Is winning an Oscar a curse or a blessing?
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It's awards season in Hollywood, with all red carpets leading to the Oscars. But winning that prestigious award can sometimes lead to nothing more than bad roles and even oblivion.
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Its Oscar time folks! It is that time of the year whereby millions of ÂdirectorialÂ hearts broken to make one heart happy.
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CANNES, France  - How does one get to be an Oscar-nominated actor? Try a little torture to the soul. It evidently worked for Joaquin Phoenix.
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Tales of tragedy and struggle will vie for Oscar attention on Tuesday as an unusual awards season overshadowed by the Hollywood writers strike heads into its final stretch.
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Alexander Payne's heart-piercing new film about a writer on the verge of disappointment is a reason to maintain hope in the film industry.
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Is racial bias still keeping black artists from being recognized when Hollywood hands out its annual Academy Awards?
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By Barbara Feder OstrovYou probably won't hear about this Hollywood thriller at the next Academy Awards. It seems the Oscar that has graced Karl Malden's mantel for decades -- the one he won for &quot;A Streetcar Named Desire&quot; -- is a fraud.
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The Oscar race of 2007 has begun with a pair of grim films capturing attention over more widely-hyped movies, indicating to awards watchers that the race for Hollywood's most prestigious awards is wide open.
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The Golden Globe awards on Sunday pose a tantalizing Hollywood question in a wide-open Oscar race: will the black-tie affair anoint a front-runner as it has often done in the past?
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The fight for the Oscar is often a bloody one, metaphorically speaking. But this year an unusual amount of mayhem is showing up in the movies themselves.
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India's entry for the Oscars tells a touching tale.
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The Golden Globe awards on Sunday  pose a tantalizing Hollywood question in a wide-open Oscar  race: will the black-tie affair anoint a front-runner as it has  often done in the past?
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Ask any Emmy expert: HBO's Angels in America, with a field-leading 21 nominations this year, is the closest thing to a sure-fire, unpickable Emmy lock since CBS' star-studded Lonesome Dove in 1989.There's just one problem. Lonesome Dove didn't win. We count on the Emmys to get at least one category horribly, inexplicably wrong each year - and the voters never fail us.Why are these the most strangely unpredictable of all the major awards? The television academy changes the rules and the playing field every year, adding, dropping, combining and dividing categories. And the two-part voting process lets all academy members vote for the nominees, but only members who promise to watch submitted tapes can vote for the awards. Of course, we'll never know if they watch those tapes. All we can know for certain from the awards and the nominations is that the voters don't watch TV, which must be the other reason they come up with peculiar decisions.How peculiar? Here, for your pre-Emmy entertainment, is a list of the 10 Top Howler Awards in Academy History (listed by the years of the Emmy ceremonies): 1955: 'Men' overboardToday, it's generally accepted that the claustrophobic courtroom drama Twelve Angry Men was one of thegreatest, if not the greatest, achievement of the Golden Age of live, original TV. Apparently, though, the appeal of Men wasn't as clear to Emmy voters in 1955. They gave the Emmy for "Program of the Year" not to Men, butto a Disneyland documentary about the making of the movie 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea called Operation Undersea - humorously known in the industry, says a Disney Web site, as "The Long, Long Trailer." In this case, history says the joke was on the academy.  1958:  Lucy plays herself - and not well enoughTo be fair, it isn't always easy to categorize TV shows or performances, or even to know whether categorization is the right approach. Should all actors be judged together, or should they be split by sex and genre into smaller groups? And how do you deal with people who are performing but not acting, like talk-show hosts and the stars of variety shows?Emmy's first answer was to separate "personalities" from "actors" and "comedians." In 1958, however, the academy came up with an award for "The Best Continuing Performance in a Series by a Woman Who Essentially Plays Herself" - along with its equally clumsily titled male counterpart. Though that may be a little hard to inscribe on an award nameplate, you get what Emmy was aiming at. The problem was, the academy placed Lucille Ball's performance in I Love Lucy in this category. Sorry, but no matter how much one may have loved Lucy, she wasn't Lucy - something you'd think her peers would have noticed. To add insult to injury, she didn't win. The award went to Dinah Shore, who was at least playing something closer to a version of herself than Ball was. 1965: Leonard Bernstein tops Illya KuryakinYour first question, no doubt, is what was Leonard Bernstein doing in the same Emmy boat as David McCallum, the exotically hot agentIllya from The Man From U.N.C.L.E.? The answer lies in one of those periodic academy attempts to cut back on the otherwise ever-increasing number of categories. Unfortunately, in its zeal to make the awards less cumbersome and less competitive, the academy went a shade overboard. It replaced the specific individual categories with four general ones: one for entertainment programs, one for news and sports programs, and two for individual achievements in those two areas. It then made the number of nominations and winners in each category open-ended.As everyone but Emmy voters foresaw, confusion reigned. Thanks to his Young People's Concerts, Bernstein was one of five actors or performers who won for "entertainment achievement," with McCallum one of the 11 who didn't. Pretty much everyone went home unhappy, and the academy went back to the old multiple categories/one winner format the next year. Oh, by the way, Tonight Show king Johnny Carson lost to Broadway legends Lunt &amp; Fontanne. Let's just say it was an unusual year.1969: A year you can't supportYou can usually take one thing for granted with the academy members: They like awards. They like to get them. They like to give them. They like to make up new reasons to give more of them. So when they don't give one, as in 1969, it's news. That year, the awards were determined by blue-ribbon panels - and in a one-time-only experiment, the panels were given the right to withhold awards if they didn't think any nominees merited one. Which is precisely what they did to poor Billy Schulman, Ned Glass and Hal Holbrook, the three nominees for supporting actor in a special. Holbrook would pick up his first Emmy two years later; Glass and Schulman never got another shot. That's just unsupportable. 1973: Z without a LizaSometimes you have to wonder what exactly the Emmy voters think they're voting for.Clearly, the academy thought the big entertainment special of the year was Liza Minnelli's musical tour de force Liza With a Z. The show won for "Outstanding Variety/Music Program"and picked up Emmys for Bob Fosse, Fred Ebb and John Kander. Only one person didn't share in this Liza bonanza: Liza, who wasn't even nominated for the show. Which does lead you to ask who the academy thought was doing those dances and singing those songs. Minnelli was nominated for her supporting performance in A Royal Gala. She lost to Tim Conway. Let's hear him sing Ring Them Bells.1977: The Bionic EmmyWhen people discuss Emmy's more curious decisions, the award that always comes up is Lindsay Wagner's "Outstanding Actress" victory for Bionic Woman.  Sure, Wagner is a fine actress - but she was playing a bionic woman, for heaven's sake. Granted, the mid-'70s were not great years for women in dramas. Still, Wagner's competition included The Waltons' Michael Learnedand Family's Sada Thompson - two excellent actresses in non-bionic roles.Emmy historians usually say Wagner won for playing an "evil twin" - a certified Emmy favorite. I think voters just liked watching her run in slow motion.1983:  The Price is wrongNo one can doubt the musical genius of the legendary Leontyne Price, who was nominated - and won - for her performance in a Live From Lincoln Center special. The trouble is, there's only one musical moment that people remember from 1982, and it wasn't Price singing. It was Michael Jackson electrifying America on Motown 25 and establishing himself as the pop star of the '80s. Nothing that came before in his career prepared us for that moment. Nothing that has come since can erase that achievement. It should have won him an Emmy, no matter the Price.1989 : 'Lonesome' cowboysHere's another Emmy rule: Big often trumps best.To be sure, no one expected the miniseries race between Larry McMurtry's elegy to the old West, Lonesome Dove, and Herman Wouk's World War II saga, War and Remembrance, to be a Western walkover. A continuation of The Winds of War, the massive Remembrance may have been the most ambitious and costly miniseries ever filmed. Indeed, in terms of both size and scope, it was probably the last of its kind. In many ways, Remembrance was a grand achievement, but not in all ways, and that's where it fell behind Lonesome Dove. Where the near-flawless Dove seemed to be more than the sum of its parts, the much larger Remembrance was considerably less: slow, disjointed and unevenly (and sometimes just badly) acted. Which is why the consensus wisdom was that Dove would be the evening's big winner. Only Dove lost the miniseries award to Remembrance and failed to pick up a single acting Emmy, despite having six nominees. Dove's nominees may have been lonesome, but that night, Emmy was the loser. 1994: The Emmy Blues Never forget, the Emmys are not the Oscars.If a movie dominates the Oscar nominations, it almost always does fairly well at the awards. It may not win the top prize, but it will seldom go home anywhere close to empty-handed. That's not true with the Emmys - and it's a result of that two-part voting process. Many people who vote on the nominations don't vote again for the final awards, which means that, many times, the preferences of the majority of the academy members end up getting overturned.This fate often befalls "The Hot New Show of the Season," which tends to appeal more to younger, non-voting academy members. It happened in 1985 to Miami Vice, which led with 15 nominations and got only one major prize. It happened in 1986 to Moonlighting, which had 16 and won for best editing. It happened in 1990 to Twin Peaks, which led with 14 and won for editing and costume design.Still, in many ways, the most unfair snub of all was NYPD Blue, which went into the Emmys in its rookie season with a record-setting 26 nominations. Dennis Franz won his first of many well-deserved Emmys, and the show picked up a handful of other awards. But the big winner was David E. Kelley's Picket Fences.Just goes to show, at the Emmys, sometimes even a sure thing can't get arrested. 1999: Emmy loves KelleyWhen The Practice, a very good show, upset The Sopranos, a great show, the message was clear: As far as the Emmys are concerned, David E. Kelley can do no wrong. And as James Spader may discover Sunday, the golden aura generally extends to the actors in Kelley's shows. That also was the year, by the way, that Kelley became the first producer to sweep the series awards, as Ally McBeal won for best comedy. It's love, I tell you. There's no reasoning with it.
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Can they really call it an awards  show if most of the winners don't turn up?
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India's official entry for this year's Oscars may have failed to make it to the grade but the 80th   Annual Academy Awards will still have a couple of Indian connections.
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HollywoodÂs tight-knit community of Oscar voters may find itself facing a difficult dilemma in the coming weeks: Will they consider Mel GibsonÂs ÂApocalyptoÂ for an Academy Award?
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This year's Academy Awards has something it hasn't had in ages: A neck-and-neck race for Best Picture.