The 88th Academy Award nominations will be announced tomorrow morning, January 14, 2016, hot off of the weekend's 73rd Golden Globe awards. I've been following the full awards season over on my Awards Tracker page. Using that data as the tea leaves and a truckload of hunches, I'm going to attempt to closely predict the Oscar nominations for the "Big 8" categories for the third year in a row.
Read MoreMore and more each year, the Golden Globes have become more an a popularity contest than a true precursor to the Academy Awards. What you're watching on TV is a party thrown by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association and hosted by Ricky Gervais in an effort to be loved and share some love. To its credit, the awards show still garners legitimate attention and ratings. The winners do get a pretty positive rub and the marketers gain a few more "Winner of..." graphics to put in the newspapers next to their films.
Read MoreRemember that scene in 1988's "Big" where Tom Hanks doesn't "get" the product pitch the so-called expert is feeding to him? That might be you after (or while) watching the animated feature "Anomalisa" from the fertile imagination of Charlie Kaufman. You may feel like Josh Baskin where you have a child's mind trying to wrap your head around an adult idea. You might come out of the film and know a better idea on how to convey human love. Mark this writer down in the Josh Baskin column with a interrupting raised hand.
Read MoreIt is time to go on record and add another label to the colorful list to describe filmmaker Quentin Tarantino: "acquired taste." Even with his recent success, the auteur's excessive and aestheticized indulgences are catching up to him. Each subsequent film of his may be getting more popular, but they are not getting better and "The Hateful Eight" hammers that point home. Swelled to either a 167-minute straight cut or a 187-minute opus complete with overture and intermission, Tarantino's newest film doesn't know when to quit. It just goes and dies, literally and figuratively.
Read More"Welcome to Me" is a Mobius strip of a trainwreck. The film is a trainwreck... of a trainwreck. Starring an extremely invested Kristen Wiig, the film is, to its credit, a bold character piece and black comedy that seeks to put a trainwreck of a person on display in an effort to preach larger moral questions. As bold as it is in that intention, "Welcome to Me" doesn't achieve that and overshoots every landing possible. It's that really well planned gag or stunt that can't match the real thing because it's been too manufactured to where the unpredictability is taken away or feels forced. It's the second coming of "Dinner for Schmucks," in terms of cringe comedy, and that film was bad but at least funnier.
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