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Amid all the spaceships, blasters, and droids, it's easy to forget that the "Star Wars" saga takes place in the distant past. But the appearances of Harrison Ford, Mark Hamill, and Carrie Fisher in the new "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" serve as a potent reminder of the passage of time.

After all, it's been more than 38 years since we first saw them in the original trilogy. Here's what the stars of the original trilogy have been up to since we first saw them a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.

%Slideshow-348030%One thing that the 35th anniversary of "R aging Bull" (released December 19, 1980) reminds us of is how vividly alive Martin Scorsese's movies are. You can watch them over and over and still enjoy the twists and turns of the ride. And your tour guide, for all his artistic pretensions, all his references to the movies and songs he's catalogued in his encyclopedic brain since childhood, is a showman and entertainer first, bent on seducing and dazzling you before making you think.

From a remarkable career that's lasted nearly half a century so far, it's hard to pick just a handful of must-see movies. Even Scorsese's misfires are more fascinating and watchable than many directors' successes. Still, if you have to separate the essential from the merely great and pretty damn good, you should start with these 11 movies.

%Slideshow-347056%The movies that dominate year-end best lists -- like this one -- tend to come from the indie camp that relishes deep dives into the human experience, rather than studio blockbusters that offer a two-hour escape from it. If the "Jurassic Worlds" and "Furious 7s" don't get much awards-season love, well, as Don Draper said, "that's what the money's for."

Lists like these aren't an expression of elitist snobbery; they're a wager on the future. They're a bet that the 2015 movies that will stick with you the longest won't be the ones that merely take you away from yourself for two hours. Here are 12 of this year's films that will stick with you long after the credits roll.

You'll notice that not a lot of critics, much less awards-nomination lists like those of the Golden Globes or the Screen Actors Guild awards, included "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" among the year's best pictures. That's not necessarily critical snobbery; it's just that nobody had seen the movie until Monday, after most list-making and awards-nominating deadlines had passed.

But then the space epic screened, and critics went nuts, giving the film a 97 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. And even the august American Film Institute, which released its annual top 10 list on Wednesday, included the new "Star Wars" among such already-anointed Oscar frontrunners as "Spotlight" and "Carol."

Could this be the year, then, that a big, populist, action-heavy blockbuster takes home top Oscars? Could this be the rare year that the Academy's taste and the public's are in sync?

After all, the Academy has never had much love for sci-fi flicks or other genre movies. It usually doesn't deem genre fare weighty enough to win awards. The original 1977 "Star Wars" did get nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture; as a movie that had fundamentally changed the industry, it was impossible for even the Academy to ignore. But the top honors that year went to Woody Allen's "Annie Hall," and no "Star Wars" installment since has made much of a dent in the Academy's consciousness. Six years ago, "Avatar" proved a similar technical breakthrough, but while James Cameron's sci-fi epic did get nominated for Best Picture and a slew of other prizes, the top honors ultimately went to the indie "The Hurt Locker" instead.

Still, over the past 20 years, the Academy has recognized a few genre films as Best Picture. Think 1995's "Braveheart" and 2000's "Gladiator," essentially summer action movies dressed in period garb. "Titanic" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" were both mega-hit action spectacles, but they were also hugely ambitious epics with serious themes and grand-scale performances.

The rule changes of the last few years that have expanded the Academy's Best Picture nomination slots from five to as many as 10 have been the Oscars' most drastic effort to keep splitting the difference between the serious-minded epics the Academy traditionally favors and the fan-favorite blockbusters it tends to snub. Indeed, the expansion was in part a response to the Academy's failure to show much love to Christopher Nolan's brainy blockbuster "The Dark Knight."

Inflating the Best Picture category may not have had the intended effect; the Best Picture winners over the past six years have still been more art-house than multiplex. But if the Academy's tastes haven't changed much, the voters still know that, if they want more people to watch their awards telecast, it helps to nominate movies in which more fans have a rooting interest.

"The Force Awakens," with momentum only from the AFI list, may be too late to the party to be that fan favorite that drives Oscarcast ratings. Besides, it'll have to compete for awards-group attention with such Oscar-friendly last-minute releases as "The Hateful Eight," "The Revenant," and "Joy." But there are several other populist candidates this year, including such box office hits as "The Martian," "Inside Out," "Straight Outta Compton," and "Mad Max: Fury Road." Not to mention Steven Spielberg's "Bridge of Spies," a modest-hit spy thriller for grown-ups that's especially likely to see a supporting actor nomination for co-star Mark Rylance.

True, "Inside Out" and "Compton" are long-shots for Best Picture wins, the former because no cartoon has ever won and the latter because its unlikely to be singled out for individual acting prizes. (And yeah, there's also the prospect that older white voters aren't going to relate to a biopic about gangsta rappers.) Still, they both have a strong shot at Best Picture nominations. "Compton" has already been recognized by the SAGs (where it's nominated for Best Ensemble, the equivalent of Best Picture), the National Board of Review, and the AFI.

Despite their sci-fi narratives, "Martian" and "Mad Max" have even better chances at nominations. "Martian" is being seen as a tour-de-force for 78-year-old Ridley Scott, who seems overdue for an Oscar. (Not even "Gladiator" earned him one; the directing prize that year went to "Traffic" helmer Steven Soderbergh.) A Best Actor nomination for Matt Damon would also boost its odds. (Indeed, last week, the Golden Globes nominated it for Actor, Director, and Picture.)

As for "Mad Max," it won the top film honor from the NBR and earned the most nominations of any 2015 movie on Monday (13 of them) from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the TV-based group of reviewers that tries to upstage the Golden Globes every year with its early-January Critics' Choice awards show. ("Martian" got nine, tying with indie darling "Carol.") Director George Miller, another septuagenarian who's never won an Oscar, earned a nomination at the Golden Globes, where "Mad Max" is also up for Best Picture.

Of course there's also the chance that one of the current Best Picture front-runners (say, "Spotlight") could become a sizable hit in wide release, or that such likely Oscar prospects as "Hateful Eight" and "Revenant" could become smash hits once they hit theaters. (Last year at this time, no one dreamed that the yet-unreleased "American Sniper" would earn $323 million by the time it contended for Best Picture at the Oscar ceremony.) Which is to say that a movie doesn't have to be a big special-effects spectacle to be popular, and that the mass audience and the awards tastemakers are likely to meet each other halfway more often than either side will admit.

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The opening of "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" smashed so many box office records that it's hard to gain a perspective on "What It All Means."

Of the many records J.J. Abrams' long-awaited film broke this weekend, here are the most notable:

-- Biggest domestic opening weekend ever, with an $238.0 million domestically and a total of $517 million worldwide. (It broke the $208.8 million three-day opening weekend set this summer by "Jurassic World".)

-- Biggest opening day ever, with Friday earnings of $120.5 million.

-- First movie in history to earn $100 million in a single day; it also became the fastest movie to gross $100 and $200 million.

-- Biggest December opening of all-time, surpassing the $84.6 million earned by "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey" in 2012.

Thanks to "Star Wars," total domestic sales at the multiplex for all movies this weekend came to $300.9 million, breaking yet another record (total sales over a three-day weekend). At this point, the total box office for the year stands at $10.4 billion, just a shade ahead of the total take at this time in 2013, which was the most lucrative year on record. So "Star Wars" could help push 2015 as a whole into the record books over the next two weeks.

As much as "Star Wars" seems to sell itself -- worldwide fanbase, a decade of anticipation -- Disney spent hundreds of millions of dollars to make it happen. (The movie itself cost a reported $200 million, and the company surely spent at least half that on an unavoidable marketing campaign.) After all, Disney has not just "Force Awakens" to launch, but a whole Star Wars universe that is expected to generate stories -- and income -- for uncounted years to come. As Dave Hollis, Disney's executive vice president for theatrical distribution, told Moviefone in an interview on Sunday, his team's job wasn't just ensuring a big opening weekend for "The Force Awakens" but also "setting the stage for the future of the franchise."

Here are four of the things Disney did right, according to Hollis:

1. Fan Service
Given how passionate the Star Wars fanbase is, "Force Awakens" not only had to connect with core audiences, it also had to be more than just an afterthought to the marketing and merchandising. "It starts with a great story," Hollis said, giving credit to J.J. Abrams and the Lucasfilm team for having "delivered a true "Star Wars" experience." They succeeded in "clearing the hurdle of fan expectations," Hollis said.

2. Non-stop Marketing
You may think the marketing was oversaturated and overexposed. (Did we really need to see BB-8's likeness on a bag of oranges?) But according to Disney, there's no such thing. In fact, Hollis said, the marketing for "The Force Awakens" has been going on for three years, ever since Disney bought Lucasfilm in 2012, before there was even a script.

3. Keeping Audiences (Largely) Free of Spoilers
As omnipresent as the marketing has been, many went into the film surprisingly (and thankfully) with next-to-zero knowledge of the plot -- which is unheard of in the current blockbuster climate, where trailers reveal many plot points and set pieces. "Star Wars'" trailers went the other direction; we knew who our characters were (both old and new), but not so much on what they were doing in terms of the story. For Disney (and especially Team Bad Robot), this Mystery Box strategy was intentional.

4. Making the Film a Cultural Event
How much credit Disney's marketers deserve for this one, and how much belongs to the merchandisers and the rest of the media for jumping on the bandwagon, isn't clear. Still, as Hollis noted, "with each beat, it just kept building momentum into a true cultural event." As a result, "when you have a movie like this that permeates the culture, everyone wants to be part of it."

There were two other noteworthy elements in the success of the "Force Awakens" debut. One was how well the movie did among women (not generally considered a sizable percentage of "Star Wars" geeks) and children (that is, kids too young to be nostalgic for the original trilogy or even the prequels). Nonetheless, Disney estimated that this weekend's domestic audience for "Star Wars" was 42 percent female and 17 percent aged 16 and under. Hollis attributed their attendance to the "FOMO" factor and noted that the kid number was encouraging considering that only 18 percent of schoolchildren were out of school on Friday. Over the coming weeks, with more kids out of school, the number of children buying tickets for "Star Wars" should only increase.

The other was the success of the film in 3D, IMAX, and premium-large-format theaters. Disney attributes a full 47 percent of the film's gross to 3D ticket sales and 21 percent to IMAX and other large-format sales. Numbers like those are great, Hollis said, not just for "The Force Awakens," but also "for what it means to the overall business of moviegoing." In other words, anything that gets you off the couch and into the theater is good for the whole industry.

As huge as the debut was, could it have been even bigger?

Over the course of the weekend, Hollis and his colleagues were projecting that the movie's domestic premiere could go as high as $250 million. They were also urging reporters to tell readers that Saturday and Sunday tickets were still available, so you could still see the movie opening weekend.

If you want a truly galactic perspective, however, you might note that not even the astronomical grosses of "Star Wars" across the planet could keep Disney's stock price from sliding 4 percent on Friday, a loss analysts blamed on to Wall Street concerns over Disney's cable businesses here and in Europe. Cable, after all, contributes 44 percent of the conglomerate's operating income.

The billions that "The Force Awakens" will likely gross, not to mention the billions the franchise will gross in the future, are a drop in the bucket. There are still some Forces out there that are bigger and more powerful than "Star Wars."
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Quality doesn't always mean popularity, as the following gallery of 10 currently underrated, little-watched series demonstrates. Granted, it's hard to make an emotional investment and time commitment to a show that might be on the cancellation bubble. So enjoy these while you can. Or watch them in loving memory...

Believe it or not, there was a lot more than just "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" going on at the multiplex this holiday weekend. With four new wide releases competing against each other, one art-house release expanding wide, and "Star Wars" still taking up most of the oxygen in the auditorium, the new movies should all have struggled. Instead, all of them did better than expected.

As a result, this weekend was nearly as huge as last weekend, the frame that saw "Star Wars" buoy the box office and break all those records. And it may even have been big enough to help propel 2015 into the record books.

Sure, "The Force Awakens" probably pulled a lot of people into the multiplex, even if they ended up seeing other movies. The seventh "Star Wars" installment continues to set records, with the biggest Christmas Day take ever ($49 million), the biggest second weekend ever (an estimated $153.5 million), and the fastest pace ever to a $500 million domestic gross (10 days).

But it also helped that Christmas Day fell on a Friday, which is why six major new films opened on December 25, each expecting to take full advantage of a complete holiday weekend.

On paper, no one was expecting much from any of them. Either everyone would just go see "The Force Awakens," or the new movies would simply cannibalize each other.

And yet, "Daddy's Home," the new Will Ferrell comedy, earned an estimated $38.8 million, nearly twice what pundits predicted. David O. Russell's awards-hopeful "Joy," starring Jennifer Lawrence, opened in third place with an estimated $17.5 million, also on the high end of expectations. It helped that both movies played better with audiences than they did with critics (both earned a B+ from viewers at CinemaScore, despite weak-to-mixed reviews). But it also helped that there's nothing else in the marketplace like either Ferrell's live-action family comedy or Lawrence's biographical comedy-drama.

Similarly, there's no other film like Will Smith's serious-minded football drama "Concussion," which opened slightly above expectations with an estimated $11.0 million, good for sixth place. And there's also nothing like "Point Break," the 3D action remake that opened at No. 8 with an estimated $10.2 million. Considering the movie's terrible reviews, its weak marketing (it's from Warner Bros., the studio that, "Creed" aside, has been releasing nothing but duds for months), and its utter superfluousness (did we really need or ask for a remake of the 1991 Keanu Reeves surfing-bank-robbers thriller?), those "Point Break" sales were also much better than expected.

Between "Concussion" and "Point Break" was "The Big Short," another Oscar hopeful that expanded this weekend from eight art-house theaters to 1,585 screens and earned a strong estimated $10.5 million as a result. That's very good for a satirical movie about the 2008 financial crash starring several A-list actors in horrible wigs.

Even the holdovers did well. In fourth place, Tina Fey and Amy Poehler's R-rated comedy "Sisters" earned another estimated $13.9 million, losing less than half a percentage point in sales from last weekend. Fifth-place finisher "Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Road Chip" earned an estimated $12.7 million, down a slight 11 percent from a week ago.

According to Sunday estimates, Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight" missed out on a top 10 debut by less than $70,000. Few predicted big numbers for a three-hour western opening in just 100 theaters, but "Eight" beat the predictions and scored an estimated $4.5 million.

And Leonardo DiCaprio's western, "The Revenant," opened in just four theaters, but it earned an estimated $117,750 at each of them. That's a phenomenal per-screen average, the third best of any movie this year. (Only "Steve Jobs" and "American Sniper" enjoyed higher per-venue averages.)

Like the other new movies this week, these were both offerings that likely succeeded because of their uniqueness. "Eight" may have received some of the weakest reviews of Tarantino's career, but the chance to see the much-hyped spectacle in a 70MM wide-screen roadshow print made the film's debut an event. And "Revenant," in which DiCaprio's frontiersman is notoriously mauled by a bear, has been touted as the film that may finally win the actor his first Oscar.

It's often said that it takes a very special event-movie to lure audiences out of their living rooms and into a movie theater. "The Force Awakens" has certainly been that kind of event, but so, apparently, were many of the other movies playing this weekend.

Thanks largely to the huge numbers posted this weekend and last, 2015 is on track to beat 2013 for the most lucrative year on record; it'll take only $30 million worth of tickets sold in the next four days to grab the crown. It would also take just $107 million over the next four days for 2015 to become the first year to see the North American box office crack $11 billion. For a year that saw brief but alarming slumps in the spring, summer, and fall, that's not too shabby.

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It's fitting that "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" has become a disruptive force in the Oscar race.

After all, the Oscars aren't just about writing the current movie year into the history books. They're often about rewriting past history -- righting old wrongs, settling old scores, and dealing with unresolved old resentments and controversies that have returned with a vengeance. (Remind you of any current blockbuster space operas?)

Think about last year, where the main competition between "Boyhood" and "Birdman" got pushed to the side, in favor of bitter arguments about how long-odds contenders "Selma" and "American Sniper" depicted recent historical events. Considering how many people learn their history in movie theaters, rather than classrooms, it mattered a great deal, especially to people who were directly involved, how accurate those two films were, how they interpreted controversial events, and whether the Academy would validate those interpretations with golden trophies.

This year, thankfully, there are few of those controversies, at least when it comes to potential award-winning movies about real-life people. Sure, some individuals who are portrayed in an unflattering light in "Spotlight" and "Straight Outta Compton" have complained. Pundits have made similar complaints about "Steve Jobs" and "Trumbo," but since hardly anyone saw those movies, no one seems to care. There were loud gripes about "Truth," but that box office flop also fell off the awards radar. And now that "Joy" and "The Big Short" are screening widely, there may be grumbling about the wildly imaginative liberties those movies take with the historical record. But so far, at least, there hasn't been the kind of sustained screaming we heard last year over "Selma" and "Sniper," or over such recent Oscar front-runners as "Argo," "Zero Dark Thirty," and "The Social Network."

Instead, the historical issues this year are strictly Hollywood-centered. Should Leonardo DiCaprio finally get a Best Actor Oscar for "The Revenant"? Most pundits seem to think he should, not just because his rugged, ragged performance as a frontiersman fighting for survival merits a prize, but because it would make up for two decades of Oscar snubs.

Similarly, if Michael Keaton wins a supporting prize for "Spotlight," it'll make up for his never having won, especially for last year's "Birdman," a Best Actor trophy he was highly favored to win. If likely honoree Ridley Scott wins Best Director for "The Martian," it'll be validation for the Oscar-less 78-year-old, who didn't even win the prize for his Best Picture honoree "Gladiator" 15 years ago.

And what about Harrison Ford? The 73-year-old is one of the most beloved stars in the galaxy, but he's never won an Oscar. In fact, he was nominated only once, 30 years ago, for "Witness." But thanks to "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," there's now talk of a supporting actor nomination for him. It'll be an uphill battle for Ford, whose chief competition may be Keaton, "Bridge of Spies" co-star Mark Rylance, and another old-timer reprising an Iconic role he created in the 1970s. That would be Sylvester Stallone, who was nominated 39 years ago for writing "Rocky" and playing Rocky Balboa, and who is almost certain to be nominated this year for playing the character again in "Creed."

The late entry of "The Force Awakens" into the Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor races has caused other upheavals. Most notably, it led to a controversy at the Critics' Choice Awards, two of whose voters quit the organization this week in protest over the group's late addition of "The Force Awakens" to its already-issued list of Best Picture nominees.

When the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the group behind the Critics' Choice Awards, announced its nominees on December 14, its members hadn't even seen the new "Star Wars" yet, as Disney was keeping the film under wraps and spoiler-free until just a few days before its release. Citing the association's own history -- they made a similar exception 15 years ago for "Cast Away" when it screened late and proved a worthy addition to the list of Best Picture nominees -- the BFCA held an emergency vote and agreed to make the new "Star Wars" the 11th nominee on this year's Best Picture list. But they did not add it to any other categories.

BFCA member Eric Melin (who's also the president of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle) immediately quit the group. In his resignation letter, he complained that the "Star Wars" waiver "smells like a desperate ploy to get better TV ratings." (The Critics' Choice Awards airs January 17, a week after the Golden Globes, on A&E and Lifetime.)

Salt Lake City critic Scott Renshaw wrote a similar resignation letter, saying, "It is obvious to me that this decision is based more on ['The Force Awakens"'] marketing value than on making sure that the best films are included. If that were the case, the entire nomination process would have been opened up again to allow 'The Force Awakens' to be considered in all categories. Any suggestion this decision was made primarily for any reason other than to improve ratings for the awards broadcast feels disingenuous at best." (Neither Melin nor Renshaw were BFCA members in 2000 during the "Cast Away" decision.)

Why does this matter? In part, it matters because the Critics' Choice Awards have historically been a highly accurate predictor of the Best Picture nominees ultimately picked by the Academy. Adding "Star Wars" to the list indicates, at the very least, increased odds that Oscar voters will nominate the film as well.

The incident also shows the bind critics are in over the year's last-minute releases -- not just "Star Wars," but also such likely contenders "The Hateful Eight," "The Revenant," and "Joy" -- movies that either screened too late for many awards groups to see them or else didn't even get sent on screener DVDs to awards voters until late December. Sure the awards groups could all wait until after New Year's Eve to issue their lists, but that would mean each group's announcement would be crowded into the first nine days of January (since no one cares what the critics say after the Golden Globes ceremony and the Oscar nominations announcement in the second week of January), and none of them would stand out or get much attention. In recent years, there's been a race among critics' groups to be the first out of the gate, leading to an announcement creep that now sees some groups touting the year's best movies at the end of November. The studios, however, haven't accommodated the awards groups by screening or sending out their year-end movies any sooner; after all, they have their own marketing plans to stick to, regardless of what critics want. So the critics are forced either to bend their own rules to accommodate the studio marketers or leave potentially worthy movies off their lists.

And the question raised by Melin and Renshaw -- Is it pandering to include a blockbuster like "The Force Awakens" that doesn't need awards validation to get noticed? -- is the biggest historical controversy at the heart of this year's awards race. As this column noted last week, the Academy has seldom given crowd-pleasing genre movies that are also critical favorites their due. This year, however, it has several chances to change that by recognizing such hits as "Mad Max: Fury Road," "The Martian," "Creed," "Compton," and "Inside Out."

Not to mention "The Force Awakens." Remember, 38 years ago, the first "Star Wars" was nominated for Best Picture and nine other Oscars, but the top prizes that year went to "Annie Hall." If the new "Star Wars" wins big this year, will that redress a historical wrong? Or will it be a sign that the dark side of the Force is ascendant?

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The Academy's voters are often derided as being old and out of touch. But they're being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

Whether they want to or not, awards voters are being forced to contend with new technology, not just in the film's themselves, but even in their own judgment and voting processes. But they're also finding that the new ways are not all they're cracked up to be, especially in a year full of cinematic throwbacks.

On Wednesday, December 30, the Academy opened its private website to its members for online voting. It had mailed out paper ballots days earlier, but the organization would really like to modernize the process and get its members to vote over the Internet. "Encourage your colleagues to join you by voting online. Paper ballot delivery is not reliable -- every year, many paper ballots are left uncounted," Academy CEO Dawn Hudson wrote in a recent e-mail to voters. Given how wide-open many of the category races are this year, and how few votes it takes to actually earn a nomination (as few as 315 of the 6,261 members need to cite a movie as a favorite for it to secure a Best Picture slot), every vote really does matter. And because of the rush-rush awards calendar, Oscar voters have only 10 days to fill out those ballots, which are due back by January 8. So voters who don't want to risk having their paper ballots arrive late in the mail really do have to go online. Idris Elba in Netflix's BEASTS OF NO NATION

Idris Elba in Netflix's BEASTS OF NO NATION

But not everything about the migration of the awards season to the Internet is running smoothly. Over at the Screen Actors Guild, the private website the voters use to stream some of the nominated films crashed last weekend for two crucial days as the SAG Awards voters were trying to pick winners. Among the film's affected were such little-seen titles as "Beasts of No Nation," "The Big Short," "The Revenant," and "99 Homes," as well as modest box office hits "Bridge of Spies," "Black Mass," and "Spotlight,"

It's long been a common practice for campaigning studios to send DVD screeners to voters, but the makers of "Black Mass," "Revenant," "99 Homes," and "Bridge of Spies" weren't planning to do so because they were relying on the streaming site. To the extent that the SAGs have an influence on the Oscars -- there's some voter overlap between the two groups, and the late-January SAG Awards ceremony is held while Academy members are voting for winners among the nominees -- the streaming blackout could affect the chances of both front-runners (Best Actor favorite Leonardo DiCaprio for "Revenant," Best Supporting Actor leader Mark Rylance for "Bridge of Spies") and those who could really use the attention (Supporting Actor long-shot Michael Shannon in "99 Homes," Best Actor candidate Johnny Depp in "Black Mass," and the entire casts of "Beasts," "Spotlight," and "Short"). Leonard DiCario in THE REVENANT

The paradox in this drive to make awards screenings and voting digital is that many of this year's most noteworthy films are self-conscious throwbacks to earlier movies, earlier eras, and earlier technologies. The "Star Wars" prequels may have ushered in the era of digital shooting and projection, but J.J. Abrams made a point of shooting Best Picture candidate "Star Wars: The Force Awakens" on old-school celluloid film, in part to give the movie the same feel as the original trilogy from nearly 40 years ago. Quentin Tarantino has been talking non-stop for a year about how important it was for him to shoot "The Hateful Eight" on celluloid, too, and made a point of screening the movie last week in old-school 70MM at 100 retrofitted theaters around the country. Another old-fashioned western, "The Revenant," made a point of shooting with only natural light. "Mad Max: Fury Road" isn't just the revival of a 30-years-dormant franchise; it's also shot using low-tech special effects, without CGI.

"Brooklyn" is an old-fashioned romantic drama that obeys narrative conventions at least as old as its 1950s setting. Similarly, 1950s-set "Carol" is shot in a way that recalls Douglas Sirk's Technicolor romantic dramas of that era. "Bridge of Spies," a Cold War spy thriller set in 1960, wears its old-fashioned-ness on its sleeve. Journalism procedural "Spotlight" echoes a 1976 Best Picture nominee about investigative reporters who uncover a vast, real-life scandal, "All the President's Men." And "Creed" depends on nostalgia for 1976's Best Picture winner, "Rocky."

The most forward-looking movie in the awards race, "The Martian," could be seen as a film about a hero who actually uses science and technology to solve his problems and stay alive. Its director, 78-year-old Ridley Scott, has heartily embraced new technology and choose to shoot the film with state-of-the-art 3D cameras. Then again, he's been making movies about stranded astronauts since "Alien" 36 years ago. And he's never won an Oscar, not even for Best Picture winner "Gladiator" 15 years ago, so many of his peers may consider a win for him for "The Martian" as a redressing of past wrongs. No matter how much the Academy wants to look toward the future, it'll be forced to reckon with the past as well.

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Another weekend, another set of box office records broken by "Star Wars: The Force Awakens."

But so what if the latest installment of the Skywalker family soap opera is on the verge of overtaking "Avatar" as the top-grossing movie of all time in North America? Quentin Tarantino's in trouble!

The Oscar-winner's latest, "The Hateful Eight," enjoyed a surprisingly successful limited run last week, earning a robust $4.6 million on just 100 screens -- no mean feat for an ultra-violent western that ran three hours and was playing on rebuilt or de-mothballed 70MM projectors. But the movie's entry into wide release, with a cut that was 20 minutes shorter, didn't fare so well.

Playing on nearly 2,500 screens, and with no competition from other new wide-release movies, "Hateful" was expected to gross about $25 million this weekend. Instead, it scored an estimated $16.2 million, having to settle for third place behind "Star Wars" ($88.3 million) and the Will Ferrell comedy, "Daddy's Home" ($29.0 million).

That marks the director's lowest opening since "Jackie Brown" in 1997, another Christmas Day release. His last two movies, 2009's "Inglourious Basterds" and 2012's "Django Unchained," had wide-release debuts above $30 million and ultimately grossed more than $120 million each in American theaters. "Hateful" is doing about half the business Tarantino and his backers, the Weinsteins, are used to.

In retrospect, it's easy to see what went wrong with "Hateful Eight." Here are some of the reasons it ran out of steam.

1. Lack of Star Power
Tarantino may be a household name, a rarity among directors, but he's still always relied upon star power to sell his films. Here, the focus is on the ensemble, rather than any one star, though Samuel L. Jackson and Walton Goggins have earned most of the media attention among the cast. Jackson's films may have grossed more than any other actor in history (thanks to his roles in "Jurassic Park," the "Star Wars" prequels, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe), but he's not a box office draw as a lead actor.

2. The Genre
Westerns were Hollywood's bread-and-butter once, but that was decades ago. Only 11 westerns ever have grossed more than $60 million at the domestic box office, and while one of them was Tarantino's "Django," there's no indication that fans wanted the genre-hopping filmmaker to climb back into the saddle so soon.

It's also possible that viewers who want to go to a western are saving their money to see "The Revenant," which opens wide this Friday.

3. Less-than-universal Praise From Critics
The film has an aggregate score of just 75 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes and 69 percent at Metacritic. Those are numbers most directors would love to have, but not an auteurist darling like Tarantino, who's accustomed to near-unanimous raves and awards-season recognition. His reputation, going all the way back to his first film, 1992's "Reservoir Dogs," is built upon his embrace by critics. That they are no longer buying what he's selling can't be lost on potential ticketbuyers.

4. The Roadshow
This should have been an excellent promotional stunt for the film, but many reports focused on the exorbitant cost of scavenging, rebuilding, and operating all the 70MM projectors required for the tour, as well as the inevitable glitches during screenings. Even so, the roadshow did generate positive word-of-mouth, both among customers (as measured by a just-okay B grade at CinemaScore) and box office observers, citing the film's excellent $46,000 per-screen average during the roadshow's opening weekend last week.

But it's not clear that such positive buzz means anything, since the print that debuted in multiplexes this weekend isn't really the same film that roadshow viewers saw, but rather a print with diminished screen size, colors, and running time. The roadshow did a great job of selling a product most viewers won't get to enjoy.

5. The Boycott
Did Tarantino's outspoken defense of the Black Lives Matter movement hurt attendance? There certainly were a number of calls, from police organizations and conservative pundits, to punish Tarantino by boycotting the film. Whether people stayed away for that reason is hard to tell, though social media response suggests that a lot of casual moviegoers are still angry at Tarantino.

6. Tarantino's His Own Worst Enemy
It's tempting also to blame the movie's extreme length and violence for putting audiences off, especially during the Christmas season, but those elements didn't hurt Christmastime release "Django." Tarantino viewers, after all, know what to expect. But maybe that in itself is the problem.

For all his hopping between genres and time periods, you could argue that Tarantino's films really haven't changed much over the course of his quarter-century career. His hallmarks have remained the same, and maybe viewers have finally grown tired of his formula.

And maybe that was inevitable. It's hard to sustain a career based on shock and controversy for 25 years. (Look at Spike Lee.) That's because what was once shocking eventually becomes tame. It's hard to remember now how electrifying "Pulp Fiction" once seemed, now that it's on basic cable all the time and is remembered largely as the film where Travolta chattered about cheeseburgers and danced the twist with Thurman.

The "Hateful Eight" filmmaker is no longer the video store clerk upstart who crashed the movie establishment's party; he is the establishment. After decades of success and acclaim, the most shocking thing he can do now is fail. And while his latest isn't a failure, it seems to have fallen short with his fans.
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It seems quaint that there was a 1984 movie called "Revenge of the Nerds." Decades later, it's clear that the nerds have won. They dominate movies and TV with their superhero and sci-fi sagas. They've made Comic-Con the central pop cultural event of the year. They got us all to care about Jedi knights and hobbits and Lannisters. They built the hardware and the software that you're using to read this article.

Of course, TV nerds have come a long way since they first attracted notice 40 years ago on "Happy Days." Back then, a nerd was simply someone who wasn't cool. Now, it's someone whose braininess and obsessiveness (usually about sci-fi or other genre storytelling) give then an intensity that makes them seem socially awkward and uncool. Or used to -- since, as we've seen, nerd is the new cool.

Here, then, are the nerds we've loved on TV over the years, a species whose evolution has made us realize how indispensable they are.

"They don't go safe. They go bold. Sometimes that's disastrous, and sometimes it's absolutely wonderful."

That's Helen Mirren, praising the Hollywood Foreign Press Association for hiring cheeky Ricky Gervais again to host the 73rd Golden Globe Awards this Sunday.

But she could just as easily be talking about the Globes ceremony itself. The few dozen foreign entertainment correspondents who comprise the HFPA often make offbeat, even bizarre choices, and they put on a show where free-flowing champagne sometimes makes stars rowdy.

Then again, their TV prizes are often the first to recognize worthy newcomers, their movie prizes can sometimes be a stepping stone to the Oscars, and their emcee should keep the show from becoming stuffy and predictable. Though there are a few things we can predict you'll see during the Golden Globes on Jan.10:

1. Venom From Ricky Gervais
Hey, remember when Gervais first hosted, a few years back, and Hollywood bigwigs were so shocked by his ego-puncturing treatment of them that the HFPA only invited him back to host twice more? Yep, he's back this year for a fourth go-round, after the intervening Tina Fey/Amy Poehler years apparently proved too tasteful. Of this year's guests and honorees, Gervais has boasted, "I might make some of them cry."

2. Love for Denzel
He's already won two Golden Globes and earned seven nominations over the course of his career, but this time, he's guaranteed a win: The lifetime achievement prize, which the HFPA calls the Cecil B. DeMille award.

Lest we forget, for all his badassery on screen, Washington is also a trained Shakespearean thespian. If the ceremony turns out to be short on dignity and class, Washington's segment should make up for that.

3. Jamie Foxx's Daughter
Miss Golden Globe, the gowned gal who helps hand out the trophies and escort the winners offstage, is one of the few jobs in Hollywood that admits to having nepotism as a prerequisite.

It's always the daughter (well, sometimes, the son) of an established star. This year, it's Corinne Foxx, who'll be adorning the same stage where her father Jamie was nominated for three Globes in the same year back in 2005. Sure, Miss Globe is often a starlet you haven't heard of yet (Foxx is a model and is still in college), but they do sometimes go on to greater fame, as Melanie Griffith, Laura Dern, and Griffith's daughter Dakota Johnson have. So if Corinne Foxx becomes a star, you saw her here first.

4. Mel Gibson
We don't see a whole lot of the original Mad Max in public anymore, much less at the Golden Globes, where Gervais skewered him in a memorable joke a few years ago. But he's apparently forgiven the HFPA, since he's scheduled to appear as a presenter.

5. Big Movie Stars
Several of last year's winners -- including Amy Adams and Michael Keaton -- will return to crown their successors. Other movie stars who'll open envelopes include Kurt Russell, Helen Mirren, and Channing Tatum.

6. Small-Screen Celebs
TV stars aren't chopped liver. There'll be plenty of them presenting as well, including your favorites from "Empire" and "Blindspot's" Jaimie Alexander.

7. Johnny Depp
Cap'n Jack hasn't been announced as a presenter, but the HFPA always seems to find a way to raise the star-power of its event by luring him onto the red carpet. A few years ago, they had to shoehorn his thriller "The Tourist" into the comedy category. This year, despite failing to nominate him for "Black Mass," they've named his wife Amber Heard as a presenter. So Depp has to show up, doesn't he?

8. A Coronation for Brie Larson
For the most part, the movie races this year are wide open and hard to predict. But, arguably, Larson is the one to beat for Best Dramatic Actress for her role as the captive mom in "Room." Meanwhile, Globe favorite Leonardo DiCaprio shouldn't have much trouble walking off with the Dramatic Actor award for "The Revenant." And the Globes' odd decision to declare "The Martian" a comedy ought to result in wins for Matt Damon and director Ridley Scott.

9. New TV Blood
The calendar allows the HFPA to be the first out of the gate in honoring new shows and new stars that won't be eligible for Emmys for another seven or eight months. Globe voters tend to make the most of this advantage, as they did last year by helping put Amazon's "Transparent" on the map. That comedy is up for prizes again this year, but another classy Amazon newbie, "Mozart in the Jungle," could grab them instead. Similarly, watch for Globe love for USA's drama "Mr. Robot" and its star, Rami Malek.

10. Alcohol. Lots of it.
The Globes are famous (Infamous?) for letting the stars drink during the show, in the hope of generating some spontaneous and outrageous moments. Guests will be drinking the Moët Ruby Red, this year's official Globe cocktail, which is made of champagne, raspberries, lemon peel, and a sprig of tarragon. Even one of the desserts, a chocolate mousse atop a flourless cake, has Grand Marnier liqueur in it. There's also beef filets, trout, winter vegetables, and Fiji water on the menu, not just spiked drinks and desserts, but still... open bar, y'all. Watch out.

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It's one week until the Oscar nominations are announced, and pundits often think they know how the Academy members will vote. But then we learn what Hollywood really thinks from the industry insiders who actually make the movies: The members of the guilds.

After all, the unions and trade groups who hand out guild awards are often the same people who'll be voting for the Oscars. We already learned a lot from the Screen Actors Guild, who announced their nominations last month -- and who'll hand out their prizes at the end of January.

But this week, we heard from several other guilds -- including the Producers Guild of America, the Writers Guild of America, and the American Society of Cinematographers -- and our simple narrative about "Spotlight" being the runaway front-runner in an otherwise wide-open race has gone out the window.

Earlier this week, the National Society of Film Critics, a group that prides itself on voting according to its members' own quirky taste and not the conventional wisdom, named "Spotlight" the group's Best Picture. If even the NSFC picked "Spotlight," as so many other groups already have, then surely the consensus is right this time, and the ensemble drama about the investigative reporters who exposed the Catholic Church's pedophilia cover-up is truly the top candidate for a Best Picture Oscar.

But we have to remember, the predictive value of an NSFC award is virtually zero most years, and this year shouldn't be any different. And if we needed any reminders of whose choices matter and whose don't, we got several of them this week from the guilds -- starting with the American Cinema Editors.

The editors of the ACE threw the oddsmakers for a loop by leavIng "Spotlight" off their list of nominees. Their drama category includes such expected titles as "Mad Max: Fury Road," "The Martian," and "The Revenant." The ACE animation nominees are less controversial: Pixar's "Inside Out" and "The Good Dinosaur," along with Charlie Kaufman's stop-motion "Anomalisa." Granted, the ACE picks won't necessarily foretell the Academy nominees for Best Picture or even Best Editing, but no movie has won a Best Picture Oscar in 20 years without first being nominated for an Eddie. Tough break, "Spotlight" fans.

The producers, whose guild prize is usually a very good predictor of who'll get a Best Picture Oscar nomination, did include "Spotlight," as well as Oscar front-runners "The Martian," "The Revenant," and "Mad Max: Fury Road." They also echoed the rising support for such films as "The Big Short," "Bridge of Spies," and "Brooklyn." But they snubbed "Star Wars," as well as supposed front-runners "Carol," "Room," "Joy," and "The Hateful Eight."

The writers liked "Spotlight," "Carol," and "Martian," as well as rising contenders "The Big Short" and "Compton." Of course, the WGA nominations come with a caveat: Only union members are eligible for nominations, which means they ignore most foreign scripts and some by non-member domestic writers. So that leaves out some likely Oscar screenplay contenders, including Quentin Tarantino's "The Hateful Eight," Hungarian drama "Son of Saul" (currently the front-runner for the foreign-language Oscar), "Inside Out" (the probable Best Animated Feature Oscar winner), "Anomalisa," "Brooklyn," "Room," "The Danish Girl," and "Ex Machina." Still, the WGA awards do have some predictive value. They may not get all the Oscar nominees right, but 22 of the 32 winners of the guild's Original and Adapted Screenplay honors over the past 16 years have gone on to win on Oscar night.

What do all these guild awards tell us? First of all, the race is still up for grabs, and "Spotlight" is far (ish) from a sure thing. Second, there's more support for "The Big Short," "Bridge," "Ex Machina," "Sicario," and "Compton" than one might have guessed a month ago. (And maybe less for "Carol," "Brooklyn," "Hateful Eight," and "Room.") Third, crowdpleasers that critics love -- including "Martian," "Mad Max," and "Star Wars" -- all still have a good shot. And fourth, because of the complexities of the Academy's weighted ballot system, the lack of strong support for almost all of these movies could mean as few as five Best Picture nominees this year, instead of the usual eight or nine. Which five have the most enthusiastic support, and which are merely well-liked but not loved, is still too hard to tell.

The suspense of this early, chaotic phase of the race is about to end. On Sunday, the Golden Globes will be handed out, but they won't matter much because voting for Oscar nominations ends two days earlier, on January 8. We also haven't heard yet from the Directors Guild of America; their nominations come out Tuesday, January 12, and will offer a strong indication of Oscar voters' picks for Best Director and Best Picture nominations.

Finally, the Oscar nominations themselves will be announced on Thursday, January 14. At that point, none of the winners journalists have picked will matter anymore, and we'll focus entirely on what and whom the industry insiders choose.
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This was a good weekend for movies.

Yes, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," racked up a few more records, including becoming the first movie to gross more than $800 million in North America, and it took its fourth weekend crown in a row with an estimated $41.6 million. But it got a run for its money from "The Revenant," which expanded wide this weekend and earned a second-place finish with an estimated $38 million.

That's about twice as well as anyone expected the film to do. After all, it's an R-rated art film with a punishing length of nearly three hours, a period setting, and horrific violence. Yet in the dead of winter, people were lining up to see Leonardo DiCaprio fight off bears, eat raw bison liver and use a horse as a sleeping bag.

How did that happen? Here are some of the film's secret weapons.

1. Leonardo DiCaprio
For years, DiCaprio has largely been a consistent draw at the box office -- one of the few A-Listers left who can open a picture at both home and abroad. Among his last six features, only one ("J. Edgar") grossed less than $116 million over the course of its domestic run. Plus, he's been absent from the screen for two years, since "The Wolf of Wall Street," so he gave us time to miss him. Oh, and there's one more thing that makes his performance here special...

2. Lots of Oscar Buzz
Over the past quarter-century, DiCaprio has been nominated for for acting Oscars and one producing Oscar (for "The Wolf of Wall Street") but he has never won. But his "Revenant" performance made him the front-runner for a Best Actor Academy Award this year, even before most people had seen it. How? In part because of stories of the Method nature of that performance, in which he reportedly endured many of the same hardships as his character. To the extent that the average moviegoer is aware of that hype -- well, who wouldn't want to see if the work on screen lives up to it? And who wouldn't want to see Leo finally get his due from the Academy?

3. The Follow-up to "Birdman"
Speaking of Oscar buzz, Alejandro González Iñárritu (pictured left) isn't exactly a household name, but people do know who he is now after his Oscar victories last year for "Birdman." At the very least, viewers know that Iñarritu will give them a visually extravagant spectacle of human beings testing their limits in extreme circumstances.

4. Strong Word-of-mouth
The film's hype kicked into high gear over its two-week limited release, where -- on just four screens -- it averaged an astronomical $100,000 per-screen average.

Plus, critics have given it generally positive reviews (80 percent fresh at Rotten Tomatoes, 77 percent at Metacritic), which matters to the largely older audience targeted by marketing. (Indeed, exit polling found that 73 percent of "Revenant" ticketbuyers were over 25.) Once the film opened wide this weekend, on 3,375 screens, viewers gave it a B+ CinemaScore, indicating decent word-of-mouth. So it's not just jaded film critics starved for sensation who are recommending the movie.

5. Tom Hardy Doing His Thing
Leo's "Revenant" co-star is not the box office draw that DiCaprio is, in part because he likes to balance his big-budget Hollywood films with smaller indies, and in part because he's such a chameleon that he's hard to pigeonhole (there's no typical Tom Hardy character). His presence in a movie is almost always a sign of quality, making his team-up opposite DiCaprio a no-brainer for ticketbuyers and the actor's fans.

6. Quentin Tarantino
Usually, when two superficially similar movies enter the marketplace, the one that's released first has the advantage. But not if viewers aren't all that thrilled with said movie. That's why "The Hateful Eight" is the best advertising that "The Revenant" could have asked for.

After all, reviewers and fans are finding Tarantino's violent western the most problematic of the director's films to date. After a strong opening during its 70MM large-screen roadshow engagement, the movie has struggled in wide release in digital-print screenings at the multiplex. This weekend, it added 464 screens (for a total of 2,938) and still lost 60 percent of last weekend's business, taking in an estimated $6.4 million and finishing in sixth place. Audiences are choosing to spend their snowbound-and-violent-auteurist-western dollars on the alternative.

7. The January Doldrums
January is traditionally the month where studios dump their afterthought releases, so any movie that stands out is going to benefit. Last year, "American Sniper" took advantage of the January slow period and raked in a fortune in wide release. "The Revenant" seems to have learned that movie's lesson: Even a violent, arty, lengthy drama can succeed in January.

Especially if it has a bankable leading man, a director with a reputation for quality, awards hype, and no serious competition on the same playing field.
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"Kill me," pleaded Golden Globes emcee Ricky Gervais deep into Sunday night's three-hours-plus awards show.

Indeed, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's 73rd annual ceremony seemed like it would go on forever. Still, there were moments that were either hilarious, appalling, or poignant enough to enliven the festivities. Here are the best and worst of those moments, which are certain to linger in the memory for eons or until the Oscar nominations are announced, whichever comes first. NBC's "73rd Annual Golden Globe Awards" - Show

NBC's "73rd Annual Golden Globe Awards" - Show

Happy birthday to Faye Dunaway, who was put on this Earth 75 years ago (on January 14, 1941) for a reason: to play grand, old-school divas, aristocrats whose diction is as perfect as their cheekbones, women whose icy exteriors often crack to reveal volcanic passions beneath.

In recent years, she's been relegated to bit parts, but in her prime, she commanded the screen in a way that harkened back to the glamour goddesses of old Hollywood. Here are the five movies you need to see to grasp the full Faye.

'Bonnie and Clyde' (1967) faye dunaway in bonnie and clyde

Dunaway became a star and a fashion icon as beret-wearing bank robber Bonnie Parker. Arthur Penn's true-crime saga is a landmark in American film history, a turning point in Hollywood's depiction of adult content, and a film whose brutal ballet of violence still has the power to shock, but at its heart is the oddly tender romance between Dunaway's Bonnie and Warren Beatty's Clyde Barrow, Depression-era outlaws who play up to their reputation as media sensations. Even then, Dunaway was making art out of layers of self-aware theatrical artifice.

'The Thomas Crown Affair' (1968) faye dunaway in the thomas crown affair

Dunaway played Pierce Brosnan's shrink in a winking cameo in the not-bad 1999 remake, but for a stylish heist thriller/cat-and-mouse romance, you can't beat the original "Crown," where Dunaway matches wits with dashing playboy/thief Steve McQueen. The King of Cool had a lot of screen love interests over the years, but Dunaway was the only one who looked like she could eat him for breakfast and be back on the prowl by lunchtime.

'Chinatown' (1974) faye dunaway in chinatown

Dunaway gives her most romantic and tragic performance as the femme fatale who pulls private eye Jack Nicholson into a morass of unspeakable evil. Actually, she tries to rebuff his chivalry with the icy facade she's built to hide her horrifying secrets, but he can't help himself. Her brittle beauty and inner torment haunt him, as they will you.

'Network' (1976) faye dunaway in network

Dunaway won a Best Actress Oscar as the soulless TV executive who'll stop at nothing to drive up ratings. She could have been a cardboard villain, but she's wilier than that. Like other Dunaway characters, her Diana knows how others perceive her and smartly plays to their preconceptions. Besides, in this bleak, prescient satire of TV sensationalism and corporate shamelessness, she's just one villain among many, a symptom of a corrupt system for which there's plenty of blame to go around.

'Mommie Dearest' (1981) faye dunaway in mommie dearest

Dunaway went full diva in this Joan Crawford biopic, giving a performance so unrestrained that it all but ended her career as an actress whom viewers could take seriously. But it's really not fair to dismiss Dunaway's Crawford or the movie itself as mere camp excess. After all, she's playing Crawford as a woman who lived her life like she was the tragic, misunderstood heroine of a Crawford movie. If she occasionally turns into a gargoyle (as in the infamous wire-hanger sequence), well, so did Crawford. Dunaway's many layers of artifice prove essential here. At any rate, it's a performance that has to be seen to be believed.

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Alan Rickman, who died on January 14 at age 69, was the actor you loved to hate, the quintessential Brit-typecast-in-villain-roles performer.

But he was so much more, capable of displaying unexpected soulfulness, profound sorrow, surprising tenderness, and on rare occasions, ice-melting joy. He could do more with a raised eyebrow than most actors can do with their entire bodies. Most of all, he had that voice -- No wonder Kevin Smith cast him as the voice of God in "Dogma." But if you still need a reminder of how much he contributed to movies over the past three decades, how varied his work was, and how much he'll be missed, go back and watch these seven films again.

With such a wide-open race this year, it was hard to predict which movies would be the leading candidates to grab an armload of Oscar nominations -- or even how many Best Picture nominees there were likely to be.

Still, there were a lot of names and titles that experts expected to be on the list when the Academy announced its nominations on Thursday morning. Now that the list is out, we can all express the proper shock and outrage and delight over which of our favorites made the cut and which got robbed.

Best Actor
This was one of the easiest categories to predict. But one of the bigger surprises among nominees was Bryan Cranston as Hollywood's favorite blacklisted screenwriter, Dalton Trumbo, in "Trumbo." Fans crossing their fingers for Michael B. Jordan ("Creed") or last year's nominee Steve Carell ("The Big Short") were disappointed as well.

Best Supporting Actor
Aside from Sylvester Stallone (a sentimental favorite for "Creed") and Mark Rylance ("Bridge of Spies"), this category was really up for grabs. The entire "Spotlight" ensemble submitted itself in the supporting category, and only Mark Ruffalo and Supporting Actress nominee Rachel McAdams made the cut. (Tough break, Michael Keaton.)

With Tom Hardy riding the wave of "Revenant" love into the category's final slot -- a surprise of sorts -- that meant snubs for such worthy candidates as Paul Dano ("Love & Mercy") and little Jacob Tremblay (the captive boy in "Room"). Oh, and if you expected the Academy to nominate Idris Elba for "Beasts of No Nation," not only because he was so charismatic and terrifying but also to avoid another #OscarsSoWhite hashtag protest this year, no such luck. Sorry, performers of color, you all got snubbed.

Best Supporting Actress
Many wondered if Rooney Mara's bid for Supporting Actress instead of co-lead in "Carol" would persuade the Academy that she belonged in the category. It did. Many also wondered if Jennifer Jason Leigh, in the late-screening "Hateful Eight," could transcend viewers' mixed feelings about the film to earn a supporting nomination. She did. A bit of a surprise was Alicia Vikander (above); while some expected a nomination for her work in "The Danish Girl," it wasn't a sure thing. And apparently Tessa Thompson's subtle, scary-good work in "Creed" was too subtle and nuanced for the Academy to take notice.

Best Original Screenplay
Quentin Tarantino often aces this category, but the Academy snubbed his "Hateful EIght" script. Many also thought fan-favorite Amy Schumer would get a nod for her "Trainwreck" script, since the Academy loves actors who generate their own opportunities -- but she was snubbed as well. Hit indie thriller "Sicario" had a shot here, too, but no such luck.

Instead, the nominations went pretty much to the early favorites, with the surprises being Alex Garland's philosophical sci-fi tale "Ex Machina," and "Straight Outta Compton," which otherwise didn't earn any Academy love. A24 had next to nothing in terms of "For Your Consideration" promotion for "Ex Machina," one of the best films of the year. Going into the nominations, it seemed more likely for the film's A.I. subject matter to come true than the film score nods at the ceremony. Pleasant surprise to see the Academy give it some much-deserved acknowledgement.

Best Adapted Screenplay
The most shocking snubs were "The Revenant' (which was nominated in nearly every other possible category, for a total of 12 nods) and Aaron Sorkin's Globe-winning script for "Steve Jobs" (pictured). Sorkin won a few years ago for another digital-era biopic, "The Social Network," but the Academy has apparently unfriended him.

Best Animated Feature
Often, this category throws at least one curveball and nominates a movie that was barely released over a commercial favorite. This year, there were two such curveballs: Brazilian entry "Boy and the World" and, from beloved Japanese animation house Studio Ghibli, "When Marnie Was There."

"Shaun the Sheep" also made the cut; it didn't do much business here but was a huge hit in the rest of the world. The remaining slots went to front-runners "Inside Out" and "Anomalisa," Charlie Kaufman's critically-beloved stop-motion animated feature. Denied nominations were fellow Pixar pic "The Good Dinosaur" and summer smash "Minions."

Best Documentary
One of the most high-profile films going into awards seasons, HBO's Scientology doc, "Going Clear," was shut out of the category -- leaving many scratching their heads and shaking their fists at Thetans.

Best Original Song
"See You Again" was more than just a fitting send-off tune for Paul Walker's character in "Furious 7." It was a radio hit and integral component to the film's success. Its omission as a nominee is further proof that the Academy is behind the times.

Best Director
Ridley Scott may be the unluckiest director in recent Oscar history. The 78-year-old has never won Best Director, not even when his "Gladiator" won Best Picture in 2001. This year, despite the slew of nominations for "The Martian" (there were seven), he didn't even land a nod himself. He's the only one of this year's five Directors Guild Award nominees who didn't get an Oscar nomination. And despite having scored nominations for his last three Oscar-bait movies -- an impressive run -- David O. Russell got nothing for "Joy." It's sole major nomination went to lead actor Lawrence.

At least when Scott and Russell are hanging out at the Dolby Theatre bar on Oscar night nursing his resentment, he can have company; fellow Best Picture nominee directors Steven Spielberg ("Bridge of Spies") and John Crowley ("Brooklyn") got snubbed as well. So did Todd Haynes for "Carol," despite widespread critical support. As with Best Picture, the surprising inclusion was "Room," whose director Lenny Abrahamson did make the Academy shortlist, despite having been snubbed by the DGA.

Best Picture
As it turned out, there were eight nominees this year, out of a possible 10. For the most part, they echoed the Producers Guild Award nominees, as they usually do. Both groups nominated "The Big Short," "Bridge of Spies," "Brooklyn," "Mad Max: Fury Road," "The Martian," "The Revenant," and "Spotlight." In fact, the only PGA nominees that didn't make the cut were "Sicario," "Ex Machina," and "Straight Outta Compton."

The most surprising inclusion was austere indie drama "Room," which the PGA had snubbed. "Carol" had been a front-runner among critics' groups, but the PGA snubbed it and so did the Academy. And if you were expecting the Academy's newfound populism to be broad enough to include "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," well, these were not the droids you were looking for.
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This year's Oscar race was the most wide-open and unpredictable in years -- until Thursday morning's announcement of the Academy's nominations. Now, most of the top categories have clear favorites.

Of course, the nominations list also tells us a lot more than just who's up for a trophy on Feb. 28. It also reveals much about the decision-making process of the Academy, the conventional wisdom in Hollywood, and even the trends that help determine what you'll be watching at the multiplex over the next year. Let's break down just what the nominations can teach us:

1. "The Revenant" Is Now the Official Front-runner

Remember when "Spotlight" was thought to have the inside edge? No more.

The frontier-survival drama earned an astounding 12 nominations, more than any other film this year. (In fact, it was a surprise that it didn't earn a 13th nod, for Best Adapted Screenplay.) Since the movie with the most nominations often wins Best Picture, "Revenant" is the favorite in the top category. It's also the favorite in many of the other categories it's nominated in, especially Director, Actor, and Cinematography.

2. That Populism Thing Finally Worked

A few years ago, the Academy expanded the Best Picture category beyond five nominees in order to make room for critically-acclaimed blockbusters (read: movies like Christopher Nolan's, ones that will generate a rooting interest that'll make a mass audience want to watch the Oscar telecast).

Since then, the awards have still tended to go to art-house fare, but in the nominations, at least, Academy voters are recognizing that some hit movies can actually be worthy of mention in the same breath as grown-up character dramas. As a result, "Mad Max: Fury Road" earned 10 nominations (second only to "Revenant"), while "The Martian" earned the third most, with seven. Of course, the Academy could have gone truly populist and nominated the year's most beloved movie, "Star Wars: The Force Awakens," for more than just the five citations for its post-production work. Guess the voters were willing to take populism only so far.

3. The Golden Globes Were... Right?

Few experts take the Hollywood Foreign Press Association's annual champagne-fueled bash seriously as an Oscar predictor. After all, they're just 90 journalists from around the world, not the 6,200 Hollywood insiders who make up the Academy. Most of Sunday night's Globe winners and nominees heard their names read again on Thursday morning. They did fail to predict two of the Academy's biggest snubs -- "Martian" director Ridley Scott and "Steve Jobs" screenwriter Aaron Sorkin, both Globe winners, both omitted on Oscar morning -- but then, everybody else thought they'd get nominated, too.

4. Weinsteins Down, A24 Up

It was pretty funny on Sunday night when Globes host Ricky Gervais joked about awards being bought and paid for, and then the camera cut to Harvey Weinstein, the indie mogul and awards-campaigning master who's managed to earn surprising nominations and wins for his films for a quarter-century. Even Weinstein laughed.

But the Weinstein Company co-chair probably wasn't laughing Thursday morning, when he failed to secure widely anticipated Best Picture and Director nominations for "Carol" or Best Picture and Original Screenplay nominations for "The Hateful Eight." Still, he did land nine nominations for those two films, including three acting nods. Meanwhile, upstart indie distributor A24, despite spending very little on "For Your Consideration" ads, earned seven nominations for three films: the Amy Winehouse bio "Amy" (Best Documentary Feature), brainy sci-fi drama "Ex Machina" (Best Original Screenplay and Best Visual Effects), and intense literary adaptation "Room" (Best Picture, Best Director for Lenny Abrahamson, Best Actress for Brie Larson, and Best Adapted Screenplay). Those nominations -- and the likely win for front-runner Larson -- will make A24 a force to be reckoned with, not just at future Oscar ceremonies, but also when it comes to raising money for new films.

5. Best Supporting Actress Is Still Up for Grabs

Jennifer Jason Leigh may get it, not just for her noteworthy role in the "Hateful Eight" ensemble, but for her long career of uncompromising work. Rooney Mara might have a better shot if the Academy had shown more support for "Carol," but at least she's not competing with co-star Cate Blanchett in the lead category. If she were, it could risk costing both stars the prize by splitting the vote.

Rachel McAdams may offer the only chance "Spotlight" has of earning a major prize; same with Globe winner Kate Winslet and "Steve Jobs." Alicia Vikander (above) has the thankless equivalent of last year's Felicity Jones role (as Eddie Redmayne's supportive wife), but this nomination and her striking performance as an android in "Ex Machina" mark her as a star on the rise. So there's a slim chance Oscar could reward her for this role, but right now, this race is still too close to call.

6. #OscarsSoWhite -- Again

The 2014 slate, which saw multiple victories and nominations for "12 Years a Slave" and its cast, is looking more and more like a fluke. Last year's list, despite the presence of "Selma," saw no performers of color nominated. Despite the outcry that caused, neither did this year's list.

The only major nomination for a film concerning people of color was the Original Screenplay nod for the white writers of "Straight Outta Compton," a movie thought to have a modest chance at a Best Picture nomination. And the lack of attention paid to "Creed" director/co-writer Ryan Coogler and actors Michael B. Jordan and Tessa Thompson will forever leave us scratching our heads. You can blame the Academy for its myopia, but the truth is, there were very few movies this year that gave performers (or directors or writers) of color a chance to shine. (Iñárritu is a notable exception behind the camera.) As Viola Davis noted at the Emmys last fall, you can't win for roles that don't exist. Given that it takes about two years for a movie to go from a greenlit idea to a theatrical release, you'd have thought that the landmark Oscars of 2014 would have resulted in a wave of similar movies that would be reaping the benefits now.

But such films are still more the exception than the rule in Hollywood. The industry is only just starting to realize that diversity is good for the box office, so it may be a while before it discovers that it's good for the Oscars as well.
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Michael Bay, emperor of the action blockbuster, king of the fireball, may demand that everything in his life be awesome. So why were the opening weekend grosses of "13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi" anything but awesome?

Here was Bay's biggest stab at seriousness since "Pearl Harbor" 15 years ago: a based-in-fact war drama about recent events, staged with the kind of movie mayhem that no one does better (or at least bigger and louder), with the bonus of being tied to a hot-button issue that has much of red-state America up in arms. Plus, it follows on the heels of other patriotic, pro-military hits released during January, like "Lone Survivor" and "American Sniper."

Yet, it came in fourth with an estimated $16.0 million, ranked behind "Ride Along 2." "13 Hours" came in behind modest projections of $18 to $20 million. It's the lowest opening for the "Transformers" franchise director since his sci-fi flop "The Island" 11 years ago (which debuted with $12.4 million) and a big come-down for a filmmaker accustomed to premieres of $70 million or more.

What went wrong? Here are 8 reasons why "13 Hours" struck out at the box office.

1. Less-Than-Great Marketing
Paramount, Bay, and the film's cast have been promoting "13 Hours" with two opposing messages. To the mainstream media and the mass audience of moviegoers, the message was: Forget the controversy surrounding Benghazi. This film is just an apolitical salute to the heroism of the American military-trained mercenaries who fought and died there. But to audiences of conservative media outlets, the message was: Here's a true story that will once again cast a negative light on the Obama administration and on then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton's State department for their security failures in Benghazi that left four Americans dead.

So, which is it? Paramount seemed to think that kind of ambiguity worked for last year's smash "American Sniper" and apparently tried to emulate it. The studio even held the premiere in the stadium where the Dallas Cowboys play -- which was also the site of "Sniper" subject Chris Kyle's funeral. But "Sniper" had a lot going for it that "13 Hours" doesn't, as you'll see below. One asset was that the controversy actually made people more interested in seeing it, rather than confusing them, as the "13 Hours" campaign seems to have done.

2. Michael Bay
Another thing "Sniper" had in its favor was Clint Eastwood, a director known for his thoughtful and nuanced filmmaking. There's nothing thoughtful or nuanced about Bay or his directing. Some moviegoers love his bombast; some think he's Uwe Boll with more money to spend on explosions. But no one thinks of him as a master of subtlety or documentary-style realism. Even the film's producer, according to an interview with Rolling Stone, thought Bay lacked the tone necessary to deliver what the subject matter deserved. The lesson here is: If you want serious war drama success, get someone else. If you want racist alien robots or exploding everything, get Bay.

3. Weak Reviews
Critics have never liked Bay's style, but since he presented the real-life siege at Benghazi with the same sonic and visual flourishes he uses in films about marauding giant robots from space, "13 Hours" wasn't going to change critics' minds about him. (See Rotten Tomatoes' 59 percent rating.)

The moviegoers who ignored the reviews seem to have really enjoyed the film, giving the film an A grade at CinemaScore and providing strong word-of-mouth recommendations. But to reach viewers who weren't Bay fans or already inclined to see it, "13 Hours" needed more positive reviews than it earned.

4. Lack of Star Power
The star of a Michael Bay film is usually Michael Bay (or Optimus Prime), but he's had a lot of help over the years from an impressive list of A-Listers. But "13 Hours" stars... John Krasinski. Nothing against the "Office" alumnus, who buffed up admirably to star in the movie, but he's not the first guy (or 51st) you'd think of to play the lead in a combat film, and he's never played the male lead in a movie that opened higher than $14 million or grossed more than $43 million over its theatrical run in North America.

5. "Star Wars"
Even a month into the run of "The Force Awakens," there's really no shame in failing to beat the highest-grossing movie in American history. "Star Wars" continues to smash records at the box office and remains, well, a force of nature.

6. Tough Competition
But it wasn't just "Star Wars." "Ride Along 2" earned $10,721 per screen and "The Revenant" earned $8,289 per screen, and both were playing in at least 800 more theaters than "13 Hours" (which earned $6,697 per screen). In fact, "Revenant" added IMAX screens to its theater count this weekend, raking in the enhanced-format surcharges. It also benefited from Oscar noms this week, attracting crowds curious to see what all the buzz was about. Having huge box office draw DiCaprio headlining doesn't hurt, either.

7. Bay's Bloated Running Time
Bay hasn't made a movie under two hours in decades. At 144 minutes, "13 Hours" may have lost sales by screening fewer times per day than a shorter movie would. Then again, a running time of more than two hours hasn't hurt "Star Wars" or "Revenant." Which only shows that ticket buyers won't be put off by a movie's length if they're already inclined to see it.

8. Benghazi Fatigue
Bottom line: Maybe audiences just weren't very interested in revisiting the subject matter. Maybe they were back when Paramount greenlit the movie, but, in recent months, we've seen Benghazi hashed over by eight Congressional investigations, and we've seen Hillary Clinton withstand an 11-hour grilling over the event.

At this stage, when liberals consider Benghazi a settled issue and conservatives consider it yet another Obama scandal for which no one will ever be held accountable, many Americans may no longer be interested. Certainly no one is likely to change their minds, or learn anything that doesn't confirm their pre-existing opinions, from watching a Michael Bay movie.

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