Meet the 7,258 Members of the Academy Who Choose the Oscar Winners (Okay, Not All Of Them)

No matter the year, awards season is always a rewarding frenzy of prognosticating and movie-cramming, as a handful of the year’s best titles make their way from year-end lists and critics circles to the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs before finally qualifying to grace the stage of the biggest ceremony of the year: the Academy Awards. Naturally, the nominations and winners of each year’s Oscars are fraught with expectations and predictions, but for all the obsession with the minutiae of the prestigious awards show,

Oscar-Nominee Richard Linklater on Playing With Time in Boyhood

There are few filmmakers who have the dedication and patience of Richard Linklater. Boyhood proved that. For those of you who might just be emerging from a cinematic hibernation, here is what you missed; for twelve years, the writer/director returned to the same actors and script to chronicle the fictional story of a boy growing up in Texas. Little-known actor Ellar Coltrane was hired over a decade ago, at the age of six,

Oscar-Nominated Composer Jóhann Jóhannsson on The Theory of Everything

When we spoke with composer Jóhann Jóhannson, he had just returned from performing a few pieces from his Oscar-nominated score for The Theory of Everything in a video interview published by USA Today. He was famished (he hadn’t eaten all day) and he was no doubt tired (he’d flown from Los Angeles to New York the day before, and was off to London the following day for the BAFTA awards,

Post Oscars Wrap-Up: Our Social Awards Season App Delivers the Goods

The things that we could agree would happen, like Ellen hosting with her easy going charm (has there ever been a more relaxed, amiable host?) and Gravity mopping up a slew of technical awards. And how did our Social Awards Season App, the DataViz, fare in predicting the winners?  Let’s have a look.

To access the DataViz and see for yourself, click here. For our brief synopsis, see below:

Best picture

Predicted Correctly?

Looking at the Legendary Career of Oscar Nominated Visionary Hayao Miyazaki

This Friday marks the nationwide release of legendary Japanese anime director Hayao Miyazaki’s eleventh feature film, The Wind Rises. With this picture, Miyazaki is nominated for his third Oscar for best-animated feature film. He was previously nominated in this category in 2006 for Howl’s Moving Castle, and he won in 2003 for Spirited Away, the first anime movie to win in that category.

In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part II

Yesterday we took a look at four filmmakers whose work has earned them an Oscar nomination (in Gravity cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki's case, his sixth), sharing with you some of their thoughts on their craft. In one of the most anticipated Oscars in recent memory, it's refreshing to step back and reflect on exactly how these talented individuals created such memorable moments in such a fantastic year for film.

In Their Words: Some of This Year’s Oscar Nominees on Their Craft, Part I

One of the strongest years in recent cinema history will officially come to a close this Sunday at the 86th annual Academy Awards. What just about everyone agrees on is that, with a few exceptions (most people seem fairly convinced Cate Blanchett has Best Actress locked up, for example), it’s anyone’s guess (including our social awards season app, the DataViz—but it's doing just a little bit more than guessing) who might take home Oscar.

The Digital Camera Company That Oscar Nominated Filmmakers Prefer

Last week saw the release of RoboCop, a slick and technologically savvy re-imagining of the 1987 classic directed by Paul Verhoeven. With it’s combination of 3D holographic video screens and large scale multi-tier HD video screens present in every environment, from the corporate computer labs that assemble RoboCop, to the cable news channel studios that cover his exploits, to the sleek design of RoboCop himself, the new movie acts as yet another reflection of ourselves –

Director Jehane Noujaim on her Oscar Nominated Doc The Square

An Oscar nomination can vault a young filmmaker into the big leagues. But for Jehane Noujaim, director of The Square, it means that her film might have the chance to be seen by many of the people who made it. The Square, a powerful, on-the-ground look at Egypt’s revolutionary uprising, was shot by Noujaim and a largely Egyptian crew on the volatile streets in and around Cairo’s Tahrir Square for more than two years.

Can Our Social Awards Season App Predict the Oscars?

The Oscar nominations have been announced, which means our Social Awards Season App, the DataViz, which is a collaboration with global social analytics and monitoring company Brandwatch, will begin collecting all the social data mentions for the Academy Award nominees in the run up to one of the most competitive years in recent Oscar history.

When we unveiled our first iteration of our DataViz app last year,

A Look at how our Oscars Social App Fared Predicting the Oscars (Spoiler Alert: Very Well!)

Tom O'Neil, of GoldDerby.com, got 91% of his predictions correct, according to this round-up by Slate on the most accurate (and inaccurate) Oscar prognosticators. We're not offended we weren't on their list (sniff), but we did want to settle our own accounts and see just how we fared with our social media and critic tracking app, powered by some very big brains (namely our quant, Edward Cook) over at Brandwatch.

Can We Predict The Oscars? Social Media Reveals Who The Public’s Rooting For

They are known as quants (short for ‘quantitative analyst), and their undisputed supreme leader, at least in the public’s perception, is Nate Silver. You’ve heard of Silver, the man who went from relative obscurity before the 2008 presidential election to a household name thanks to his pinpoint accuracy predicting the last two presidential elections.

Quants are not just employed to help us figure out who the next Commander in Chief is going to be,

An Evening With George Stevens Jr., Celebrating his Honorary Oscar and his Remarkable Career

George Stevens Jr. has lived and breathed films since he was a child. His father, the legendary director George Stevens, instilled in Steven fils a love of story. It was a teenage George Jr. who paced around his father’s bed one night, excitedly telling him the truncated story of a book he had read that his father should turn into a movie. That movie turned out to be the legendary western 

Talking With Malik Bendjelloul, Director of Oscar Nominated Documentary Searching for Sugar Man

A surprise hit at the 2012 Sundance Film Festival, where it won both the Audience Award and a Special Jury Prize for Best International Documentary, first time filmmaker Malik Bendjelloul’s Searching for Sugar Man opened last summer to strong critical reviews and robust commercial success. The story of singer-songwriter Rodriguez, from his late 1960s emergence from the streets of Detroit; his startling and strange success in South Africa during the waning days of Apartheid in the 70s and 80s;