Photograph of Queens native Amy Ryan, nominated for best supporting actress for her role in Gone, Baby Gone At 8:30PM (following a half-hour red carpet special), the 80th Annual Academy Awards ceremony will begin, finally putting an end to the "There Will Be Oscar" or "Oscar Country for Old Men" type headlines. You can prep yourself with the Oscar nominees list as you watch (or avoid) red carpet coverage. You could read NY Times......

The Oscars are in town! Well, at least some 8-foot Oscar statues for the official New York Oscar night celebration at the Carlyle hotel, where east coast industry folk will come together Sunday night as the show goes down in Hollywood. Nominees were announced on January 22nd with Best Picture nods going to Michael Clayton, Atonement, There Will Be Blood, No Country For Old Men and Juno. The love and buzz continues to surround the......

Photograph of Kathy Bates and AMPAS President Sid Ganis announcing the nominations by Chris Pizzello/AP While the writers' strike continues and prospects of an awards ceremony are unclear, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences went ahead and announced the contenders for their 80th annual back-slapping ceremony. Oscar-winning friend of the academy Kathy Bates was on hand to announce this year's golden picks. From Bob Dylan to Michael Clayton, many of the nominations......

After Letterman announced his show's comeback with new episodes, writers' strike or no writers' strike, the leaders of late night all followed suit. Conan O'Brien, who has been growing a "strike beard" and paying his non-writer employees out of pocket, will return on January 2nd -- and his West Coast network-mate, Jay Leno, will do the same. Yesterday the WGA released the following statement regarding this move.“The AMPTP walked away from the bargaining table on......

The New York Film Critics Circle met yesterday to vote on their “Best of” list for 2007; widely viewed as a barometer for the upcoming Academy Awards, the critics pride themselves as “a principled alternative to the Oscars, honoring esthetic merit in a forum that is immune to commercial and political pressures.” But if one anonymous member is to be believed, the meeting sounds more like a “principled” excuse for an Aint It Cool News-style......

The French Connection (directed by William Friedkin) Film Forum through September 6th A New York City procedural cop movie classic and the winner of five Academy Awards, a new 35 mm print of The French Connection gets a one-week run at Film Forum starting this weekend. Starring Gene Hackman as the porkpie wearing detective Popeye Doyle in a career defining role, the movie follows the attempt of a French criminal (Fernando Rey) to smuggle heroin......

Joel Siegel, perhaps best known as Good Morning America's film critic (a program he was on weekly since 1981), died yesterday in New York at the age of 63. Siegel had been battling colon cancer, though many didn't even know he was sick as he stayed positive until the end and kept working until just two weeks ago. In addition to his weekly appearances on GMA he was also seen frequently on ABC News, and......

If you detected a frisson of fabulous excitement scorching the air this morning, it’s because the 61st annual Tony award nominations were announced! (For those who may not fathom the awesome significance of the Tonys, the awards are the Broadway theater world equivalent of the Oscars and named for Antoinette Perry, an actress, director, producer and who passed away prior to the first award show in 1947.) Turning a profit on Broadway takes a perfect......

It's a holiday weekend for the NY Times Weddings Announcements! Total Number of Weddings: 9 (including Vows column) Total Number of Same-Sex Weddings: 0 Youngest Bride: 25 Oldest Bride: 51 Youngest Groom: 28 (two grooms) Oldest Groom:52 Biggest Age Difference: 17 years Number of Couples Where Bride and Groom Are the Same Age: 0 Number of University of Arizona Graduates Married: 2 (to each other) Number of Dartmouth Graduates: 1 Number of Yale Graduates......

Blades of Glory (directed by Will Speck and Josh Gordon): "Will Ferrell the Serious Actor" is a good thing, but oh how we adore "Will Ferrell the Clown." The off-kilter mannerisms, the flamboyant costumes and the tendency to flash his hairy belly for cheap laughs are hallmarks of a great Will Ferrell movie and they're all there in his newest, the figure skating spoof Blades of Glory. Ferrell plays Chazz Michael Michaels, otherwise known as......

A look at some noteworthy televison shows this week: Live From the Red Carpet: The 2007 Academy Awards (Sunday, 6:00 p.m. E!) The traditionally absurd Oscar pregame of celebrities arriving at the Oscars. 2007 Joan & Melissa at the Academy Awards (Sunday, 6:00 p.m. TV Guide Channel) Joan Rivers and daughter Melissa do their yearly schtick during the Oscar arrivals. An Evening at the Academy Awards: The Arrivals (Sunday, 6:30 p.m. WABC 7) Channel 7......

Okay, so it's been 2007 for the last four days but since everyone's doing it from the critics circles to the awards nominating pools, it seemed worth it to weigh in on last year's movies. However, constructing end of the year top ten lists can be both painful and thrilling. Looking at a long list of the year's movie releases reminds you how many films passed you by in the theaters and playing favorites amongst......

If you count yourself as a New Yorker and a movie lover, it's tough to not have a special affinity for films by Woody Allen. Practically the filmmaker laureate of the city, Allen's prolific 40 plus year career is getting a three week long screening series at Film Forum starting this Friday. Gothamist loves Allen's movies (both the highs and the lows) so much that we thought we'd chat with an Allen expert, Queens College......

It's December today and you know what that means...let the rampant awards season speculation commence! As the year comes to a close, it's that magical time when all of the movie studios begin unloading their most precious commodities into our theaters, making sure things come out in New York (and LA) before Dec. 31 so they'll be eligible for this year's Academy Awards. But of course, we're still weeks away from any nomination announcements for......

Robert Altman, maverick film director, died on Monday night in Los Angeles. He was 81 years old. Altman had recently been promoting the DVD release of A Praire Home Companion, a film in which the movie studio hired Paul Thomas Anderson to be an assistant director in case, as Altman put it, he kicked the bucket. He had been nominated five times for best director at the Academy Awards, but never won one (a......

As Jon Stewart takes to the stage this Sunday at 8 pm to host the 78th Annual Academy Awards, the movie-lovin' Gothamist will be watching with eager anticipation from our couch. The spectacle, the glamour, the bad musical numbers and cheesy memorial montages -- we love it all. In fact, Gothamist (ie. Jen Chung and movie correspondent Karen Wilson) will be live blogging the ceremony but in the meantime, here's a few predictions for the......

It's the itch we can't scratch - the Academy Awards. We make sure we see the announcements at 8:30AM and then rush to work, thinking about the nominations while on the train. This morning, Academy President Sid Ganis and Mira Sorvino (who isn't doing anything else, anyway) announced the nominations. As expected, Brokeback Mountain, Good Night and Good Luck, and Capote earned many nominations, and Crash made a surprising showing with Best Picture, Best Director......

On Sundays, Gothamist runs opinion pieces on issues relevant to life in New York. The views expressed below belong entirely to the author. Tim Robbins and Sean Penn won Academy Awards for the intensity they put into their acting in Mystic River, and they were great, for sure – but they were acting in a movie with a plot that doesn’t exactly skimp on tense moments. Now imagine the same sort of slowly uncoiled, suspenseful......

First bloggers were accused of damaging journalism, then politics, and now? The Oscars! What's next, Christmas? The LA Times' Patrick Goldstein has accused bloggers, aka "the web's Oscar dingbats...bickering over supporting actor nominations and movies they haven't even seen yet" of spoiling the awards by over-predicting and even ruining the post-film experience: "When I went to an early screening of Terrence Malick's "The New World" the other night, my first reaction was one of almost......

In an effort to help the reported “Hollywood Slump,” AMC Theatres offer full-ticket refunds to moviegoers seeing Cinderella Man, which did rather poorly at the box office. The exhibitors offering Cinderella Man claim their marketing ploy is simply to encourage the public to see “a special picture” says Dick Walsh, film group chairman at AMC: "It's first class up and down, almost certain to be nominated for Academy Awards, and we just wanted to do......

You know it's the Oscars when P. Diddy busts out the velvet suit! Gothamist loves the Oscars, and we're going to attempt to do a little liveblogging. We might need to order a vat of caffeine and an EMT team at the ready; not because Chris Rock will be boring, but because we think that Gil Cates might kill us with his newfangled ideas and because we're meh about this year's nominees in the big......

Bruce Goldstein, Film Forum...

Florence Almozini, BAMcinématek...

David Schwartz, Museum of the Moving Image...

Laurence Kardish, MoMA, Dept. of Film & Media...

Kent Jones, Walter Reade Theater/Film Society of Lincoln Center...

One of the best things about the Oscars is Fametracker's coverage. This year's Galaxy of Fame :: Special Speculative Edition: What If They Win Their Academy Awards? seems spot on, as does their Oscar fashion handicapping. But what Gothamist liked best was their imagining of movies-turned-TV shows in 2007, like Lost in Translation, starring Amy Jo Johnson and Jim Belushi: You won't want to miss the season finale; John becomes suspicious about Charlotte's activities in......

Yay for surprises. The announcement of the 76th Academy Awards nominations were not the snoozefest we thought they would be, thanks to some shockers. Some thoughts on the categories: Best Actress Keisha Castle Hughes, youngest lead acting nominee ever, for Whale Rider; the film has been criticized for being heavy on cliche, but many films are (Lord of the Rings, for instance, though epic, is part of the adventure tradition) - it's the acting,......

The best cop movie Gothamist has seen this year, Infernal Affairs, has been chosen as Hong Kong's official selection for Best Foreign Film consideration for the 2003 Academy Awards (meaning, the Academy Awards that will honor films from 2003, but will be broadcast in 2004). The premise is simple and complicated, as the plot description from IMDB indicates: A story between a mole in the police department and an undercover cop. Their objectives are......

Dave Barry, the funny every-man (but I've never really been that into him), writes about his experience at the Academy Awards as a writer for the show: I was there for the Academy Awards. The host, Steve Martin, had asked me to be on the team of writers working with him; apparently he felt that what was needed, to lend just the right tone to Hollywood's most glamorous night, was booger jokes. So I went......