Here are the year-end nominees from the Online Film Society Awards.  This year 366 Weird Movies’ G. Smalley will vote in the poll for the first time.  The names of the winners will be released on January 2.

“The Tree of Life”, Terrence Malick’s exploration of suburban family life in the 1950’s, received seven nominations for the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society awards. The film was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (Malick), Best Supporting Actor (Brad Pitt), Best Supporting Actress (Jessica Chastain), Best Original Screenplay, Best Editing and Best Cinematography.

Joining “The Tree of Life” in Best Picture are Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist”, Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants”, Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”. Malick, Hazanavicius, Refn and Scorsese were joined in the Best Director race by “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier.

“Drive” was the second most nominated film picking up six mentions including the aforementioned Picture and Director as well as Best Supporting Actor (Albert Brooks), Best Adapted Screenplay, Editing and Cinematography. Brooks was nominated alongside John Hawkes in “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Nick Nolte in “Warrior”, Pitt and Christopher Plummer in “Beginners”. In Best Supporting Actress, the nominees were Chastain, Melissa McCarthy for “Bridesmaids”, Janet McTeer for “Albert Nobbs”, Carey Mulligan for “Shame” and Shailene Woodley for “The Descendants”.

Woodley and Mulligan’s co-stars shared nominations in the Best Actor slate, George Clooney and Michael Fassbender respectively, who were nominated alongside Jean Dujardin in “The Artist”, Gary Oldman in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and Michael Shannon in “Take Shelter”. The Best Actress category features Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia”, Elizabeth Olsen in “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”, Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and Michelle Williams for “My Week with Marilyn”.

Each year, the OFCS also submits nominations for Special Achievement Awards, granted only by a majority vote of the membership. This year, the Online Film Critics have selected two individuals, Jessica Chastain and Martin Scorsese, to receive special citations.

Chastain’s tremendous and quality-filled output this year has brought her instant acclaim and recognition marking one of the most stellar debuts in recent memory.

Scorsese has long been a champion of film preservation and with his love letter to the cinema this year, “Hugo”, he continues to show his admiration for film history and the many pursuits to keeping those records alive.

The full list of nominees for the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards: Continue reading 2011 ONLINE FILM CRITICS SOCIETY AWARD NOMINEES →

You may have noticed that this column, which normally appears on Sundays, has been pushed back to Monday this week so that we could warm your weird heart with the tale of Santa and the Ice Cream Bunny on Christmas Day.  We’d like to tell you that things will be getting back to normal after that minor bit of schedule shuffling, but right about now we’re cursing whoever decided to schedule awards season in the middle of both the holiday season and the cold and flu season.  We’re simultaneously trying to catch up on the major awards nominees we missed in the past 51 weeks of 2011 while fighting off chills and sniffles and struggling to express seasonal cheer to well-wishers.  So this upcoming week we will be slacking off on new reviews and instead focusing on bringing you top 10 lists and year-end surveys of both mainstream and weird movies (although Alfred will chime in with a review of the 2010 small-screen documentary Gauguin: The Full Story).  When 2012 rolls around in a week, we’ll start diving back into that long-neglected reader-suggested review queue.

Since you’ve had to wait an extra day to get your weekly dose of weird search terms, you’re probably hoping for some extra-strange stuff.  And indeed, with overall search volume up moderately what with the kids out of school and on Google, we had a nice little haul of odd queries for our Weirdest Search Term of the Week contest.   We had the typically mangled searches for movies that may or may not exist, such as  “a film about a girl discovers cow movement” (not on the bottom of her shoe, we hope) and “cult film when kennedy killed a erection” (a search for Bubba Ho-Tep, only the viewer mistook the mummy for a woody?)  We also must mention the seeker looking for information on “our brain’s nativity comedy.”  And every week we can rely on horny English-as-a-second-language students for something bizarre: this week’s entry is “hookey sexy porn womence.”  But our official Weirdest Search Term of the Week goes to the absurdly specific “what about a list of one time seen on tv unpopular thriller movies in 1977 or 1979 about twins kids.”  The searcher gets bonus points for starting off his search with “what about” (as if he’s free-associating to his keyboard), and for writing his elaborate request to specifically exclude one-time seen on TV unpopular thriller movies about twin kids from 1978.

Here’s that reader suggested review queue (which we will be getting back to paring down during 2012, we promise!): Kairo [AKA Pulse]; The American Astronaut; Blood Tea and Red Strings; The Films of Kenneth Anger, Vol. II (for Lucifer Rising, among others); Willie Wonka and the Continue reading WHAT’S IN THE PIPELINE →