Archive for the 'Awards' Category

• e  7 It’s all a bunch of piles

  As an add-on to my earlier post, The Wrap has a detailed article about how nomination votes are tallied.

• e  37 How nominations work

  This is my first year as an Academy member, and my first year voting for award. Since it’s all new to me, I thought I’d walk readers through the process.

• e  24 Nicholl screenwriting competition begins

  The Nicholl Fellowship has a strong track record and good follow-up.

• e  30 Show your work

  Screenwriting continues to be the most transparent and opaque part of moviemaking.

• e  39 Official badasses

  MTV released its final list of top-ten badasses, which included contributions by me and a lot of other folks.

  Dirty Harry – “Dirty Harry” Ellen Ripley – “Alien/Aliens” John McClane – “Die Hard” Mad Max – “Mad Max” Walker – “Point Blank” Sarah Connor – “Terminator” Pike Bishop – “The Wild Bunch” Khan Noonien Singh – “Star Trek” Boba Fett – “Star Wars” John J. [...]

• e  16 Oscar grouchiness

  Patrick Goldstein’s article about Hollywood’s Oscar obsession is worth a read:

  The Oscars have become a circular firing squad, touted and debated by a small coterie of Oscar publicists, bloggers, marketers, agents, producers and antsy studio executives–all talking to themselves. The public has grown bored with the whole charade. They’d rather be watching “American [...]

• e  15 Saturn Award nomination

  Matt Venne emailed me this morning to point out something I would have otherwise missed: The Nines just got a Saturn Award nomination for its DVD.

  It’s a cliché to say, “It’s an honor just to be nominated,” but really, it is. And surprising, too. The Nines isn’t an obvious choice at all.

  The Saturn Awards are [...]

• e  16 And I barely know who she is now

  At the Grammy Awards last night, my friend Jen pointed to presenter Miley Ray Cyrus and said, “You know she was in Big Fish, right?”

  I insisted that was impossible, and immediately tried to pull up IMDb on my iPhone in order to prove her wrong. But the network inside Staples Center was massively overwhelmed, [...]

• e  11 Life is now worth living

  In a bold choice that shocked, well, me, The Morning News gave this very site one of its 2007 Editors’ Awards for Online Excellence, which is pretty cool considering it’s a damn screenwriting blog.

  The other award-winners are more deserving quite interesting, and worth a click-through. I’m particularly enamored by Mindy Kaling’s awesome Things I’ve [...]

• e  44 Blingons and despair

  Measured by the number of entries, the first-ever John August Scene Challenge was a surprising success. In terms of quality, well, there was a disappointing sameness that I’m going to blame on the limited nature of the assignment.

  Many entries were just a slightly-better version of the existing scene. While a lot of rewriting [...]

• e  6 Best editors

  In this morning’s Oscar nominations, I was delighted (but not surprised) to see Doug Crise and Stephen Mirrione nominated for Babel. Stephen Mirrione cut Go, and Doug Crise followed up his work on Babel with a little movie called The Nines.

  Huge congrats to both of them.

• e  11 The Queen on a silver platter

  The 2007 Oscar screeners.

• e  15 Little Children, a little late

  2007 Screeners update.