Why Watch? Because we can all somehow relate to being “the new kid” even if we never switched schools. This Oscar-nominated short from writer/director Steph Green has a charm to it that comes from a surprising source. A new student (especially one from Africa dropped into a classroom in Ireland) is rife ground for difficult drama, but Green takes the tale (adapted from a Roddy Doyle short story) in a fresh direction. What Will It Cost? Just 11 minutes of your time. Check out New Boy for yourself:

If you love a girl who loves raising the roof, this movie might just be for you. Especially if you dig musicals set in Paris. It stars Leslie Caron, a heavily drugged cat, and Maurice Chevalier. It was a giant hit, earning all 9 Oscars it was nominated for (a feat that hadn’t been achieved at the time), and it remains the Best Picture winner with the shortest name. It’s perhaps the most exciting film about ennui ever created, and it sets a romantic comedy standard for platonic relationships that have no chance of staying that way.

Elmer Gantry is an all-American boy. He’s interested in money, sex, and religion. This barn-burner of a drama was directed by Richard Brooks and stars Burt Lancaster in a role that won him his only Oscar. It’s the story of a con man who realizes that shouting loudly about the Lord is the best con he can possibly pull (and it might just get him into the habit of Sister Sharon (played by Jean Simmons)). In perhaps the only time in film history until Fight Club, the author of the novel, Sinclair Lewis, actually told Brooks to take the criticisms of the book and use them to make the movie better. Maybe that’s why they denounced the author by name in one of Gantry’s signature sermons. Plus, the mother from The Partridge Family plays a woman of ill repute. How can you beat that?

Dear Mr. Franco, Before I say anything else, I just want to say, at the risk of sounding like a brown-nosing blogger writing a hypothetical letter to a movie star who most definitely will not read it, that I actually do appreciate what you’re trying to do. Many people would start a post like this heavy on the snark and in total dismissal of a star’s decision to construct their career as performance art. But I don’t. I think it’s kind of interesting. Kind of. We know you’re talented. And we know you like to explore a variety of avenues of expression. It’s not just that you’re actor, but an actor who can play Aron Ralston and Alan Ginsberg, convincingly, in the same year. It’s not just that you’re a filmmaker, but the filmmaker that made Saturday Night, which is more enjoyable than anything SNL has produced in years. It’s not just that you’re pursuing a PhD, but…well, I’m actually not familiar with your scholarship, but I’m sure you’ll publish something someday. Anyway, this is to say I’m writing from the perspective of a reluctant fan. But after Sunday night, you and everybody that respects you deserves a damn break.

Every year about this time it’s become custom for me to spew a whole lot of vitriol, venom, and curses about the Academy Awards. Some of my most vile diatribes have been brought to the surface by the Oscars – Juno is still a pile of shit. As you’re probably starting to glean, this year is no different. They’re still the same old Oscars and I’m still the same young handsome boy modeling school graduate who’s got shit to say about them.

Editor’s Note: This article will be updated in real time as the winners come in during the Academy Awards broadcast. Please join us for our Live-Blog tonight (because we ask nicely), and while you wait for the winners, check out our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. Tonight’s the night! You find out if you will take top prize in your office pool, and, you know, you’ll get to see which fantastic films are most celebrated with little naked statues of gold. If you love the Oscars, hate them, or pretend to hate them while sitting riveted to the broadcast, one thing is clear: tonight is a night to celebrate the best in filmmaking. We love movies. So do you. Tonight we can all celebrate our favorites of 2010 even if they don’t win and even if they weren’t nominated. As for those in the running, they are all beautiful works of art, they’re all winners tonight, they went out on the field and gave 110%…and…yeah, yeah, yeah. Let’s get to the winning, right? And the Oscar goes to…

Every day, come rain or shine or internet tubes breaking, Film School Rejects showcases a trailer from the past. It’s the Old Ass Movie today, and this movie was also up for an Academy Award back in 1945 (but it lost, just like its director always did). Speaking of that director, his famous cameo is featured heavily as the hook of this trailer. Forget about Ingrid Bergman. Forget about Gregory Peck. Just remember that portly fellow coming out of the elevator smoking a cigarette. Think you know what it is? Check the trailer out for yourself:

While we may not see a non-fiction film nominated for Best Picture anytime soon, the Best Documentary Feature has for many risen from a minor category rarely given its due attention to a battleground for some of the most important movies in a given year. 2010 was no exception, and in this year and in this category there are an impressive collection of docs addressing a variety of subjects in unique ways that truly exemplify the personalities of the filmmakers behind them. If no other year has convinced you the documentary is a great art form, this one should. But perhaps more significantly, this year exhibits such a variety of films that it throws the simplistic notion that a documentary should occupy one single mode of address out the window: here we have ambitious and stylish massive doc about a very complex subject, an intimate biographical advocacy piece, some on-the-ground investigative journalism, some trash art, and that film everyone’s been talking about all year that puts the entire notion of artistic truth into question. Only one of these films will take home the gold at the end of the night, but I’ll be damned if they’re not all impressive pieces of non-fiction filmmaking. And the nominees (with my prediction in red) are…

Two years ago, we were on a boat in the middle of a lake somewhere near Austin, Texas. Last year, we were in an abandoned 6th century church somewhere deep in the heart of Eastern Europe. This year, we’ll be in our living rooms. Times have been tough all over. Still, that shouldn’t stop you from joining us for our getting-slightly-more-infamous-every-year Live Blog of the Oscars! What else are you going to be doing that night besides yelling every time you “called it” and driving your friends crazy? Now you can do that and enjoy the hilarious antics of the Rejects. Participate in meaningful polls about the armpit hair of presenters, test your wits with our trivial challenges, and scratch your head as Adam Charles accidentally live-blogs the movie Oscar featuring Sly Stallone. Check out our full Oscar coverage up until now and mark your calendars for Sunday:

This article is part of our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. Unlike last year, the field is wide open for which fantastic performance will earn the naked golden statue of power for Best Actress in a Supporting Role. Some fans are sad not to see Mila Kunis, Barbara Hershey or Miranda Richardson among the ranks here, but that shows just how strong these performances were. In no particular order, there’s a bartender with a boxer to build up, a mother with a boxer to build up, a Queen with a King to build up, a young girl with revenge on her mind, and a woman who would probably rip your face off and then talk about how great you are to it. With my winner prediction in red, here are the nominees:

There has been much hullabaloo over speculation as to what will happen if the Banksy directed doc Exit Through the Gift Shop ends up winning the Academy Award for Best Documentary. Banksy is a popular street artist who maintains a lot of his mystique through hiding his identity. He narrated Gift Shop shrouded in a hood and with voice modulation. Whenever pictures are shown of him, he is usually wearing a ridiculous monkey mask. Most likely, if Banksy were ever to be unmasked, we would all be faced with the stunning realization that he is… some guy. That’s why it’s very important that he maintains his secrecy. Mystery equals intrigue; intrigue equals people shelling out boatloads of cash for his work. The Academy has been around show business for quite some time. They understand what Banksy is doing here. And yet, up until this point, they have made it clear that showing up to the Oscars wearing a monkey mask would be completely unacceptable. Academy president Tom Sherak reportedly told Banksy’s representatives, “We suggested to them that it might be a good idea that if he did win, one of them would accept in his place – that it would not be dignified for the Academy to have somebody come up wearing a monkey’s head.”

This article is part of our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. The Best Supporting Actor category is one of the most interesting. As Cole and I discussed last week, there really is no stable definition of what constitutes a “supporting” role, so this category can run the gamut from scene-stealers (Heath Ledger for The Dark Knight) to memorable parts with a limited amount of screen time (Hal Holbrook for Into the Wild) to nominations that seem only to be banking off the presence of a film in other categories (Matt Damon for Invictus). Fortunately this year saw five pretty strong nominees (and three first-time nominees), but this year also exhibits the potential variance of the category. Here we have a crack addict, a sperm donator, a townie gangster, an unqualified speech therapist, and somebody named “Teardrop.” Let’s see how these five incredibly different performances size up against one another. With my winner prediction in red, here are the nominees:

Famed British filmmaker Mike Leigh recently received his fifth screenwriting nomination for Another Year. Another Oscar nomination for a highly celebrated filmmaker should be surprising to no one except, in this special case, for the fact that precisely zero of Leigh’s nominated films actually use screenplays. Leigh’s films are constructed through a painstaking and long-term process of creating characters and scenarios with his cast and creative team. His films aren’t improvised in the sense of, say, a Christopher Guest film, where a basic framework exists and actors are allowed to ad-lib and play with(in) that paradigm. Leigh’s films are instead created from the outset through an involved collaborative process. Leigh’s regular team of actors bring to each individual film their construction of a character from scratch. Details arise eventually through this collaboration, and the final work projected onscreen is the end result of a long selection of various possibilities. The only reason Leigh’s films even qualify for screenwriting awards is because of the written script that Leigh creates after the end product has been made. The physical screenplay, in this case, is nothing more than a transcription written after the fact, or a record of a much larger event (whose details are largely unknown to the audience). While Leigh is the sole nominee for Another Year, the creation of the script (or, in this case, the transcript) is just as indebted to the creative efforts of other individuals involved. Stars Jim Broadbent and Lesley Manville are, in a sense, just [Due to Content Scraping and Theft, we have been forced to try abbreviated feeds. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause and woud very much appreciate you clicking through to view the full article on FilmSchoolRejects.com]

This article is part of our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. If you want to separate the actors who are just good from the ones who are truly great, the best way to do it is to look at the winners of the Best Actor Oscar. Without exception the greats are the ones who win the award, and the ones who don’t are proven to just not be elite level actors. It’s science. Or, probably, none of that is true at all. The fact is: there are a lot of reasons someone might be nominated for an Academy Award and someone else might not be. And there are even more reasons why one of those nominees goes on to win and the others don’t. Quality of performance is not necessarily the end-all be-all. But the Best Actor award is probably one of the Oscars that has best retained its credibility over the decades. There aren’t a lot of stinker performances that have been wrongly praised muddying up the list. To have your name appear alongside greats like Clark Gable, Spencer Tracy, Humphrey Bogart, Marlon Brando, Sidney Poitier, Paul Newman, Robert De Niro, and Sir Nicolas Cage is still seen as being a rare honor. So what does the field look like this year? With my guess highlighted in red, the nominees are…

This article is part of our Oscar Week Series, where you will find breakdowns and predictions for all of the major categories. Some of you might be confused as to what the Best Actress category is exactly. Don’t worry; it’s easy enough to explain. You see, Best Actress is just like the award for Best Actor, except it’s for people with lady parts only. Why there needs to be a gender distinction when it comes to giving out awards for acting performances is beyond me. Is there something inherent in one of the genders that would give them the edge when it comes to acting? Or maybe this is a relic of an older Hollywood where all of the really meaty roles were written for men and actresses didn’t have much more to do than be the object of affection? I think we’re past that point now. I would argue not just that female actors put out work equal to male actors in 2010, but also that they were on the whole given more interesting characters to play. I say that this is the year where we need to band together and call for the end of award discrimination. Who’s with me? Maybe you should look over the nominees first. They are as follows, with my winner prediction in red.

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as CriterionCollector85 and JP2themax in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, they puzzle over how to define a Best Supporting Role. What does that support mean? Or look like? Does it matter how long someone is on screen or how big a catalyst they are? Since the Oscars don’t seem to know…what the hell is a supporting role anyway?

In order to make sure everyone is up to speed with the nominees by the time the Academy Awards are broadcast on February 27th, many of AMC’s theaters are screening marathons of all ten films that are up for best picture over the next two Saturdays. This Saturday, the 19th, they will be screening Toy Story 3, 127 Hours, The Kids Are All Right, True Grit, and The Fighter. Next Saturday, the 26th, they will show Winter’s Bone, Black Swan, Inception, The Social Network, and The King’s Speech. A two day pass to see all 10 films will run you $60 and a one day pass to see either set of five will be $35. In addition to this, fifteen participating theaters will be doing a marathon of all 10 films starting at 10 am on the 26th and spanning to well into the morning on Oscar Sunday. Tickets to the 24-hour marathon will go for $50.

Every week, Landon Palmer and Cole Abaius log on to their favorite chat client of 1996 as THEFANFROMLONDON and DinoDNA007 in order to discuss some topical topic of interest. This week, the two tackle the fact that no documentary has ever been nominated for a Best Picture Oscar. Why all the hate, AMPAS? Sure, it has its own category, but that doesn’t deny it entry into the big game. Is there an internal bias against non-fiction? Should Jackass 3 been facing off against The Social Network? Will we see a documentary nominated for Best Picture in our lifetime?

French Canadian film Incendies has gotten a trailer to promote its release in US theaters. The film is directed by Denis Villeneuve and tells the story of a set of adult twins who are set out on a journey to the Middle East by their mother’s last will and testament to find their long-lost father and sibling. It has already made a splash with critics by touring the festival circuit, gotten itself a nomination for Best Foreign Language Film by the Academy Awards, and is now set to be released in select theaters on April 22nd by Sony Pictures Classics. For all of you Oscar buffs and year-end completists, this one is going to have to be on your must see lists. Check out the trailer below:

This week, on a very special episode of Reject Radio, Awards Season junkie and editor-in-chief of In Contention, Kris Tapley, joins us to shoot the bull on the Oscars. We’ll be roasting that bull on a spit and serving it for our live-blog next month. Could Natalie Portman lose her sure-thing Oscar? Why did Inception never have a chance at Best Picture? Who will win Best Costume Design?!? We ask the tough questions. And then answer them. Plus, we also review The Mechanic in case you’d rather see something blow up besides an actor giving a thank you speech. Listen Here: Download This Episode