In Memoriam: Mike Nichols (1931-2014)

Mike Nichols
November 6, 1931 - November 19, 2014

Legendary director Mike Nichols died yesterday of cardiac arrest, according to USA Today. He was 83.

The director was a rare EGOT winner, winning an Oscar, a Grammy, four Emmys, and nine Tonys, as well as a Golden Globe.

His Oscar and Golden Globe were for The Graduate (1964), but he also received nominations for both for Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf (1967), Silkwood (1984), and Working Girl (1989), plus another Oscar nomination for The Remains of the Day (1993) and another Golden Globe nomination for Closer (2004).

He received his sole Cosmique Movie Awards nomination for Closer in 2004, losing to Martin Scorsese for The Aviator. Closer won one of its eight nominations. Silkwood also received a Cosmo nod for Cher, and Virginia Woolf received three, but none were for Nichols.

He won both Director and Producer Emmy Awards for Wit (2001) and Angels in America (2004). His Tony awards were for Barefoot in the Park (1964), The Odd Couple (1965), Plaza Suite (1968), The Prisoner of Second Avenue (1972), Annie (1977), The Real Thing (1984, for which he won two), Spamalot (2005), and Death of a Salesman (2012).

He was born Mikhail Igor Peschkowsky in Berlin, Germany in 1931 to parents of Russian Jewish descent. He and his brother were sent to the United States in 1938 to join their father, who had fled the Nazis a few months earlier. Their mother was able to join them in 1940.

At the time of his death, he was married to television anchor Diane Sawyer, his fourth wife, whom he married in 1988.

Prioritizing your Oscar queue

When the Oscar nominations are announced, many people rush out and try to see as many of the Oscar-nominated films that they can before the awards ceremony. (The next Academy Awards will be on February 22, 2015.)

To help you get a head start, we've looked at Gold Derby's Oscar predictions and created a weighted list based on their predictions for the top six categories: Best Picture, Best Director, and the four lead and supporting acting awards. (We figure those are the awards that casual viewers are most interested in.)

Their lists rank their predictions in each category, extending far beyond the number of available nominees for each award. This chart I've made shows:

• Predicted Noms in Top 6 Categories: For each film, the number of times in the top six categories their odds have placed them high enough to be nominated in that category.
• Total Weight: My own mathematical weight for each film that appears on any of Gold Derby's lists, even if they're farther down. The higher they appear on a list, the greater the weight. Some films may have a high weight but still not be predicted for an award if they were on many prediction lists but just below the cutoff for each category.

Rank	Film	Predicted Noms in Top 6 Cats	Total Weight
1	Birdman	5	568
2	Foxcatcher	4	628
3	Boyhood	4	483
4	The Imitation Game	3	385
5	The Theory of Everything	3	374
6	Interstellar	2	846
7	Gone Girl	2	557
8	Unbroken	2	460
9	Wild	2	427
10	Selma	1	705
11	Into the Woods	1	676
12	Mr. Turner	1	400
13	The Judge	1	372
14	American Sniper	1	355
15	Whiplash	1	353
16	Big Eyes	1	335
17	Still Alice	1	256
18	Inherent Vice		732
19	The Grand Budapest Hotel		514
20	Kill the Messenger		512
21	St. Vincent		474
22	A Most Violent Year		419
23	Fury		418
24	The Homesman		380
25	Get On Up		375
26	The Disappearance of Eleanor Rigby		370
27	Men Women and Children		361
28	Dear White People		358
29	Exodus: Gods and Kings		353
30	Love Is Strange		333
31	The Gambler		327
32	The Fault in Our Stars		316
33	Begin Again		295
34	Rosewater		294
35	Miss Julie		283
36	The Good Lie		280
37	Nightcrawler		271
38	Pride		244
39	Calvary		225
40	Annie		198
41	Chef		187
42	Maps to the Stars		174
43	Top Five		172
44	The Hobbit: The Battle of the 5 Armies		160
45	Two Days One Night		90
46	Tracks		89
47	Maleficent		85
48	Locke		84
49	A Most Wanted Man		82
50	The Hundred-Foot Journey		81
51	Trash		76
52	The Lego Movie		74
53	The Giver		69
54	Noah		63
55	This Is Where I Leave You		59

Neil Patrick Harris to host the Oscars

Variety is reporting that Neil Patrick Harris has been selected to host the 87th annual Oscars, which will be televised on February 22, 2015.

All he has to do now is host the Grammys to have the EGOT of awards hosting.

There's no EGOT for hosts, just winners, but it's fun to imagine. An EGOT is someone who has won an Emmy, Grammy, Oscar, and Tony. If Harris is nominated for and wins a Grammy for the cast recording of Hedwig, he'll just need to win an Oscar to have an actual EGOT.

He won't be the first openly-LGBT person to host the Oscars; Cosmo-winner Ellen Degeneres hosted in 2007 and again last year. Like Harris, she has also hosted the Emmys, but has not hosted the Tonys.

The Pixar Theory

This is actually super cool.

What if I told you that all Pixar movies are connected? That all the characters in those movies actually live in the same universe, only in different times? How is that possible, watch this video and you'll find out.

Totally worth checking out.

Trailer: Big Eyes (2014)

Tim Burton has released the trailer for Big Eyes, a biopic starring Amy Adams about Margaret Keane (Adams), who painted wildly popular kitsch paintings in the 1950s and 60s of children with enormous eyes, and her husband Walter (Christoph Waltz), who took credit for her work.

The film is slated to be released on December 25, 2014.

New Line producing film about Oz writer

L. Frank Baum, author of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, will be the subject of a feature film optioned by New Line Cinema, according to the Hollywood Reporter.

The book, which had 13 sequels written by Baum and many others by other writers, inspired numerous stage productions and early films before the 1939 film The Wizard of Oz, starring Judy Garland, which was the first film inducted into the Cosmique Movie Awards' Best Films of All Time Lifetime Achievement Hall of Fame.

Baum's Oz tales have stood the test of time, with the 1939 film now a classic, perennially playing on screens and remaining a solid merchandising performer. Wicked, based on the story, is one of the Broadway's biggest hits. And Disney proved that the Oz world still works on the big screen with the 2013 film Oz the Great and Powerful. Starring James Franco and Mila Kunis, the prequel was a box office smash, earning $493.3 million worldwide and having the 10th highest domestic box office gross of the year.

Movies about authors and the stories behind their most famous works tend to attract high-class talent. Finding Neverland saw Johnny Depp as J.M. Barrie, the creator of Peter Pan, and scored six Oscar nominations. Last year's Saving Mr. Banks was also awards bait with a cast that included Emma Thompson, Tom Hanks, Colin Farrell and Paul Giamatti.

 - The Hollywood Reporter

Oz the Great and Powerful received six nominations at the 2013 Cosmo Awards.

The biopic is based on the script Road to Oz by Josh Golden. New Line is still choosing a director to attach to the project.

Meryl Streep song cut from "Into the Woods"

An original song written for Meryl Streep's character has been cut from the Hollywood adaption of Into the Woods, according to an interview with director Rob Marshall (Broadway World).

Marshall was quick to caution that the cut had nothing to do with Streep's performance. "I don't think people will be remotely ready to hear her sing this material," he told Entertainment Weekly. "The power from her is off the charts."

Into the Woods is a cinematic adaptation of Stephen Sondheim's Broadway musical that originally starred Bernadette Peters, Joanna Gleason, and Chip Zien. The play mashes up a number of classic fairy tales, including Cinderella, Rapunzel, Jack and the Beanstock, and more. The film stars Meryl Streep (the Witch), James Corden (the Baker), Emily Blunt (the Baker's Wife) Cinderella (Anna Kendrick), Little Red Riding Hood (Lilla Crawford), Jack and the Beanstalk (Daniel Huttlestone), Rapunzel (MacKenzie Mauzy), and Johnny Depp (the Wolf).

There's no word whether Streep's cut song may still make it's way into the film's closing credits, which would still make it eligible for a Best Original Song Oscar nomination. Many film adaptations of musicals add a new song, since Academy rules preclude songs previously released from being eligible for Best Original Song. Chicago skirted this by including a song that had been written for but ultimately cut from the Broadway productions. Other movie musicals that have scored Oscar nominations for new songs include "You Must Love Me" in the 1996 film Evita, and "Listen," "Love You I Do," and "Patience" in the 2006 film Dreamgirls and "Suddenly" in the 2012 film Les Miserables.