The King's Gimme

We finally watched "The King's Speech", and while it was enjoyable, now we see what all the fuss was about it being the winner of this year's Oscar winner for Best Picture.

In case you've already forgotten the story, "The Social Network" won almost every single critics' award before the Oscars, but then was beaten by "The King's Speech" for the ultimate prize, the Oscar. Many believed that "The Social Network" lost because many of the older Academy voters couldn't relate to a movie about Facebook, while others in the industry know that no one knows how to run a successful Oscar campaign better than Harvey Weinstein, who was one of the producers of "The King's Speech".

We haven't seen "The Social Network" yet, so we can't honestly say which movie we thought was more deserving of the Oscar, but now, after having watched "The King's Speech", we can say that we're not sure it really packed enough of an emotional wallop to be named Oscar's Best Picture. "The King's Speech" had some nice moments, and the tone throughout was dramatic and certainly heart-warming, but it left us a little cold at the end. It was almost as if we were geared up for a real emotional experience which never transpired. Compared to the Best Picture winners and nominees of the past two years, such as "The Hurt Locker", "Milk", "Precious", "Up in the Air", "Frost/Nixon", "The Reader"; "The King's Speech" just doesn't hold up.

So Much for Facebook Friends

It's over. Charlie Sheen has sent the last hooker home, Elvis has left the building and the fat lady has sung. "The Social Network" will not win the Oscar for Best Picture, it will go instead to "The King's Speech". Just a few shorts weeks ago, it looked as if "The Social Network" would cruise to an easy Oscar win after winning all the earlier critics awards, but now, "The King's Speech" has won the Producers Guild Award, the Directors Guild Award, and last night, the SAG Award for Best Actors Ensemble. It's done.
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If you're wondering how a movie could be almost universally recognized by every critic in the country as the year's best movie, and not win the Oscar for Best Picture, you just have to remember one thing, the people who vote for the Oscars are not critics. Oscar voters and movie critics are two, very different animals. Don't see the difference? Imagine Sarah Palin going on the show, "Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?"; Sarah Palin and a reasonably intelligent 5th grader: two very different animals. Got it now?

(melissa leo wins for best

supporting actress)

Not that we're saying the Oscar voters are as dumb as Sarah Palin, it's just that Oscar voters vote for movies and their fellow actors for a lot of reasons other than "critical assessment". Oscar voters vote for sentiment, career achievement, popularity, and sometimes, only sometimes, for critical reasons.

One movie critic today wrote that the Oscar voters should "be forgiven for they know not what they do", in an obvious reference to the fact that he thinks "The King's Speech" is an inferior movie to "The Social Network" and shouldn't win the Oscar for Best Picture. Now he knows how millions of us felt a few years ago when we watched the inferior "Crash" beat out "Brokeback Mountain" for the Best Picture Oscar. Thank you.

As for last night's SAG Awards, do we really need another nationally televised show in which multi-millionaire actors hand each other trophies which only serve to further inflate their already massively bloated egos? No. No, we don't. But our opinion won't stop the SAG's from happening, so we are left with no other choice than to make fun of them and everyone on them.


Natalie Portman won for Best Actress, and she's beautiful, graceful and composed. But come on, Natalie, bring back the donkey laugh. At the Golden Globes, she was in the middle of a very refined speech, and then she started to crack from nervousness, and this thing came out of her mouth that could only be described as the sound made by an excited, very confused barnyard animal. Whether or not Natalie will win the Oscar is a foregone conclusion; she will. The thing we'll be watching for that night is if she can manage to keep the door closed on the donkey. God, we hope not.



Ernest Borgnine got a Lifetime Achievement Award. Well deserved. This guy made his first movie in 1951 and, of course, won the Oscar for Best Actor for 1955's "Marty". And at 94, he's still working; so far for 2011, he has three movies coming out. Take that, Betty White!
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Speaking of Betty White, she won an award last night for her role on the sitcom, "Hot in Cleveland", and as usual, she stole the show last night. She did a quick comedic bit in her acceptance speech, proving that she can do more comedically in two seconds than what some actresses can do in an entire movie. And yes, we're looking at you, Jennifer Aniston.







Christian Bale won the Best Supporting Actor award for "The Fighter". It's amazing how fast this guy has gone from quirky character roles to sexy leading man.


Julianna, Julianna, Julianna. Oh dear, where do we start? She's a real head-scratcher. She wins award after award, but why, oh god, why? She's as charismatic as a bag of wet potato chips; she's so boring that the U.S. Government is trying to find a way to bottle her performances into a spray gas which we'll use on Al Qaeda which will simply put them to sleep. She bored us for years on "E.R." and now she's bringing all of her emotional range, (both facial expressions), to something called "The Good Wife". Dear god. And then we have to watch her win an award and thank everyone she's ever met, and everyone who helped her to get where she is now. We'd actually like to track down those people and hurt them. Julianna, please make it stop. Please use your talent somewhere more suited for your demeanor, at the DMV where a blank, vacant stare is in high demand.




Taye Diggs and Sofia Vergara presented an award. Wow. Beautiful face with perfect features and full lips, incredibly sexy body. Wow. And Sofia's not bad, either. Thank you.

The King Just De-Friended You on Facebook!

We said it last week, and it looks to be coming true. We said last week that after winning a titanic number of critics awards in November and December, that "The Social Network" seemed to be running out of gas, and might now lose the Oscar for Best Picture to "The King's Speech".

"The King's Speech" first major upset was last week at The Producers Guild Awards, and now, last night, the folks over at The Directors Guild also gave their top prize to Tom Hooper, the director of "The King's Speech".

Who knows why "The King's Speech" is now winning acclaim so late in the game? Some think it's because the Oscar voters are older and more conservative than the voters for the other awards, and they're not warming up to a movie about a social networking website when so many of them are still struggling to figure out how their emails work. While others think that when one movie so dominates the early competitions that it sets up the also-ran movies as sympathetic underdogs for which people want to root.

All we do know is that people who write about movies and the awards season have to stop talking about which movies won The Golden Globes and how a Golden Globe win affects a movie's chances to win Oscars. Please. People, get a grip. As we've said many, many times, no one in the movie industry takes the Golden Globes seriously, especially in the light of the most recent pay-for-play scandal over at the Globes. Winning a Golden Globe is only slightly more important than winning an MTV Movie Award, which is not much. So, stop it, before we smack you.

Running Out of Gas?

Uh oh. Not so fast, "The Social Network" movie! Yes, you've piled up award after award in the past two months, and you looked like you were cruising to an easy win in the Oscar race for Best Picture next month. But now, the Producer's Guild has thrown a major wrench in the works. They handed out their "Best Picture" award last night in Hollywood, and the winner was someone other than you. Ouch, that had to hurt.
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The Producer's Guild awarded "The King's Speech" as the year's best, and this is not good news for the fans of the Facebook movie. The Producer's Guild winner often goes on to win the Oscar, namely in the past three years when the Guild honored "The Hurt Locker", "Slumdog Millionaire" and "No Country For Old Men". Now, finally, we have a race.

The DGA's Golden Touch

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A couple of days ago, "The Social Network" picked up the Best Picture Award from the prestigious National Society of Film Critics, which brings the movie's win tally to 23 out of 28 trophies given so far this year from the country's various film critics groups. But as we've cautioned for several weeks now, Oscar voters are not critics, and just because one movie sweeps the critics awards doesn't mean it will do the same at the Oscars.
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But today, nominations were announced which definitely do foreshadow Oscar success. Today the Directors Guild of America, the union to which most Hollywood directors belong, announced their five nominations for Best Director of the Year. The nominees are Darren Aronofsky for "Black Swan", David Fincher for "The Social Network", Tom Hooper for "The King's Speech", David O. Russell for "The Fighter" and Christopher Nolan for "Inception". Why do we say that the DGA is a good indicator of Oscar success? Because in the 62 years that the DGA has awarded a Best Director, that person has gone on to win the Oscar for Best Director 56 out of those 62 times.

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Some were surprised that The Coen Brothers didn't win a DGA nomination for "True Grit", but you can be assured that "True Grit" will almost certainly take one of the ten Best Picture Oscar nominations, and The Coen's could still be nominated for an Oscar for Best Director, although their lack of a DGA nod will certainly hurt their chances for an Oscar win.

Oscar Is Heading For the Final Turn

Ladies and Gentlemen, your Oscar winners for 2011: Colin Firth for Best Actor, Natalie Portman for Best Actress, Christian Bale for Best Supporting Actor, Hailee Steinfeld for Best Supporting Actress, and "The Social Network" for Best Picture.

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(mark wahlberg in "the fighter")

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Okay, we know the Oscars haven't been given out yet, the nominations haven't even been announced, but as we wrote last year, there are so many movie awards which are given out now before the Oscars, that it almost becomes a foregone conclusion who will win the Oscars by the time the winners are actually announced. In other words, there are almost never any surprises any longer.

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(hailee steinfeld and barry pepper in "true grit")

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In the past few days, three more critics groups, the Kansas City Film Critics Circle, the Phoenix Film Critics Society and the Online Film Critics Society, announced their 2010 film award winners. All three groups selected Colin Firth, Natalie Portman and Christian Bale in the Actor, Actress and Supporting Actor categories, respectively. They disagreed slightly over Supporting Actress and Best Picture; Kansas City and the Online folks picked Hailee Steinfeld and "The Social Network", but Phoenix picked Melissa Leo and "The King's Speech".

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(geoffrey rush and colin firth in "the king's speech")

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With these newest awards, the latest tally for critics groups wins stands at "The Social Network" having won 22 of 27 awards; Colin Firth having won 14 of 27 awards; Natalie Portman at 14 of 26; Christian Bale at 16 of 25; and Hailee Steinfeld at 8 of 25.

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And thus, our confidence in announcing, now, who will win the Oscars. That's not to say that the Oscar voters always vote the same way that movie critics do, hardly!, but at this point, peer pressure starts to have an effect. In other words, if one actor has won the bulk of praise from the country's critics, it becomes really difficult for a lowly Oscar voter, who might be an actor or film editor who hasn't worked in two years, to claim that they know better than the nation's critics. Another reason why the Oscar Awards sometimes resemble an election for junior high prom queen.

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(natalie portman in "black swan")

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However, and this is a big "however", one force that is always present at the Oscars is sentiment. And Oscar sentiment is a hell of a force. Sentiment means that Oscars voters often like to reward actors for "career achievement" or simply for their overwhelming popularity. You have to look no further than last year's wins for Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock to see the results of Oscar sentiment. Not that Bridges and Bullock weren't good in their roles, but you'd be hard pressed to find many film critics who really thought Bridges was better than Colin Firth last year, or Bullock was better than Meryl Streep.

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(jackie weaver and joel edgerton in "animal kingdom")

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So at this point, you can pretty much count on Colin Firth, Natalie Portman and Christian Bale wins. Annette Bening might upset Portman, but it's doubtful. And "The King's Speech" might upset "The Social Network", but that looks doubtful, too. The only major race that's still in contention is for Best Supporting Actress. Steinfeld, Melissa Leo and Jackie Weaver have split the critics votes three ways, but not nearly as many people will see Leo's and Weaver's movies as they will see Steinfeld in "True Grit", and Oscar voters will also want to reward the Coen Brothers' film with at least one acting award. Also, don't forget, Oscar voters are suckers for rewarding child actors, i.e. Patty Duke, Tatum O'Neal, Anna Paquin, etc.

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Next up are the industry awards, i.e. The Screen Actors Guild Awards, The Producers Guild Awards, etc. And these people, unlike the nation's film critics, actually belong to the Oscar Academy, which means they actually vote for the Oscars. So their selections over the next few days will really give us an even more accurate prediction of who will take home the most coveted naked man in Hollywood.