Awards

The Hurt Locker was expected to fare well at the Oscars, but even the team behind the Afghanistan-set feature looked like they never dreamed of doing quite as well as this. In the end, they took six Oscars, including the big two - Best Picture and Best Director, for Kathryn Bigelow (as I predicted in my Oscars preview).

If the BAFTAs are any indication of how the Oscars will go then it looks like it will be Kathyrn Bigelow's night.

“After you're nominated, it's like a crapshoot, it's like throwing dice.” Morgan Freeman

True to form, it was documentaries that swept up most of the awards at this year's VIFF. There were plenty of docs to chose from this year with nearly half of the festival’s feature and mid-length films being nonfiction (there were 103 nonfiction and 134 dramas in total).

The 2009 Raindance Film Festival drew to a close with the screening of Steven Soderbergh's film "The Girlfriend Experience" on the evening of Sunday 11 October.

No Country For Old Men is big winner on Oscar night 2008.It was the Coen brothers' night as they scooped the Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay awards at the Oscars last night.

The Academy likes Oltmanns and Rosas, the secretive agents of Oscar, to be safe and dull.Monty Python's sketch about the chartererd accountant who wanted to become a lion tamer (watch on YouTube) may have had fun sending up this "dull, dull, dull" profession.

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences ballot system is still done in the same way as it was in 1936 - by hand.

This is a description of how the Academy decides Oscar-winners.

Iranian animated feature, eco-docs from around the world, and local trans-sexual's autobio are voted most popular at VIFF 2007

It's been a long wait for Martin Scorsese, but with The Departed the New York director finally has a little gold man for his mantlepiece.