awards (the critic group and guild awards are more telling since they share members with the Academy). Nonetheless, the Golden Globes are still an integral and rather fun part of the awards season, so let’s take a look at this year’s nominees: