items tagged with Oscars

Well before the 2009 Academy Award nominations were announced this morning, Oscar-watchers were abuzz over the potential excitement in this year's major categories. Would Slumdog Millionaire's seemingly unstoppable march toward a Best Picture win be derailed by a surge of popular support for The Dark Knight or even - gulp! - WALL•E? Would the season's continued award-splitting between Milk's Sean Penn (recipient of 15 pre-Oscar citations thus far) and The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke (14 and counting) allow Clint Eastwood to sneak in a career-achievement win for Gran Torino? Would Kate Winslet receive her long-overdue trophy for Best Actress in Revolutionary Road, or for Best Supporting Actress in The Reader ... or could the performer, as she did at the Golden Globes, actually walk away with both awards?

The excitement was fun while it lasted, huh?

With the Golden Globes behind us and the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) telecast not taking place until January 25, there's nothing for movie-award hounds to do now but wait for the announcement of this year's Oscar nominations on Thursday, January 22.

Oh, wait, there is one thing we can do: We can make seemingly knowledgeable predictions that, in all likelihood, will eventually bite us in the ass!

HEARTBREAKERS

Though the competition is fierce – The Insider, All That Jazz, maybe even Beetlejuice – I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a movie that made smoking look more repellant than David Mirkin’s comedy Heartbreakers.

ERIN BROCKOVICH

In director Steven Soderbergh's Erin Brockovich, which is based on a true story, Julia Roberts plays the titular heroine, a divorced, unemployed mother of three, who bullies her way into a job at the law offices of Ed Masry (Albert Finney), the lawyer who previously lost a case for Brockovich.