Awards

The organization, Jeeps Against Veteran Suicide, will host a Poker Run on Sunday, October 22, to benefit the Sedalia...

Midwest Dragfest is back for its 5th year here Sedalia. The car show will take place June 2-4,...

The Cole Camp Chamber of Commerce will present the ‘Rockin Bikes and BBQ’ Motorcycle Show in downtown Cole...

The 2017 Cornerstone Ceremony will be held at Knob Noster City Hall on Saturday, April 29th. According to...

The ‘Nothing But Nets 3v3 Basketball Challenge’ will take place on Friday, March 24 and Saturday March 25,...

The 12th annual Smith-Cotton JROTC Drill Meet will take place Saturday, Feb. 18 on the S-C campus. 2010...

Kenneth Lonergans’ Manchester By the Sea was a film that debuted with the words “awards season” attached to it. Back in January when the drama premiered at Sundance, many audiences members’ first thought (mine included) was that we’d already found our 2017 Oscar frontrunner. That may not entirely be true anymore, since the fall movie season has introduced some worthy contenders in the forms of La La Land and Moonlight. Yet still, Lonergan’s film is already sweeping up awards.

Awards season, that glorious time of year when works of moving art are made to fight for our amusement and betting-pool glory, lurched into gear last night with the Gotham Independent Awards. A sort of east coast counterpart to Los Angeles’ Independent Spirit Awards, the program recognizes the finest achievements in indie film over the previous year, as selected by the members of the Independent Filmmaker Project. For the past two years, the IFP’s Best Feature designation has effectively predicted the film that will receive the Best Picture Academy Award a couple months later. If that happens to be the case again this year, the Oscar future looks bright — and refreshingly black.

Have you ever seen those movie ads on TV filled with gushing quotes from critics and thought to yourself, “I saw that movie; it was terrible. Where did they find these positive reviews?” If you have, you’re not alone — and you’re going to love ScreenCrush’s newest series, Critics Are Raving, which balances the cinematic scales with trailers full of slightly more accurate (and slightly more negative) lines from reviews. Real critics. Real quotes. Really bad movies. That’s what’s Critics Are Raving is all about.

Now that the seemingly infinite hell of election season has reached its merciful end, it’s time to move on to what is pretty much the election season of movies: awards season! The Golden Globes, Oscars, industry guilds and various critical bodies will soon hand down their rulings on the best films, performances, and technical achievements of 2016, but before that ball gets rolling and flattens all nuanced criticism in its way, the Independent Spirit Awards will have their say. The nominations for the slightly left-of-center awards program were announced yesterday, and the unusually stellar lineup provides a nice reminder that the whole “2016 was a disaster at the movies!” narrative only applies to Hollywood studio pictures.