SeanC

Best Director will be effectively nailed down by the DGA, but if Miller wins that (which I'm really feeling is likely at this point), that will leave Best Picture as total jump ball. I'm trying to think of what categories will serve as effective bellwethers at the ceremony. Adapted Screenplay will be the big one, I think; if The Big Short can't win that, no way does it win Picture. That's also true of Spotlight in Original Screenplay, but it should win that regardless of whether it wins Picture.

SAG reactions: - Spotlight lives to fight another day with its Ensemble win. If it had lost that, it would have been completely out of the running. - Leo and Brie are locked in now. - Elba's win will no doubt inspire another wave of thinkpieces (he makes history as the first SAG film award winner to not get an Oscar nomination). - I think Vikander can now be considered at least a mild favourite in her category. She's got a bunch of films this year, including two films that earned notable Oscar nominations, and has built a solid rep. I don't think Winslet has the career momentum for a second Oscar at the moment (which didn't stop Hillary Swank or Christoph Waltz, admittedly, but they were in films with more momentum), and while Mara's film has a high nomination tally, as yet there's no sign of a big groundswell to reward the film by voting for her.

Entertainment Weekly: Sophie's annual "this year will be different from all the earlier ones" interviews begin. Maisie, Alfie, Hannah, and Carice (at least) were also at that party so perhaps there'll be a few more vague interviews out of it in the next day or so (and, obviously, SAG tonight).

That was, rather bizarrely, a passion project for Wayne. He really wanted to play that role, for reasons pretty much nobody understood.

It's weird to think that if Lorelai had given birth at the time the series started in 2000, Rory would now be the same age she was in the pilot.

Admittedly the seventh season took a lot of heat, but it ended with one of the all-time great accidentally-prescient finale moments, where Rory heads off to cover Barack Obama's presidential campaign. If they acknowledge the non-Palladino stuff at all, I hope we get some hilarious anecdotes from Rory's time there.

I was rewatching the "West Covina" reprise, and I was amused at how Rebecca gets all hopeful that Fantasy Josh is going to declare his love for her, and then, when he breaks the rhyme scheme, she has a chastened "right, that makes sense" look.

Profit, one assumes. It's not coincidental that all of the organizations have names like the "Trade Federation" and the "Banking Clan".

I was thinking on that point, Josh and Rebecca lived on opposite sides of the country at that point, so I'm not sure how a high school relationship would even have worked under those circumstances (though given how miserable Rebecca's life already was, easy to see why she wasn't worried about that).

Palpatine's plan is actually fairly simple, I thought. He manipulated the Trade Federation to provoke a political crisis that would depose the sitting chancellor and, by creating sympathy for Naboo, make him the new chancellor. Then he again used the Trade Federation and other similar groups to start a civil war that he could in time crush and use as a means of consolidating his own power and making himself a dictator.

He's giving Stannis pretty detailed advice on how to conduct his campaign in the North. He's also independently taking actions to rescue fArya, which are, if not pro-Stannis, at least anti-Bolton.

I agree that the criticisms of there being too much politics in the prequels is, to me, very over the top, and probably a misdiagnosis of the problem. Telling the story of the rise of the Empire is necessarily going to involve politics. The problem is, akin to my earlier comment, that Lucas just couldn't make his political drama interesting.

I do wonder if they should have stuck with the "studying Rebecca" gimmick longer, because Heather, unlike April, doesn't work with Rebecca or anything like that, so there's no real reason for her to go anywhere that her slacker attitude doesn't want her to go. Dating Greg is a good idea, though, both in terms of hopefully broadening the character's connections and because I think their dynamic is funny. She doesn't really remind me much of Valencia, though.

Denzel Washington's adaptation of August Wilson's Fences, which has been in the works since Washington headlined it on Broadway back in 2010, is apparently racing to film this year in order to make the 2016 awards race. Washington and Tony Kushner are fine-tuning the screenplay.

It's not. You can campaign for both. But the revised balloting procedures implemented after 2010 disadvantage Pixar (TS3 and Up probably wouldn't have been nominated under the current system; Inside Out was the notable test of that, since it's the first Pixar film released since TS3 to reach similar levels of acclaim. More the reverse: they weren't in the Best Picture discussion, but after Beauty and the Beast's nomination, the other Disney Renaissance-era films, and the rise of Pixar, the Academy's board of directors decided that they should have an animated feature category to reward those artists (akin to the documentary and foreign film prizes).

Actually, Sansa had met Lysa before: It had been many years since Sansa last saw her mother's sister. She will be kind to me for my mother's sake, surely. She's my own blood. And the Vale of Arryn was beautiful, all the songs said so. Perhaps it would not be so terrible to stay here for a time. (ASOS Sansa VI, pg. 764)

Well, that's somewhat different since he actually doesn't like Valencia, per his past statements.

I don't think they really "gained" a season. There is no way that Season 5 was written with a seven-season show in contemplation. It seems more like the stuff that they moved around was to allow those stories to flow into their TWOW-and-afterwards points.

In retrospect, even moving to New York seems a bit odd for Josh, as we've come to know him. Though perhaps his current attitude is in part specifically because he went to New York and felt so unhappy there?

I agree that Heather definitely feels like the most peripheral castmember. Having her date Greg is, I think, a good idea, both because it broadens her interactions with the cast (she otherwise doesn't especially fit into either Rebecca's work life or her Josh-centric personal life very well) and because I think they have a good dynamic (she's certainly much better-positioned to deal with Greg's often bitter attitude than Rebecca, at present).

It was Bail Antilles.

Yeah, say what you will about quality, but I wouldn't call Twilight a bad career decision. It definitely hurt her credibility as an actress a bit (as did things like Snow White and the Huntsman; that sort of part is just outside her range), but she's getting that back, so the main legacy of it is tons of money and name recognition.

Given Tony's probable birth date it seems unlikely that Maria enters the picture for a while. Incidentally, about that scene, I like the occasional fight scene where Peggy really struggles. Obviously she's superb, but if all she ever does is curbstomp everybody it decreases narrative tension a bit.

It's a shame this show can only afford Dominic Cooper in measured doses per season, because he's consistently a scream and has a great dynamic with Peggy and Jarvis. This season continues to be a big step up from the first (which I thought was okay).

I saw this a second time recently. The ladies I was seeing it with hadn't seen any of the ads, etc., and one of them remarked to me afterward that during the escape sequence she was convinced the cops were going to find Joy murdered when they went back to the house. The rewatch just heightens my appreciation for the film. The nuances of the acting are remarkable (referring back to the above comment, Joy didn't seem like she was expecting that she'd survive this attempt).