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The Flipside #10: The 2018 Oscar Nominations

With the Academy Awards upon us, the Flipside examines whether the world's biggest platform for movie recognition might actually get it right this year, and avoid any, let's say, giant televised mishaps.

                                      
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PopMatters is moving to WordPress. We will publish a few essays daily while we develop the new site. We hope the beta will be up sometime late next week.

With the Academy Awards upon us, the Flipside examines whether the world's biggest platform for movie recognition might actually get it right this year, and avoid any, let's say, giant televised mishaps.

Though impossible to draw a singular connective line among the excluded, Joe Vallese can’t help but notice what the Academy apparently did not: the most accomplished, and now officially unrecognized, performances of the year were all fundamentally “of the body”.

Joe Vallese looks at the curious case of Naomi Watts' history with Oscar...

Nostalgia is at the heart of this film, starting with its compelling recreation of a storybook Havana that existed briefly between WWII and Fidel Castro’s revolutionary eruption at the dawn of the Jet Age.

The Swell Season is one of the most intimate fly-on-the-wall peeks at the effects of stardom on two people at two very different points in their lives. It’s arguably the most accomplished music documentary of its kind since D.A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back.

Yet another category of the Oscars that rarely gets the attention it deserves? Best Documentary Feature.

While categories like Best Actress and Best Picture have gotten a lot of attention this year, smaller but equally important categories have been a little lost in the shuffle. Among these: Best Foreign Language Film.

Five reasons The Tree of Life should win best picture at 2011's Academy Awards.

PopMatters has been counting down the days until David Cronenberg's newest film, A Dangerous Method hits theaters. Today it arrives in limited release and in the last piece of this cinematic puzzle, actor Michael Fassbender, talks to Christopher Sweetapple for the grand finalé.

Lauded screenwriter Christopher Hampton speaks with David Lee Dallas III about adapting his own stage play.

A Dangerous Method's Best Actress hopeful Keira Knightley speaks with PopMatters about playing the unsung feminist heroine of psychoanalysis, Sabina Spielrein, for David Cronenberg.

On the second day of our five-part interview series on A Dangerous Method, we talk with director David Cronenberg about Freud and Jung as heroes, the horrors of World War One and the reality of hysteria, among many other interesting things.

Today PopMatters begins a five-part countdown until the November 23 release of David Cronenberg's A Dangerous Method. Today Stuart Henderson recounts his meeting with Oscar-nominated actor Viggo Mortensen.

Everyone is talking about Albert Brooks' transformation from funnyman to hitman in Nicolas Winding Refn's excellent Drive. The legendary comic, author and Best Supporting Actor Oscar hopeful recently spoke with PopMatters about being ahead of the curve and more.

Actor Corey Stoll breezed in to steal Midnight in Paris out from under his co-stars and now, headed into awards season, his memorable characterization of legend Ernest Hemingway in Woody Allen's most successful film to date feels decidedly poised to enter the Supporting Actor race.

In her newest film 50/50, the actress brings everything full circle, combining comedy and high drama with another far less-discussed area of her expertise: the ability to work a good old-fashioned bad wig and turn it into a powerful acting tool.

Fiddler on the Roof represents the Hollywood musical at its most astute. A terrific, light-hearted, but deep thinking dramedy filled with dazzling performances, and ponderous, insightful, even timeless themes.

Treated almost like a crime story, Inside Job unveils a sordid world of the prosperous elite who take an almost unseemly pleasure in living lives of unscrupulous lavishness, with no regard to whom they harm.

Golden Age Hollywood scion, feminist activist, and general all-around bad-ass Jane Fonda is back, and this time she's hitting the campaign trail on behalf of the health of boomers and senior citizens.

For Your Consideration: Best Supporting Actress 2010: Jacki Weaver in Animal Kingdom.

On the eve of the release of Get Low, PopMatters talks with film legends Sissy Spacek and Robert Duvall about food criticism (sort of), film critics (without mentioning any, ahem, names), and of course, cute shoes (and a few other things).

The most-recently Oscar-nominated Gyllenhaal talks about why Jeff Bridges is sexy at 60, the dangers of falling for the wrong person and why Sissy Spacek rules.

Screen World remains the go-to reference book for people in the film industry as well as film critics and fans.

Mazur checks out the year's best female acting and offers up a mostly alternative opinion to the boring Oscar-begging consensus picks including some you might not have heard about, yet.

As The Zombies once sung, "It's the time of the season/Where the love runs high". The studio's awards prospects are at the gate, campaigning hard, while we gallop into another kooky awards season.

With 2009's awards season about to ignite, it is time to analyze the ups and down of the recent rule changes, including what truly benefits from the expansion of Best Picture nominees and how this affects representation of cinematic excellence.

Harris spins an engrossing tale of the collision between artistic ambition and studio politics, all set against the backdrop of the dramatic cultural upheaval of America in the '60s.