More Oscars News and Information | NewsOK.com

BY DENNIS KING  The Oscars are being given out Sunday night, so all across the land the game’s afoot. In office pools, barrooms, classrooms, living rooms and at water coolers everywhere popcorn pundits are analyzing and strategizing and prognosticating over who will take home the little golden statue for “best.” In our 25 years of writing about movies, we admit to a pathetic track record at picking Oscars. Predicting how 5,856 Academy voters – a most insular, erratic and passionately biased clique – will cast their ballots has always seemed to us a wholly futile exercise. We have a friend – whom we drag out and cite every year – who never sees any of the Oscar-nominated movies but has a

BY GENE TRIPLETT There are moviegoers who still remember Steve McQueen’s shocked and anguished cry at the tragic end of “The Sand Pebbles” — “What the hell happened?” That’s probably the question that shot through the befuddled minds of Ben Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow, Tom Hooper and Quentin Tarantino when the films they helmed (“Argo,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Les Miserables,” “Django Unchained,” respectively) received best picture Oscar nominations while the filmmakers themselves all were snubbed for best director honors. (At least McQueen got the best actor nod way back when, even if he didn’t win.

There comes a moment (or three) in every Oscar telecast when the party becomes muted and solemn, when the lights dim and a sentimental song plays over a gauzy and brief montage of Academy members who made their final curtain calls in the past year. The “In Memoriam” sequence, a regular feature of Oscar telecasts since 1994, presents a largely star-studded but arbitrary obituary roll call of Academy members – mainly actors and recognizable behind-the-scenes figures – now deceased. The short, artful sequence is mostly a highlight reel and necessarily picks and chooses from a much larger roster of late Academy members (this year the obit list is said to approach some 500).

Looking for some last-minute picks as you make out your Oscar ballot? Here’s what I’m going with: Best Picture: Argo Best Director: Steven Spielberg, Lincoln Best Actor: Daniel Day-Lewis, Lincoln Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook Best supporting actor: Robert DeNiro, Silver Linings Playbook Best supporting actress: Anne Hathaway, Les Miserables Best Animated Feature: Brave Best Foreign Film: Amour, Austria Best original screenplay: Django Unchained Best adapted screenplay: Argo Best costume design: Anna Karenina Best original song: “Skyfall,” Skyfall Best original score: Life of Pi Best documentary:

An online poll of movie fans at Fandango.com reports that Ben Affleck being left out of the Best Director nominations for the 2013 Academy Awards is the biggest snub of this year’s Oscar nominations.   Affleck directed “Argo,” which is nominated for best picture.  The poll also stated the nomination for actress Quvenzhane Wallis of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was the Happiest Surprise.

5: 59 p.m. Welcome to StaticBlog’s live, start-to-finish, red-carpet -to-red-eye coverage of the 2013 Oscars, one of the great endurance tests of our time, right up there with triathlons and competitive eating. 6:01 p.m. Oklahoma’s Own ™ Kristin Chenoweth opened the red carpet saying the red carpet is about “500 feet long, or 2000 of me.” Kristin is diminutive, but the math on that is about 3 inches, I think. She’d have to climb the microphone. 6:05  p.m. Jessica Chastain is the first on the carpet. Don’t know if that counts for anything, but watch where they seat her and how often the camera is trained in that direction. 6:13 p.m.

Nominees for the Academy Awards

The Oklahoman's movie critics predict Oscar winners.

Uniformly brilliant but stylistically diverse, the contenders are capable of transporting viewers into all sorts of new and unfamiliar places, whether real and imagined.

Despite their brief runtimes — each one clocks in at 40 minutes or less — the films earn their Academy Award honors by powerfully pairing real faces and true stories with weighty social issues.