Visual effects race narrowed to 15

The Academy has announced the fifteen films in contention for the Best Visual Effects Oscar:

"Alice in Wonderland"
"The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader"
"Clash of the Titans"
"Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 1"
"Hereafter"
"Inception"
"Iron Man 2"
"The Last Airbender"
"Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief"
"Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time"
"Scott Pilgrim vs. the World"
"Shutter Island"
"The Sorcerer's Apprentice"
"Tron: Legacy"
"Unstoppable"

Any thoughts on who's a keeper and who's destined to get the axe?

'Dragon' towers over Annie nominations

The annual Annie Awards, conducted through animation guild ASIFA-Hollywood, honors achievements in animated film. Devout followers may remember several months ago when Disney-Pixar announced they would not be submitting their films for competition consideration in the Annies. You can read my column on that story here.

"Toy Story 3" nevertheless earned three nominations including Best Picture without an official submission for consideration, but Dreamworks' "How to Train Your Dragon" towers over the competition with a stunning 15 nods, including ones in Best Feature, Direction, Writing and Voice Acting. While the Annies have dozens of categories spanning a wide variety of animated fields, you can catch the nods for the major film categories after the jump.

D.C. Film Critics Pick 'Social Network'

"The Social Network" starts to make a stronger case as this year's critics' darling, picking up Best Picture, Director and Adapted Screenplay honors. "Inception" gets a big boost here as well, getting its first strong showing in a critics organization with four wins including Original Screenplay, the most overall wins.

Washington, D.C. Area Film Critics Association Winners

Best Film: "The Social Network"
Best Director: David Fincher, "The Social Network"
Best Actor: Colin Firth, "The King's Speech"
Best Actress: Jennifer Lawrence, "Winter's Bone"
Best Supporting Actor: Christian Bale, "The Fighter"
Best Supporting Actress: Melissa Leo, "The Fighter"
Best Adapted Screenplay: "The Social Network"
Best Original Screenplay: "Inception"

More winners after the jump

My mistake; Critics Choice date correction

So apparently I was looking at the wrong week on the awards calendar.

The Broadcast Film Critics Association is mailing the BALLOTS for the Critics Choice Awards tomorrow. The actual nominations are NEXT Monday.

Still, the preview feature below helps encapsulate some of the leering questions from last week's intro to the awards season.

Rising Questions: BFCA preview

The Broadcast Film Critics Association will unfurl their nominations for the Critics Choice Awards tomorrow. While they're not an elite organization by any stretch of the imagination, they're often good at ironing out some of the problems you encounter this early in the race: namely, who's actually here to play and who's just riding buzz?

The Golden Globes release their nominees next Tuesday, and with them comes the first major benchmark for how we weed out certain actors, directors, and films. While the Globes notoriously pander to stars (and star-studded films), they've retained some kind of draw and staying power that's always worthy of consideration. But that's an article for next week.

This week, we're still stuck with only a few awards to look at, namely the National Board of Review. So before the Critics Choice awards throw their own set of picks at us, here are the questions they can help answer:

Read more after the jump:

'Ghost Writer' sweeps European Film Awards

Roman Polanski's "The Ghost Writer" is almost criminally underrated in the United States (at least as far as I've been able to tell) -- last year's Polanski-fest seems to have kept this utterly superb suspense film from really shining. It's one of the best films I've seen in all of 2010, and yesterday the European Film Academy responded in kind by giving it six total awards.

Best Film: "The Ghost Writer"
Best Screenwriter: Robert Harris & Roman Polanski for "The Ghost Writer"
Best Director: Roman Polanski for "The Ghost Writer"
Best Actor: Ewan McGregor for "The Ghost Writer"
Best Actress: Sylvie Testud for "Lourdes"

Full list after the jump.