by Andrew Osborne

For as long as the American Academy of Motion Arts and Sciences has been handing out awards, people have bitched about the Oscars:  they’re pointless, they’re boring, they’re self-indulgent, they’re predictable, they’re pretentious, they’re tacky, they celebrate the wrong films, etc. etc. etc.  But you know what?   I’ve never missed a broadcast…and here are seven reasons why.

1) It’s a summation and farewell to (some of) the previous year’s movies and dead people…and sometimes a nomination or award gives new life in the new year to deserving, underseen films.

2) For me, watching the Oscars is a tradition stretching back as far as I can remember, and a yearly excuse to get together with friends/family (not unlike similarly meaningless sports playoffs, which also tend to be more interesting some years than others).

3) It’s fun to sit with friends/family and make wisecracks about some of the ridiculous people and things happening on the TV during each year’s Oscar broadcast.  Occasionally you even get to root for people/movies you actually like, or gasp at those rare unexpected moments of memorable peculiarity or emotion (like Woody Allen finally attending after 9/11 to introduce a tribute to NYC).

4) It’s an excuse to get all het up and opinion-y about, say, Annie Hall beating Star Wars, Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction, Crash beating Brokeback Mountain, David Letterman getting lambasted for what seemed to me a pretty funny broadcast, how unfair it was that Hoop Dreams and Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work weren’t nominated for Best Documentary, how Albert Brooks got shafted this year, how certain aspects of the show are better or worse than previous years, and so on and so forth.

5) There are dumb intros and some boring parts, but overall I find the show itself to be fairly entertaining.  Maybe not Breaking Bad season finale entertaining, but not bad for what it is.  Bruce Vilanch is a funny mofo, and he and his colleagues manage to slip in some decent one liners, montages and set pieces every year (plus there’s even a decent Best Song performance every five years or so)!

6) It’s fun to beat Mom in the annual Oscar pool (NOTE:  voting with your heart for the most deserving nominees almost always guarantees Oscar pool defeat)!

7) It’s an excuse to be my wife’s catty gay friend for the night and judge red carpet fashion!

That said, as an Academy Awards aficionado, I will admit this year’s broadcast looks to be a bit of a snooze…but swing by the Screengrab In Exile on Oscar night and I’ll do my best to liven things up with my annual live blog!

If the new Showtime series Inside Comedy looks suspiciously familiar, that may be because you vaguely remember Sit Down Comedy With David Steinberg, which ran for two seasons on TV Land from 2005-07. The two shows are nearly identical in format, as both feature Steinberg conducting one-on-one interviews with top comedians, discussing their influences, methods, and philosophies of comedy.

Click Here for the Full Post!

Kate Beckinsale can still fill out a skin-tight leather bodysuit, but with Awakening, the vampires-vs-werewolves Underworld franchise has finally decayed beyond the point of repair.

Click here for the Full Post!

by Leonard Pierce

Considering the prominence we give it in our society, Americans seem to have a lot of trouble talking about money.

All sorts of odd communicational shorthand has arisen around the rather simple concept of money, to the degree that we have found ourselves voluntarily handicapped when discussing the very thing we have built our entire culture and values system around.  Some of these are merely amusing, such as the curious dramatic trope of writing amounts of money on a piece of paper rather than saying them out loud, just like no one has ever actually done.

Click Here for the Full Post!

Of all the complaints I’ve read about We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsay’s first film in nearly a decade, the most interesting to me is the idea that the film doesn’t work because Kevin (played by Ezra Miller as a teenager) is a monster more or less from the time the doctor cut his umbilical cord. And you know what? Those folks aren’t wrong- a film in which a mother looks back at the fleeting, subtle signs that her kid is going to end up shooting up his school does (on paper, anyway) sound more compelling than one in which a child reveals his evil from the get-go and seems inevitably careening toward cataclysmic violence.

Click Here for the Full Post!

As recent as two years ago, back before I entered into this state of constant tedium and tension that is defined by my lack of employment, I used to enjoy making a list of my favorite albums and other artworks at the end of the year. I also used to spend more time working on this blog because, strangely, having less free time meant that I could manage it better. Now, every post that I write here is time that I should be spending doing things that seem more valuable: looking for a job, managing the house, watching my children, planning dinner, looking for a job, contemplating the pointlessness of my existence, pitching stories to outlets that may indeed pay me for said work, staring into space, and looking for a job. But I digress.

Click Here for the Full Post!

Having directed Liam Neeson in the competent 2010 TV upgrade The A-Team, Joe Carnahan again harnesses the actor’s late-career reinvention as Charles Bronson for The Grey, in which Neeson does things like punch a wolf in the face and tell a surly plane crash survivor, “I’m going to start beating the shit out of you in the next five seconds.”

Click Here for the Full Post!

by Leonard Pierce

Rather than do the predictable, not to mention timely and sensible, thing and write about the season première of Justified, I thought I’d take a different approach.  Raylan Givens, the quick-triggered U.S. marshal who is the protagonist of the show, is played by Timothy Olyphant, who also played Seth Bullock, the quick-tempered sheriff of Deadwood in the HBO series of the same name, and with Justified now entering its third season — the same length of time Deadwood was on the air — it’s become easier to see how the two characters both reflect and oppose one another.

Click Here for the Full Post!

by Andrew Osborne

Interesting indie films tend to sprout in the spring, blockbusters rule the summer and the classy Oscar-bait is generally released in the fall.  But winter has long been the cinematic equivalent of New Jersey:  a dumping ground where toxic waste is disposed of as quietly as possible.  Fortunately, your pals at Nerve have compiled a list of some of the more promising diamonds in the rough to (hopefully) tide us die-hard movie geeks over until The Hunger Games and The Three Stooges lure the hoi polloi back into theaters for popcorn season.

Click Here for the Full Post!

by Leonard Pierce

Food-addicted man-hog that I am, I somehow manage to miss key developments in industrial nutrition technology.  I often fail to see the consumption-enhancement forest for the new-flavor-of-Slurpee trees, to put it another way; by way of example, despite its fascinating nature and evocative name, I only just yesterday found out about the “ready-to-use therapeutic food” known as Plumpy Nut.

Click Here for the Full Post!