Los Angelinos may have noticed the Gooodyear Blimp and a bunch of media helicopters circling around the Kodak Theater in Hollywood today.  These aerial vehicles were, oddly, covering an event that that takes place entirely indoors: the 84th Annual Academy Awards.  Hosted for the ninth non-consecutive time by Billy Crystal after Eddie Murphy bowed out months ago, the Oscars went down almost exactly as you'd expect: Harvey Weinstein once again proved his ability to win awards with The Artist, which took home awards for Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Picture, amongst others.

With Oscar ballots due earlier this week, and only a few days to go until the Oscars on Sunday, February 26th, here is how things stand in the race for the gold... 

We're in the home stretch of awards season here, and as we coast ever closer to the Oscar ceremony at the end of this month, it looks like the official issuing of statues of accolades has settled into an almost entirely predictable pattern.  That pattern sees the silent film homage The Artist picking up the major awards, just as did at tonight at the 64th British Academy of Film and Television Arts, where Michel Hazanavicius's film picked up no fewer than seven awards, including Best Film, Director, Leading Actor, Original Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Music, and Costume Design.

In a month, awards season will be no more than a memory.  A memory of ecstatic accolades, tuxedo-sporting actors, and actresses clad in dresses so beautiful they'll melt your face off while inspiring impoverished people the world over to weep diamond tears.  Right now, though, we are very much in the middle of awards season.  The latest news comes from the Screen Actors Guild, which has just handed out its annual awards.

Tonight, the Beverly Hilton was the location for the 69th Annual Golden Globe Awards, with British comedian and The Office co-creator Ricky Gervais hosting for the third consecutive year.  Before last year's ceremony, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, the 300-member body throwing the shindig, was the subject a lawsuit from their former publicist, the latest in a long string of allegations regarding Globes-based corruption.  This year, though, it's all red carpet pomp and what have you, as well as Gervais doing his job by making fun of people.

Though the Globes are largely accepted as irrelevant (what with corruption and all that),  they're nonetheless the most publicly popular awards, and they also get people all hyphy for the Oscars the following month.  And in that spirit, let's check out the winners at this year's Golden Globes, including Christopher Plummer's continued domination of the awards season for his supporting performance in Beginners, Martin Scorsese's win for Hugo, Octavia Spencer getting love for The Help, and Alexander Payne's The Descendants taking the big prize for a dramatic film.

With just days to go before the Oscar nominations are announced on January 24th, it is now time to narrow down the predictions to 5 in each category. Rather than list each name alphabetically, the contenders have been listed in the order of their likelihood of receiving the nomination. In each category, the 5th slot could possibly go to a “dark horse” instead…

If the Academy Awards are the most respected, high profile, and sought-after awards in film, the bright center of the awards universe around which so many actors, directors, and assorted film professionals revolve during this time of the year, then the Golden Globes are...also awards.  Despite the Hollywoord Foreign Press Association's reputation for not exactly being on the up and up with these awards, the Golden Globes are probably the second biggest awards show around.  Today the HFPA announced the nominees for the 69th Annual Golden Globes, which will one again be hosted by Ricky Gervais.

While this summer was populated by the usual hostile aliens, transforming robots, and superpowered mutants, it was bookended by two films starring female ensembles that very few people expected to do big business, yet both went to become big hits.  The first was the unapologetic comedy Bridesmaids, and the second was The Help, a drama based on the bestselling novel by Kathryn Stockett, which spent weeks as the number one movie in America and has earned more than $160 million dollars at the box office. 

Set in Mississippi during the 1960's, the film stars Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as two domestic employees who agree to share their stories with and aspiring writer played by Emma Stone.  This leads to a much larger project that defies the racial and social injustice that remained entrenched in our culture a century after the Civil War. 

Two months after its release, The Help is still in the midst of its theatrical run, but DreamWorks has announced that it will arrive on Blu-ray, DVD, digital download and On Demand during the Christmas shopping season on December 6th.

Labor Day weekend is generally acknowledged as the symbolic close to summer, a three-day weekend during which American collectively lights the fires on its barbecues and gasses up its station wagons for one last romp in the season of fate's perfection.  Historically, Labor Day began as the result of the Pullman Strike, an 1894 workers' strike that resulted in violence and civilian deaths when President Grover Cleveland dispatched federal troops to dismantle the striking workers of the Pullman Palace Car Co.  Obviously, old Grover needed to subsequently make peace with the unions, and voila (more or less): Labor Day was born.  The holiday weekend here in 2011 saw The Help once again dominating the American box office, with The Debt following in second place.  Like Cleveland dealing with the aftermath of the Pullman Strike, both films thematically grapple with the moral compromises and atrocities of the past.  On a less historical note, both also coincidentally feature actress Jessica Chastain.

August is giving way to September, and as kids stock up on school supplies and college freshmen wary eye their new roommates, there's no doubt that the blockbuster movie season has come to a close.  Gone for the moment are those hot days of record-breaking openings and overblown 3D spectacle, and here are the days of less ostentatious movie-going.  Once again this weekend, new releases underperformed, and with much of the East Coast battening down the hatches for Hurricane Irene, the surprise late-summer hit The Help dominated the box office for the second consecutive weekend.