Tags :: Academy Awards

Before <em>Spotlight</em> and <em>Brooklyn</em>: Priests, religious, and the Academy Awards ARTICLE

Before Spotlight and Brooklyn: Priests, religious, and the Academy Awards

Two of this year’s eight best picture Academy Award nominees, Spotlight and Brooklyn, present dramatically different depictions of Catholic clergy — though neither gives a clerical character more than a few minutes of screentime.

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“Reel Faith” One-Hour Oscar Special now online

If you missed the various broadcasts of the “Reel Faith” one-hour Oscar special over the last few weeks, you’ve still got time to catch online before Sunday’s Oscar ceremony … and see how wrong we were three weeks ago! David and I talk about the nominees, call out snubs, give our favorites and give our predictions, some of which have aged better than others. Watch online now!

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The 2012 Academy Award Nominees

I like lists better than awards, so I look forward to the Academy Award nominations more than the Oscars ceremony itself. The process of whittling down countless contenders to a handful of nominees is more interesting than the process of picking one nominee as the winner — and this year is no exception.

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“Reel Faith” One-Hour Oscar Special: final airing (date & time change!)

The Oscars are just a week away now. If you missed the first two airings of our one-hour “Reel Faith” Oscar Special, you have one more chance to catch it on Thursday, February 23 at 9:00pm. Note: This is a change from the date and time originally reported. Hope you enjoy it. (Watch NET live.)

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Why I’m glad The King’s Speech won…

Last night at the Academy Awards, my favorite film of 2010, True Grit, went 0 for 10, winning none of the impressive lineup of nominations it had garnered including best picture, director, actor, supporting actress and adapted screenplay. (Read full Oscar coverage.)

 ARTICLE

Academy Crowns The King’s Speech

The royal historical drama The King’s Speech, starring Colin Firth as England’s Prince Albert, later King George VI, was the biggest winner at the 83rd Academy Awards, winning four of its 12 nominations in an evening with few surprises and a poorly staged ceremony whose primary virtue was its comparative shortness.

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On the Air: Reel Faith Oscar Special; Kresta

Tune in this weekend for a one-hour Oscar special of Reel Faith … Also, this afternoon around 5:40pm EST I’ll be on Al Kresta discussing the transcendent film Of Gods and Men, which opens this weekend in NY and LA.

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Spiritual themes at the Oscars?

The Academy Awards are upon us, and the two top contenders for major awards—The King’s Speech and True Grit—are both excellent films with significant moral and/or spiritual overtones. In fact, Lisa Respers France at CNN.com’s Religion Blog suggests that many of this year’s Oscar nominees have “deeply spiritual overtones.”

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The 2010 Academy Award Nominations

Last year’s Academy Awards were not the least-watched Oscars in history—that was the previous year—but they were widely perceived as contributing to the ongoing apathy of viewers by snubbing popular and critical favorites like The Dark Knight and WALL-E while honoring a roster of films (Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Milk, Doubt) aptly characterized by A. O. Scott’s phrase “hermetically sealed melodrama[s] of received thinking.” (By contrast, Scott called The Dark Knight and WALL-E “contrasting allegories pitched at the anxieties of the moment,” “populist entertainments of summertime” that incited the “interesting movie debates of 2008.”)