Meet the Nate Silvers of the Oscar race

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 17:21:00 +0000

Casual awards-season fans may be debating over whether Anne Hathaway is a lock for her performance in "Les Miserables," or whether a dark horse like "Moonrise Kingdom" can sneak into the best picture race. But among Oscar bloggers, the debate’s already about next year.

“I’ve written out a list of films that are almost certainly going to be best picture nominees” in January 2014, said Jeff Wells, blogger for Hollywood Elsewhere, where he prognosticates about everything pertinent to Oscar season. He’s among a coterie of bloggers who track every change in a race that, this year, has been unusually volatile.

Oscar prognostication and reporting online is hardly a new phenomenon — the zeitgeist-tracking website Gold Derby went online in 2000, and media reporter David Carr was in the game for a while at the New York Times’ Carpetbagger blog. Other grandees include Kris Tapley at Hitfix, Dave Karger at ticket-sales site Fandango’s new editorial arm, and Mark Harris at Grantland. (Harris is taking the season off to avoid a conflict of interest, as his husband, Tony Kushner, wrote the screenplay for "Lincoln.")

Goodbye, alt-weeklies

Sat, 06 Oct 2012 17:00:00 +0000

Two weeks ago, the 46-year-old alternative weekly the Boston Phoenix vanished in a puff of newsprint, leaving in its place a new publication called simply The Phoenix, a news-culture-lifestyle magazine as glossy as the new condominium buildings sprouting in once working-class Southie. The city's name -- the sense of place -- simply disappeared. The loss was a long time for coming.

For decades, alt-weeklies have been giving hell to incompetent mayors, evil developers, and lapdog city council members with the kind of righteous rage lots of us eventually outgrow. "It's the best damn journalism in America outside of a monthly national magazine," says Fran Zankowski, president of the Association of Alternative Newsmedia (AAN).

Salon.com > David Carr

Meet the Nate Silvers of the Oscar race

Goodbye, alt-weeklies