In May, it's the Cannes International Film Festival that rightly maintains the spotlight, but once all the craziness from the French Riviera's all over, June belongs to another sun-drenched, world-famous locale.  That would LA, home to the Los Angeles Film Festival, currently gearing up for its 18th annual iteration.  Today, Film Independent officially announced the LAFF lineup, consisting of just under 200 features, shorts, and music videos from all around the world.

Hey, Woody Allen fans, the trailer for the writer-director's next film, To Rome With Love, is viewable now and it is deliciously Allentastic, so much so that it actually includes the man himself in an increasingly rare onscreen role.  He's but one member of a rock-solid ensemble whose separate tales of romance, eccentricity, and comedy play out on the streets of the historical Italian city.

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 have but a week until the orgiastic display of congratulations, accolades, pomp, and circumstance that is the Academy Awards finally puts an end to the awards season that so consumes us for months, regardless of foreign wars, humanitarian crises, or potentially Orwellian national legislation.  That leaves one week of breathless speculation based on the other awards being trotted out.  The latest professional organization to unveil its winners and contribute to that speculation is the Writers Guild of America.

At Miramax, Harvey Weinstein justifiably gained a reputation as something of an Oscar kingmaker, very effectively earning Academy Awards for often unlikely or unexpected features.  Last year, The Weinstein Company, the professional home of the brothers Weinstein, campaigned well on behlaf of The King's Speech, and it's looking increasingly likely that the distributor can do it again this year with The Artist.  See, French helmer Michel Hazanavicius just won the feature film award at the 2012 Director's Guild of America 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…

The Directors Guild of America has announced the five nominees for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Feature Film at the 64th Annual DGA Awards.  Last week we saw three separate professional organizations formally announcing their awards contenders, with the Art Directors Guild, Producers Guild, and Writers Guild all dropping press releases.  To those folks who assiduously track every blip on the awards season radar, though, the DGA Awards are a bigger deal than any of those.  Why?  Because the winner of this DGA honor has only ever failed to correspond with the Best Director Oscar six times, and the directorial Oscar also tends to go to the Best Picture winner.

Like all New Yorkers, Edward Burns loves his corner of the world. Unlike most New Yorkers, however, Burns gets to share his love of the Empire State with hundreds of thousands of people around the world. His first movie, The Brothers McMullen (1995), which launched his career as actor, writer and director, was shot in Long Island on a minimal budget. Lauded by critics everywhere for his resourceful commitment and lucid take on working-class Irish-American lives, Burns went on to play a number of handsome nice-guys in compelling movies such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), Life or Something Like It (2002) and 27 Dresses (2008).

The filmmaker in Edward Burns, however, is still drawn to explore relationships from the other side of the lens. His latest movie, Newlyweds, will be released everywhere digitally on-demand December 26^th, making it the triple-aesthete’s tenth feature-length film. In all ten of his movies, New York is the extra in the background, wordlessly pulling the characters to each other or away from each other. Sometimes, New York’s multi-faceted landscape simply exists seemingly to enchant the audience without them even knowing it. Newlyweds continues Burns’ charming formula of mixing romance and milieu, except for three major details. This time around, and quite unlike most movies in general, its mode of narrative is the mockumentary, it is being distributed digitally on-demand, and it was shot on a $9,000 budget in eighteen days. Those three details alone are enough to get tongues wagging, and for independent filmmakers, at the very least, it’s enough to start asking some bigger-picture questions.

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.