Academy Awards | featured news

All four acting winners from last year's Academy Awards are returning to this weekend's Oscars as presenters....

The Academy Awards will be coming to you live from the same place - but with a different name. Oscar organizers have agreed to drop mentions of the Kodak Theatre from Sunday's broadcast. The move follows bankruptcy proceedings for Eastman Kodak Co., which has received court approval to end its expensive naming-rights deal for the venue that's been home to the awards show for a decade.

The Oscar telecast is this Sunday on ABC, so I'll throw out my projections on who will be heading to the Governor's Ball with a statue in hand. Since the majority of the winners have already been announced in other industry awards, it makes my job that much easier.

A study of Twitter sentiment shows a high level of love for Woody Allen's latest movie.

Meryl Streep isn't the only Hollywood star sitting on nearly three decades of Academy Awards losses. Woody Allen has been nominated nine times in the Best Original Screenplay category since his last Oscar win ("Hannah and Her Sisters" at the 1987 ceremony) and eleven times overall. If you take stock in the Writers Guild Awards, however, Allen may break his streak of futility at next Sunday's 84th annual Academy Awards.

An L.A. Times study of Oscar voters finds that their demographics are much less diverse than the moviegoing public. Academy leaders say they want to diversify. When the names of winners are revealed on Oscar night, months of suspense give way to tears, smiles and speeches.

If the Academy Awards hate the best song category so much, why don't they just dump it completely? First, only two songs were nominated, and now Deadline.com is reporting that neither will be performed at the ceremony.

The nominations for the 84th Academy Awards are out and below is the full list. This year, nine films are contending for BEST PICTURE instead of the usual five. Hugo leads all contenders with 11 nominations; The Artist has 10 nominations; Moneyball and War Horse both have 6 noms; The Descendants and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo tie with five noms; The Help and Midnight in Paris have four each.

Jennifer Lawrence will help announce this year's Academy Awards nominees. The 21-year-old actress will join Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences President Tom Sherak at the nominations announcement on Jan. 24. Lawrence earned her first Oscar nomination last year for "Winter's Bone." She stars in the anticipated adaptation of "The Hunger Games," set for release in March.

'The Artist' gains momentum as critics' and indie groups hand out early citations. As the fall season's first wave of film awards and nominations roll in, the Oscar picture continues to be a murky mass of contenders and question marks.