The News: Dargis Pans Awards Season

Oscars Anonymous: Back in session for '08! (Photo illustration: D. Fith)

By S.T. VanAirsdale

Some of today's movie news of note form around New York:

--Prolific Awards Daily (nee Oscar Watch) blogger Sasha Stone was back in Variety over the weekend noting that -- wait for it -- Oscar blogging is huge! Not that Manohla Dargis is having any of it: "A film's Oscar chances are largely manufactured by the movie companies and the publicists working for those companies and are then repeated and recycled ad nauseam in the media (online and off), which is all too happy to spin this very same disinformation," she told Stone. "This manufactured information/disinformation -- i.e., 'buzz' -- has no bearing on a film's worth, as the Academy Awards, of course, prove time and again." Sure, it's a bit of obvious-stating, and the rest of the piece does everything it possibly can to contradict her, but you take your bracing refreshments where you can get them.

--RIP: Harlem's own St. Clair Bourne, filmmaker, dead at 64.

--Michael Tully says more about Adam Rifkin's ridiculous surveillance-camera stunt Look in a blog comment than any 20 bad reviews: "It's Crash meets Hard Candy. Roll credits." At least give it credit for its John Landis cameo, not nearly as overwrought a wink as it could have been.

--Really, Popular Mechanics: An entire feature to tell readers a sci-fi/horror blockbuster movie took liberties with its science? Here's hoping America doesn't petition Warner Bros. for its $76.5 million back. (H/T: Cinematical)

Posted at December 17, 2007 9:18 AM