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The best holds going into the Oscar weekend in the Top 20 at the box office are, as expected, those films nominated for Best Picture. There are two things that traditionally happen at the box office right before the Academy Awards. First, all the nominated films still playing receive a bump the weekend before and of…

The Oscar nominated best pictures still in the theaters are holding well the last weekend before the Academy Awards. Most are at the end or nearing the end of their runs. Those distributors who re-released their films or upped the number of theaters post-nomination did receive nice bumps to add to their overall cumes…

Randee Dawn is an AwardsLine contributor. What makes a scene Oscar-worthy is difficult to define, but everyone knows it when they see it. It's an end as foreboding as they come. Cate Blanchett, mesmerizing as the title character in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine, sits in a disheveled mess on a park bench in San Francisco…

AwardsLine deputy editor Anna Lisa Raya contributed to this report. Everything old is new again for Nebraska cinematographer Phedon Papamichael, whose first film when he was just a kid back in the early 1980s was shot in 35mm black and white. As many established filmmakers have, Papamichael truly began his career…

EXCLUSIVE: Hot on the heels of getting an Oscar nomination for Best Original Screenplay for Nebraska, Bob Nelson has signed with WME. Nelson wrote that script a decade ago and waited this long for Alexander Payne to make it. They’ve joked that they were waiting for Will Forte, Bruce Dern and June Squibb to reach the…

The New Year has yet to make its mark on the Specialty Box Office, though 2013 titles continue to show traction in January. CBS Films jumped Inside Llewyn Davis from 156 runs to 729 in the run-up to tonight’s Golden Globes, where the film is vying for Best Picture (Musical or Comedy) and Best Actor for Oscar Isaac as…

It continues to be a good week for American Hustle, The Wolf Of Wall Street, Her, Captain Phillips, Blue Jasmine, Dallas Buyers Club and Nebraska. All followed up yesterday's Producers Guild nominations with WGA noms this morning, making it 2-for-2 in the early guild contests of this new year. The WGA also gave a…

EXCLUSIVE: With today’s Best Picture Producers Guild nomination, 5 Golden Globe nominations, 6 Critics Choice Movie Award nods and two more from SAG, some Independent Spirit awards love plus a coveted spot on the AFI Top Ten Movies Of The Year list, Paramount’s ‘little-movie-that-could’ Nebraska has been slowly, but…

Anna Lisa Raya is deputy editor of AwardsLine. Much has been written about the decades-long journey Nebraska took to the big screen. For director Alexander Payne—who spent a year of that time just scouting locations in his home state—the gap allowed him to distance himself from his other road-trip movie, Sideways, and…

In the 1970s, Columbia Pictures then-president Peter Guber was given a script for a film starring  Woody Allen. "I called my boss David Begelman and said, 'There has to be a mistake,' " Guber recalls. "There's not a laugh in it!" The film was The Front (1977), and it was a stark departure from Allen's comedy writing…

Anna Lisa Raya is deputy editor of AwardsLine. Woody Grant, the cantankerous, not-entirely-there patriarch chasing a dubious lottery payoff in Nebraska, is a character Bruce Dern embodied heart and soul. Though always considered a first choice for the role, Dern had to wait almost a decade—and amidst rumors that Gene…

UPDATED, 2:35 PM: The LA Film Critics Association held its annual end-of year awards vote today, handing Best Picture to WB pics Gravity and Her in one of multiple ties. The big surprise of the day went down as Best Supporting Actor award resulted in a tie between Oscar contender Jared Leto (Dallas Buyers Club) and Jam…