The 26th Los Angeles Gay and Lesbian Film Festival, which is also known as Outfest 2008, is wrapping up today, but the cinematic winners of this year's fest have already been announced during an awards ceremony last night in Hollywood. In the list of winners, there are some familiar names, plus some other films that might be worth keeping an eye out for.

via cinematical.com

I'm typically a fan of all the movie-related stamps produced by the U.S. Postal Service, and I'm very glad to read the news that important early African American movie stars are being recognized and celebrated with a new series of 42-cent stamps (see them all here).

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Were you aware that when the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences presented the Oscars every year, the results were being determined without considering the opinion of Jet Li? It's hard to believe, I know. They haven't been consulting Diablo Cody (pictured), either! Well, that egregious oversight is about to be remedied, as Li, Cody, and 103 others have been invited to join the AMPAS and become voting members.

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Last week, I did some reporting from the CineVegas Film Festival, where I served as a juror. The winners were announced this weekend, and they have me wishing I had been able to see more stuff. She Unfolds By Day, Rolf Belgum's film about "a frustrated middle-aged son trying to manage his misanthropic 80-year-old mother," took home the Grand Jury Prize. A Special Jury Award went to Dark Streets, which our own Eric D.

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Last Friday, Judd Apatow was presented with the Visionary Award at The Hollywood Reporter's Key Art Awards. So, before Apatow took the stage to accept his award, they played a pretty fun reel celebrating the man's work. Sure, it's kinda your typical clip montage, but when you're talking about the films of Judd Apatow, said montage will not only be filthy and funny ... but also come with a nice helping of heart.

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A lot of people think that the American Film Institute should shut up already with the lists, and they have a point: an ordered list of the "100 greatest" anything is bound to be so subjective as not to be worth much, especially when it's not clear why the people compiling the list should be seen as authorities.

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When Heath Ledger passed away earlier this year, he left the planet as one of this generation's great actors; a guy who battled many personal demons off the screen, for sure, but one who gave everything to the role. And while we won't get to see his latest creation on the big screen until July 18th, early footage shows Ledger's version of Batman's arch-nemesis could go down as the darkest, baddest and craziest we've ever seen. My question to you, then, is: Will it be enough to land Ledger another Oscar nod come next year?

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At GreenCine Daily, Dave Hudson brings word that the German Film Awards, also known as the Lolas, just awarded three of the top prizes to Turkish-German filmmaker Fatih Akin's The Edge of Heaven. Akin has been recognized over the last decade for his explorations of the tensions between culture and religion, particularly as they pertain to German Turks. Edge of Heaven is no exception. A gorgeous survey of several interlocking tragedies, its deft structure puts Paul Haggis' Crash to shame.

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Peter Morgan, screenwriter of The Queen, The Last King of Scotland and The Other Boleyn Girl, is fast becoming one of Hollywood's hottest commodities. Variety tells us that his latest, a supernatural thriller called Hereafter, has been sold to Dreamworks for seven figures. Morgan's prestige no doubt helped the sale, though Dreamworks may also have had a Pavlovian response to the fact that the screenplay is pitched as being "in the vein of The Sixth Sense."

Morgan has a unique and very valuable talent for telling stories that are hugely entertaining and "respectable" at the same time. The Other Boleyn Girl was a steamy, melodramatic soap opera that managed to worm its way into the arthouses, presumably because of its historical grounding. His play Frost/Nixon was a political gabfest that became a Broadway sensation and is now being adapted for the screen by Ron Howard. The Queen took a dry subject and transcended demographics on its way to several Oscar nominations. Studios understandably flock to him. I'm very interested to see if he can bring the same sort of aura of dignity to a ghost story. Maybe Hereafter's biggest similarity to The Sixth Sense will be that Morgan, like M. Night Shyamalan, will get the supernatural thriller genre some rare Oscar attention.

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Though I was too jet-lagged to attend myself, the Asian Film Awards proceeded just fine. Song Kang-Ho starring Korean drama Secret Sunshine topped the awards, taking home awards for Best Film, Best Director and Best Actress. Song was edged out in the best actor category by Tony Leung, in what must have been an emotional win for Lust, Caution, whose female star was just banned from all media by the mainland Chinese government because of the film’s sexual content. Hit the link below for the complete list of winners.

via twitchfilm.net

Atonement emerged victorious at London's Empire Awards on Sunday, taking home three prizes including Best British Film.

The drama also netted its stars James McAvoy and Keira Knightley the trophies for Best Actor and Best Actress, respectively, at U.K. movie magazine Empire's annual awards ceremony.

Elsewhere, Best Film went to Matt Damon sequel The Bourne Ultimatum, while David Yates took home Best Director for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Hot Fuzz was named Best Comedy and American Gangster claimed the Best Thriller prize.

via hollywood.com

Last night’s Best Actor categories were as predictable as the Best Actress races were surprising. Yesterday’s ceremony was also as disappointing as it was routine.

For months now, we’d been hearing about several plans being orchestrated for the Academy Awards. If the writers’ strike was still in effect, the producers swore the telecast would continue with packages that celebrated Oscar’s 80-year history. Interestingly enough, even with the scribes back at work, the show was still horribly written and crammed with unnecessary fillers. (Even I could have penned ‘the always Fantastic...Jessica Alba’.)

As it was, the winners appeared to have been given less time last night to accept their awards than ever. (Which may or may not have been a good thing.) But did Javier Bardem really need to rush his lovely speech to his mother? Did the organizers have to reshow the previous awards presentations? Did the AMPAS President really need to waste time explaining how the selection process is done?

via movies.gearlive.com

Here is a listing of the 2008 Academy Award winners, followed by some commentary. Tell me what you think of the winners and losers in the comments below.

Best Picture
No Country for Old Men
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
There Will Be Blood

Best Director
Joel Coen and Ethan Coen for No Country for Old Men
Julian Schnabel for The Diving Bell and the Butterfly
Jason Reitman for Juno
Tony Gilroy for Michael Clayton
Paul Thomas Anderson for There Will Be Blood

Best Actor
Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood
George Clooney in Michael Clayton
Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones in In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises

Best Supporting Actor
Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men
Casey Affleck in The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Hal Holbrook in Into the Wild
Philip Seymour Hoffman in Charlie Wilson’s War
Tom Wilkinson in Michael ClaytonRead the rest of this entry »

via slashfilm.com

No Country gets the final two major awards, Best Director(s) and Best Picture, making it the clear winner of the night (4). The final two wins for the Coens’ feature tops off what was largely an uneventful night: the winners of all the major Oscars were top candidates save for Marion Cotillard’s win in the best Actress category. (Well, and The Golden Compass winning for Best Special Effects, but that’s a geek thing.)

I thought Jon Stewart was a better host than comedian; his insistence that the other singer/performer for the Best Original Song come back to deliver her thank you speech after the commercial break was really classy.

I wonder where the big party will be now that Vanity Fair’s annual shindig was called off.

via movieblog.ugo.com

Last night, as per every year at the Oscars, they take a brief break from all the self-congratulatory back-patting to acknowledge the deaths in the movie industry over the preceding year. As several of our readers (and Scott Weinberg, who was going ballastic on IM about it) noted, Brad Renfro, who died of a drug overdose on January 15 of this year, was mysteriously excluded. The troubled actor, best known for his work in The Client, Apt Pupil, and Bully, had been known to have a drug problem for years, and had a drunk driving and heroin-possession arrest in May 2006, but was supposedly "working hard on his sobriety" at the time of his death.

via cinematical.com