Will Emmanuelle Riva, the oldest nominee in Academy Awards history, pull off the unlikely upset in the Best Actress category and take the trophy away from Silver Linings Playbook’s Jennifer Lawrence? Can Daniel Day-Lewis cap his streak of memorable 2012 awards season acceptance speeches with one more rousing Lincoln moment? And will Seth MacFarlane zing and dance ABC to solid overnight ratings?

On Monday, February 25 at 8:30 a.m. PT / 11:30 a.m. ET, we’ll know the answers to these questions and much more. Join Gold Derby maestro Tom O’Neil, KCRW producer Darby Maloney (The Business), TVNewser senior editor Alex Weprin, GalleyCat editor Jason Boog and FishbowlLA co-editor Richard Horgan for a special post-Oscars Google+ hangout on the Mediabistro home page, FishbowlLA and at Google+. (You can also click into that link to request a reminder notification of the event.)

Read more

What happens when a Hollywood guild carelessly uploads embargoed information about its annual awards derby ahead of the big December 12 reveal? In the case of the Screen Actors Guild and the 2012 SAG Awards nominations, the result was a Twitter-fueled party poop.

A forums poster on Sasha Stone’s website awardsdaily.com, where users regularly try to figure out ways to “hack” advance awards info, discovered that a title-actor search yesterday at sagawards.org instantly confirmed whether the entity was part of this year’s nominations group. Faster than you can say Django without the “D,” full, accurate lists of the nominees were being passed around the Internet. The only saving grace for SAG is that the small, voracious group of film awards handicappers treated the information with necessary caution because it was all just a little too easy and too good to be true.

Read more

Here’s a vivid reminder of just how well Tom O’Neil and his group of goldderby.com editors know the Emmy Awards beat.

Thanks to a recent Skype discussion between O’Neil, Chris Beachum, Matt Noble and Daniel Montgomery about the Best Supporting Comedy Actor chances of New Girl’s Max Greenfield (pictured), the performer’s Hollywood agents realized the wrong episode had been submitted on the co-star’s behalf. Instead of “Control,” which Greenfield’s reps had selected, the DVD reproduction house somehow pressed copies of the episode “Bad in Bed.” Tipped by Gold Derby, the TV  Academy worked with the actor’s team to remedy the mistake and get new discs out to voters with special instructions in time for the September 17 deadline.

“It’s definitely one of Gold Derby’s top ten scoops,” O’Neil tells FishbowlLA via telephone. “But nothing will likely surpass our story about Katherine Heigl lashing out at her writers after having withdrawn from Emmy consideration for Grey’s Anatomy. She was ticked off at her writers, and then there was that whole backlash against her after the story broke.”

Read more

On Friday, after six years spent under the LATimes.com umbrella, awards season expert Tom O’Neil (pictured) bid farewell to TheEnvelope.com. It’s time, he enthused, to take his groundbreaking website Goldderby.com back onto the wide open expanse of the Web and run it independently.

FishbowlLA chatted with O’Neil via email to get a better sense of the operation. His executive editor, Paul Sheehan, is a former entertainment lawyer who returned to the Gold Derby fold in 2010 after freelancing for major newspapers and magazines. Together, they watch over a hand-picked team of senior editors.

“I recruited my editors from the smartest posters at the Gold Derby message boards over the past 11 years,” O’Neil explains. “By following the discussions there, I could see who really knew their stuff and who didn’t. I believe it’s much easier to take award experts and turn then into journalists than it is to take cocky, know-it-all journalists and turn them into award experts.”

“I don’t believe that 99.9% of Hollywood writers really know anything about awards,” he adds. “This year no one at the Hollywood Reporter, TheWrap, Deadline, the New York Times, TV Guide or Entertainment Weekly bothered to scrutinze what episodes were submitted by nominees to Emmy judges, but those episodes decide who wins and loses. However, my editors at GoldDerby can not only tell you what episodes the nominees entered this year, they can tell you what was submitted ten and 20 years ago and why those contenders won or lost.”

Read more

Yesterday we listed all the people who are no longer at the Calendar Section of the LA Times. We noted it makes the section look pretty dysfunctional. We don’t hear of en masse exits from say the Sports Section. But it’s been pretty consistent at the Calendar section.

The newspaper has sent us a statement saying we forgot to mention they’ve hired people too. Hear that obit writers? You should also talk about how people are being born. Otherwise it’s only half the story.

From Nancy Sullivan:

LA Times Calendar section: The Mass Influx

NEW HIRES (in the same frame):
Joy Press, Randall Roberts, Melissa Maerz, Gerrick Kennedy, Yvonne Villarreal, Nardine Saad, Nate Jackson, Rebecca Keegan, Nicole Sperling, Ben Fritz, Joe Flint, Steve Zeitchik, Julie Makinen, Deb Vankin, Jori Finkel, Amy Kaufman, David Ng

Read more

Okay, we’re going to admit that when the Golden Globes was canceled last year due to the strike – we didn’t notice. We’re that big of fans of awards shows. Last night there were the people watching the GGs and those watching 24. We were watching a rerun on Discovery Health about comedian Frank Payne‘s exploration of his morbid obesity. Because that how big a fan we are of 24.

Anyway, Tina Fey – a pioneer for female comedians – the Lucile Ball of nerds – the bane of Sarah Palin won for best actress in a TV comedy series and in her acceptance speech she called out commenters on Tom O’Neil‘s LA Times, The Envelope.

Read more

Oscar buzz is ripe with seven top Oscar seers presenting updated Oscars predix:

Pete Hammond (Notes on a Season, The Envelope), Peter Howell (Toronto Star), Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly), Lou Lumenick (New York Post), Tom O’Neil (Gold Derby, TheEnvelope.com), Sasha Stone (AwardsDaily.com), Jeff Wells (Hollywood-Elsewhere.com).

Four pundits put “Benjamin Button” out front for best picture (Hammond, Howell, Karger, Stone), two say “Slumdog” (O’Neil, Wells), one bets on “Milk” (Lumenick).

See more below:

Read more

We love the word “shockeroo.” (We also love zowie and zoinks, but that’s beside the point.) So, when Tom O’Neil told us the Top 10 contenders for best comedy and drama series Emmy awards include a few “shockeroos,” we just had to read on. You should, too.

Blammo!

Diva SmackDown at the Tonys? Not even this titillating headline can get us to care about the Tonys. Sorry, Tom O’Neil.

Another Person Younger Than Us Has Just Made A Killing: According to Jay A. Fernandez: 28-year-old screenwriter Barry Schwartz has sold his original script Parents Weekend to Arnold Kopelson, “Oscar-winning producer of Platoon, The Fugitive and Se7en, for low-six figures against mid-six figures. Schwartz describes his R-rated comedy as ‘a life-event milestone movie, like Meet the Parents or Knocked Up, that takes place during the 48 hours when ‘the kids and the parents get to see each other as independent people for the first time ever.’” If you need us, just tap on the oven door.

Is George Stephanopoulos Sean Hannity’s Bitch? Probably not. But we can’t get enough of this story.

We’re determined to find out what Gary Busey meant when he menacingly told Ryan Seacrest that he’d been looking for him for years. When Seacrest asked what he’d done, Busey said, “It’s what you haven’t done.”

What hadn’t he done? Our only guess is that he hadn’t asked the questions his researchers prepared for him — how else to explain so many celebrities’ perplexed faces? (George Clooney bought a house on a whim in Malibu?!)

Tom O’Neil thinks Busey was pissed because Seacrest didn’t recognize him on the Red Carpet.

Whatever Seacrest was guilty of, poor Jennifer Garner got in the middle of it like a 4-year-old girl outside the wrong house during a drive-by.