Having only seen the linked videos, my outrage level is medium. On Letterman he describes having been in a cluster of helicopters, 2/4 of which were hit by RPG fire, all of which made an emergency landing. The nefarious lie is his aside of "…including the one I was in" but that's one of those fabrications that, in a…

Lucy is one of those rare films that made me genuinely angry

This is a great piece about a solidly pleasant show. Monk never hit the intensity of House, but its misses were also never as embarrassing: it was a warm, good-hearted show I could watch in dentist chairs for the rest of time. (Also, I know it's minor, but I really enjoyed the Tin Man / Scarecrow / Cowardly Lion…

After a few months neglecting NNF, I listened to the John Hamm ep and fell in love all over again. His easy rapport with Jimmy et. al really highlights what makes the show so great.

Isn't this the movie where Kevin Costner calls someone a "street n*****" and the audience is supposed to be on his side?

Saving Christmas is one of the most fun experiences I've had in a theatre in a long time. Full disclosure: I had just watched the (fairly slogging) Rosewater an hour earlier, with the exception of an elderly couple who were also there to laugh I had the theatre all to myself, and I may have been drinking.

I can see the similarities, but a part of me has to ask if Tom Petty's is actually the first song to use this melody? The (obviously identical) aspect is basically 5 monotonically decreasing notes in one key, and the rest of the flares of course can be hidden when you lay them side by side, but they're still clearly…

As a big James Ponsoldt fan and a mega-cliched DFW fan (weird anti-cred sidebar: if you search for his excellent short story "Good Old Neon" on Google, a PDF I uploaded strictly to share with my friends is now the top search result), I'm so, so glad to hear that The End of the Tour was good. I'm also glad to hear it…

I wouldn't say Cooper is a WTF-level nomination — he's really the only one I see as potentially deserving. Though I do think Redmayne deserves the nod, though that's certainly the _only_ aspect of ToE that does. Otherwise totally agreed on all counts.

I have to say, while I thought Selma was great, I'm not particularly upset at its "snubs". Most of those categories had plenty of more deserving nominees, in my mind — while it may have been nice to get more nominations, I can't think of any categories I'd honestly want it to win. It's only in comparison to the ones…

Congratulations! Also, Whiplash + Birdman + Nightcrawler = a pretty damn amazing lineup. Whiplash blew me away more than anything else, but both of those films came close.

Caught up with a few award-heavy movies I missed before making my end of the year list (semi-plug: http://stanford.edu/~sdmill… ), namely Selma and American Sniper, and watched a very nice rental.

Update: it looks like The Missing Picture was actually nominated for "Best Foreign Film" last year. So this is another case where "year it technically came out" != "year we all saw it", which probably hurt its chances.

I'm pretty sure it technically came out in 2013, so like some other great documentaries (Jiro Dreams of Sushi) it somehow wound up in this purgatory between awards shows.

I think it was nominated for exactly the right things, too: cinematography was excellent. I thought critics gave the actors a little more praise than they deserved, so I'm pretty OK with their omission.

I was very disappointed to not see that on the list. Beautiful, beautiful film. If you liked it and haven't seen them yet, Waltz With Bashir, The Act of Killing, and Persepolis similarly used creative devices to tell difficult, true stories. Something simultaneously heartbreaking / uplifting about that.

You made the right call. Don't you ever think otherwise.

Genuine question: what considerations go into choosing Best Original Screenplay? Boyhood, for instance, would make sense to me if it's about overall project and ambition (though I expect director + picture to take care of that.) But if it's about having a tight, sharp script, I can't say I understand its place among…

Completely agree, except the "just because he's a little older" part. I know it's easier to gravitate to a powerhouse performance than an (excellent) subdued one, but Simmons deserves this one.

The category has all solid films, just a few seem undeserving when compared to the LEGO movie, assuming it qualified. I would love for Kaguya to beat it out, and would even go to bat for Big Hero 6 (though being a robotics researcher in San Francisco, I'm pretty hugely biased). But How To Train Your Dragon 2? In my…