I’ve done worse — but with 50 of the nominees under my belt, I should have done better.
The scorecard is below.
Best Picture: wrong
I really thought they’d try to split the baby between Avatar and The …

Well, friends, I gave it my best, but I couldn’t manage to watch them all. The final score is Sarah 50, Death Race 8 (86-ish percent) and 20 out of 24 categories completed (83 percent). …

A handful of nice moments — most of them from McAvoy, who isn’t nominated — but one review I read called the movie an acting showcase more than a plot, and I’d have to agree. …

This is a great movie. Here’s how I could tell: the version I saw had, bar none, the worst subtitling I’ve ever seen, and I have watched a fair amount of bootleg kung-fu in my …

Everyone looks beautiful, the acting is good (with one semi-exception), and Nine successfully evokes Fellini, but I don’t think I see the point of the exercise, here or in the stage original. That the dialogue …

This is, I believe, the presumptive favorite for Best Foreign Film, with good reason. I’ve only seen one of the other nominees, and it’s good, but The White Ribbon is in another class entirely; it’s …

For my tenth birthday, my mother got me a framed copy of the front page of the New York Times from the day I was born. The big headline is about food costs pushing up …

I actually enjoyed it, because I expected to hate it, and while it is definitely bad — buys into its own pompous mythos, takes too long to explain a conflict nobody cares about, thinks it’s …

The best part of the Oscars Death Race project is the nice surprises: the films I expected to have to endure that gripped me instead.
I faced Ajami as one does a hated vegetable, and got …

It’s hard to tell if the movie intends to portray Gabrielle “Coco” Chanel as morally compromised and often bratty, as part of a larger conversation about the forging of genius. If so, the script could …