The 95th Oscars recap through tweets …

Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s because this is the first time since Moonlight that my favorite film of the year won Best Picture. Maybe it’s just the continued devolution of rhetoric and tribalistic community on for-profit social media sites. I don’t know. But this year was the first year that I’ve been scrolling through tweets to compile an Oscars recap where I wasn’t laughing. Because the jokes weren’t funny. They weren’t even mean. They were gatekeep-y. They were told with the premise that the teller knew what good cinema was…

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The 94th Oscars recap through tweets …

Move over Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway, toxic masculinity has entered the chat. I don’t know how the 94th Annual Academy Awards doesn’t go down as the most memorable, awkward, scary show of its lifespan. Heck, I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s the last telecast of the Oscars that we get because of just how fast and far things fell. Things started going sideways a couple weeks ago when The Academy announced that they were going to give out eight awards while most of the night’s guests were doing their…

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Picking Winners at the 94th Annual Academy Awards

The 94th Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, March 27th, 2022 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: As the “Show all 23” chant continues on Twitter, we all know the 2022 Oscars are going to be a little different than previous years. The Academy says no one should worry because no awards are going to be “excluded,” but their definition of that word is not universal. Yes, every award will be…

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The 93rd Oscars recap through tweets …

If you’re going to hire a director like Steven Soderbergh to handle the Oscars … expect the unexpected. And why not after the year the industry just experienced? Movie theaters shuttered for months (some forever) as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. Productions were canceled, postponed, and scaled-down with new protocols allowing Tom Cruise to scream at people and somehow be the “good guy” in the exchange. And the deadline to qualify for the ceremony shifted from December 31, 2020 to February 28, 2021. Chaos was baked into this show’s…

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Picking Winners at the 93rd Annual Academy Awards

The 93rd Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, April 25th, 2021 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert and myself (regular contributor William Altreuter was unfortunately unable to particpate this year). Jared Mobarak: This year’s Oscars suddenly feels like the Grammys now that we have titles from multiple years vying against each other due to the COVID-19 voting extension. It’s not as weirdly complex as that ceremony (there’s still an obvious cut-off and movies, unlike albums, don’t have…

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The 92nd Oscars recap through tweets …

What a weird, wild night. After the debacle that was Kevin Hart’s appointment as Oscar host last year and the straight-up refusal by everyone else to dare take the baton in the wake of his dismissal, The Academy chose right from the start to not have a host for their 92nd annual event. So what do they do after Janelle Monáe’s opening number (itself strange for representing more films that weren’t nominated than those that were)? They ask Steve Martin and Chris Rock—two former hosts—to go on-stage and deliver an…

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Picking Winners at the 92nd Annual Academy Awards

The 92nd Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, February 9th, 2020 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: Let’s face it. The Oscars have been irrelevant from a creative standpoint since … probably forever. The whole thing is a marketing ploy to boost box office numbers and give trailer makers something to put next to names of creative. That’s why theaters re-release nominees. That’s why boutique studios hold wide rollouts until foreign…

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The 91st Oscars recap through tweets …

What a wild ride this Oscars season has been. After so much recent talk about inclusivity and a changing of the guard, it was bound to happen that we’d receive an awkward period of flux. There’s the young crowd cheering a Marvel Cinematic Universe chapter to the franchise’s first Best Picture nominee and the older sect feeling warm and gooey about a story pretending to talk about racism despite really just glossing over the struggle to say most racists are simply misunderstood until sharing a bucket of KFC with the…

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Picking Winners at the 91st Annual Academy Awards

The 91st Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, February 24th, 2019 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: It’s the type of year where hashtags rhetoric simply won’t work. There’s just not one all encapsulating buzzword to touch upon the myriad problems these nominations face. What do you do when you have a film up for Best Picture that was directed by a known presumed sexual predator who was fired for not…

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The 90th Oscars recap through tweets …

If you thought this year’s Oscars were going to do something crazy or exciting, you haven’t been paying attention. Between the envelope-gate incident of 2017 and the fact that this was a “multiple of ten” anniversary, the 90th Annual Academy Awards was going to do everything it could to right the ship and ensure nothing overshadowed the winners’ list. And for the most part they succeeded—often at the detriment of the show itself. But that’s their fault for alway trying to make it more than what it is: an awards…

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Picking Winners at the 90th Annual Academy Awards

The 90th Annual Academy Awards hits airwaves Sunday, March 4th, 2018 at 8:00pm on ABC. For those handicapping at home, here are the guesses of Buffalo film fanatics Christopher Schobert, William Altreuter, and myself. Jared Mobarak: This new look Academy is really starting to pay dividends. The fight for representation might have begun with a focus on the acting categories (there are four POC actors nominated this year out of twenty slots), but it’s expanded much further in a very short period of time. This 90th year of Oscar becomes…

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