Oscars | featured news

The rumors became a reality Tuesday: Eddie Murphy will host the 84th Academy Awards, which will be telecast Feb. 26 on ABC, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has announced.

Oscar-nominated playwright and screenwriter Sir David Hare wins the Pen/Pinter Prize for his "unflinching, unswerving" gaze upon the world.

The film academy has tapped Brett Ratner and Don Mischer (MIS'-sher) to produce next year's Academy Awards. This will be Ratner's first involvement with the Oscar show and Mischer's second: He produced and directed the 2011 Academy Awards telecast and was nominated for an Emmy for his work on the show.

Surprise! During a meeting of the Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Board of Governors on Tuesday night, it was decided that the Best Picture voting system would be changed to allow for anywhere from five to ten nominees in a given year, depending on the quality of films available. The exact number of Best Picture participants won’t be announced until the nominations are revealed in January.

It's a sea change at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Many critics dissed the hosting combo of James Franco and Anne Hathaway, but considering that the ceremony lacked a huge crowd-pleasing nominee such as last year's "Avatar," Sunday's 83rd Academy Awards telecast on ABC held up pretty well in the ratings.

Celebrity watchers won't need to dress up to feel like they're at the Oscars this year....

And Lucy vows not to yank the football away from Charlie Brown at the last second. Here’s one tip for the producers of the Academy Awards: tell presenters not to waste time on the show complaining about how long the show is. If you subtracted all the time people wasted talking about how long the show is during the show, you’d actually be able to end the show by 11:00 PM Eastern.

Oscar prospects brightened for "The King's Speech," as the film's producers - Iain Canning, Emile Sherman and Gareth Unwin - won the top award for makers of a theatrical motion picture from the Producers Guild of America on Saturday night.

The National Board of Review, widely considered a harbinger of the Academy Awards, has chosen "The Social Network" as the best film of the year.