Heard at Saturday’s pre-Oscar party circuit: Though he's the rare producer twice nominated in the same year for Best Picture honors for The Social Network and True Grit, Scott Rudin turned in his tickets for the Academy Awards. I'm told that Rudin made the decision just before the weekend. Considering how badly Sony…

EXCLUSIVE: I've learned 2-time Oscar winner and Academy favorite Tom Hanks will be the first presenter and name winners in both the Art Direction and Cinematography categories right off the bat. Best Picture frontrunner The King's Speech is up for both, so the world will quickly get an idea whether that Best Picture…

EXCLUSIVE: David Ellison’s Skydance Productions is negotiating a rights deal to turn the 1970s animated science fiction TV series Star Blazers into a large scale live action feature. Ellison will hire Christopher McQuarrie to write the script, with Ellison and Josh C. Kline producing with McQuarrie. The series was…

With The Social Network winning big with Film Editors, and True Grit doing the same across town with the Sound Mixers, Saturday represented the first night in several weekends when the big news was not The King's Speech. Last night added a little surprise and diversity to an awards season that was becoming a bit…

The Cinema Audio Society consisting of Sound Mixers and Associates from the film and television industries handed out its 47th Annual CAS Award Winners Saturday. The Society was founded to create a proper channel of communication between the related sound crafts and between those instrumental to the production and…

Get those ballots in, stragglers. Forget that many professional pundits and even casual observers of this year's Oscar race have already called it. (…The King's Speech wins Best Picture… Best Actor for Colin Firth… Natalie Portman gets Best Actress… The Fighter‘s Christian Bale and Melissa Leo win supporting… The Socia…

The Deadline Team of Nikki Finke, Pete Hammond, and Mike Fleming have spent recent days interviewing the studio moguls to gauge their perspective on this very close Oscar race: PARAMOUNT 20 Nominations: 10 True Grit, 7 The Fighter, 2 How To Train Your Dragon, 1 Iron Man DEADLINE’s Nikki Finke: You had the most Oscar n…

EXCLUSIVE: Producer Scott Rudin announced to staff Friday that he will shutter his LA office at the end of the month. While Rudin’s decision was based on his desire to centralize his operation from his New York base, speculation has become heightened that he will soon end his studio production deal with Disney and…

The Oscar ballots went into the mail today and should be in every one of the 5,755 voting members' hands by tomorrow, or at least by the weekend depending on how long it takes some of them to travel to snowbound or far-flung places. The Academy Of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has set a due date of February 22nd…

What started as a wide open contest all those months ago remains a still impossible to predict one with just four weeks to go as The King's Speech has erased The Social Network's once-thought impenetrable lead. And if a photo finish is needed between these two front runners, could a third movie, a true spoiler, sneak i…

SATURDAY PM/SUNDAY AM: The big news this weekend wasn’t just seeing whether domestic grosses were depressed on the post-blizzard East Coast (they weren’t), but also which movies received Oscar bumps given that the Academy Award nominations were announced this past Tuesday (all of them still in theaters). Some like The…

Has The King's Speech, fresh off that Producers Guild win and now leading with 12 Oscar nominations, just gone to the front of the class? My guess is this one could be a squeaker. Presumed Academy Awards co-frontrunner and critics favorite The Social Network trailed with only 8 nominations but they were the right…