I apologize for the poor quality of the video, but I wanted you to see how the VFX artists for the Life of Pi were treated during the Academy Awards last week. Generally speaking, the supporting jobs in movie-making are given the short shrift in favor of the actors. Those who actually merit being in the main program (rather than the lesser, non-televised Technical Awards) are expected to get up on the stage, grab the award and get the hell off, lest they be chased off by the Jaws Theme. And they should expect the actors, who let's face it, rely more and more on visual special effects, to be sneering and joking about giving them the respect they deserve.

But the story is even more poignant than what was shown on your television screen. If you happened to be in Hollywood that day, you would have seen more of the Rhythm & Hues Visual Effects crew outside the Kodak Theater, protesting the bankruptcy and subsequent layoffs of the same company simultaneously accepting an achievement award for a movie largely comprised of visual effects:

You might assume those who work on a film that wins an Oscar would be excited about it taking home the gold, but that's not the case for over 400 current and ex-employees of visual effects company Rhythm & Hues, which filed for Chapter 11 Bankruptcy and fired over 250 employees last week. Deadline reports that many of those workers gathered and staged a large protest near the 85th Academy Awards ceremony last night.

Following the company's filing for bankruptcy and laying off hundreds of employees without pay, the effects house hoped to receive an emergency $17 million loan from 20th Century Fox and Universal so all their VFX artists could finish work on contracted projects that would last until the end of April. Legendary Pictures stepped in and paid the company around $5 million to finish the effects work on Seventh Son, the upcoming fantasy film set for release on October 18th, 2013. But things are still looking shaky for the VFX house.

The protest took place at the corner of Hollywood & Vine last night, only a few blocks away from the red carpet pre-shows near the Dolby Theatre. Reportedly even those who stuck around to work on Seventh Son haven't received a paycheck in weeks, and many are distressed about Hollywood's practice of hiring foreign companies instead of local ones to complete effects on blockbusters. Unionization is another big issue for VFX artists, but an undertaking like that is difficult to organize in a community with this many members. When VFX supervisor Bill Westenhofer accepted the award for Life of Pi last night, he was ominously played off the stage by the Jaws score and abruptly cut off just as he was beginning to tell the audience about the current situation. "Sadly, Rhythm & Hues is suffering severe financial difficulties right now, and I urge you all to remember..." and that was all he could say before his microphone was turned off.

While it's easy to dismiss this as the free market working its invisible hand, remember that Life of Pi has now grossed $585 million worldwide, not counting DVD sales. Likewise, The Avengers, which stars Robert Downey Jr. (with a reported $50 million payday) and Samuel L. Jackson (a paltry $5-6 million) grossed $1.5 BILLION worldwide. Yet the crew that gave the Hulk his bulk has to resort to literal panhandling to stay in business. A Reddit discussion enumerates the grievances:

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I've mentioned before that I have a Persian uncle. He immigrated here more than forty years ago, went through the process of getting his citizenship and has been a testament of the benefits of a strong immigration program can be for the nation. He has multiple degrees, owns his own business, has never even gotten so much as a traffic ticket and is loved in his community.

He also cannot fly anywhere without being harassed simply because he is a Muslim with an identifiably Middle Eastern name. A 24 hour turnaround to Las Vegas during the Christmas holidays turned into being detained, strip searched on both ends of the trip and hours of humiliation, because my uncle didn't think to bring luggage for such a quick trip. This is the reality for many Muslims in the US.

So when stories came forward that Palestinian filmmaker Emad Burnat was detained at LAX when he arrived for the Academy Awards, I wasn't particularly surprised. This is what we do in a post-9/11 world:

My wife and I had seen that look before -- on the faces of our kids, mostly. After all, like all Palestinian children living in the West Bank, ours have grown accustomed to the humiliation of ID checks and interrogations.

But we had never seen our youngest son, Gibreel, as disappointed as he was on Tuesday, when American immigration officials threatened to deny us entry to the United States and to the 85th Academy Awards for which we had traveled two days to attend.

As my friend and fellow filmmaker Michael Moore, who intervened to help secure my entry, tweeted after the episode: "Apparently the Immigration & Customs officers couldn't understand how a Palestinian could be an Oscar nominee."

Well, I am an Oscar nominee. But more to the point, my film, 5 Broken Cameras -- which chronicles my village Bil'in's nonviolent struggle to resist Israeli occupation -- is about precisely the kind of humiliation my family and I experienced at Los Angeles International Airport. The only difference is that the victims where I come from number in the millions, and our stories have become so routine that what happened to my family and me yesterday pales by comparison.

This is a sad statement on our own ridiculous notions of Homeland Security, a worthy subject for any journalistic enterprise. But that's not the lede that Buzzfeed's Ben Smith wanted to take. Rather than look at racial profiling and how we're devolving as a country for a faux sense of security, Smith decided the better headline was to make fun of fellow filmmaker Michael Moore, who Burnat contacted for assistance. And even then, his reporter Tessa Stuart couldn't get the story right:

In statements made exclusively to The Atlantic Wire, Michael Moore and Emad Burnat say the Palestinian filmmaker's detainment by LAX customs officials on his way to the Oscars was anything but a "publicity stunt," as a deeply flawed BuzzFeed report based on a single anonymous source characterized the incident. "BuzzFeed is trying to spin their way out of this," Moore said in an interview on Tuesday evening, "and they're just running the talking points from the customs officials there at LAX." [..]

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Richard Roeper's Academy Awards picks

Here is a full list of the nominees for those who'd like to play at home.

And for those who like to hedge their bets, What Would Nate Silver Predict?

Make your predictions, snark on the fashion, groan through the musical numbers (I don't mean Barbra!) and wonder why they keep hiring Bruce Vilanch to write unfunny jokes for the presenters every damn year.

Here are John Amato's predictions:

I haven't seen every movie up for awards, but I'll throw in my two cents anyway.

I have Argo winning the Oscar for Best Picture. Ben Affleck's movie was simply compelling and funny while crafting the action around a very tough time in our history---the 1979 hostage crisis. Although it wasn't a true depiction of the actual events since the Canadians played a major part in saving the Americans, it still was a terrific movie.

Beasts of the Southern Wild was a magical surprise of a film with a cast of real people (not actors) that shined and a new young rising star (Quvenzhané Wallis) that captures your imagination from the first scene to the last.

Django Unchained was completely overrated. Yes it was fun, but once Christoph Waltz (SPOILER ALERT) was killed, the movie flamed out. And at one point it appeared that Tarantino tried to turn it into a Mel Brooks comedy when KKK members argued about how badly their hoods were made.

Les Misérables had good intentions until Russell Crowe opened his mouth. I couldn't finish it.

Lincoln was good, but not as great as the early reviews claimed it to be. On a side note, the Beltway press is trying to paint this as a movie that shows how Lincoln brought disagreeing parties together to ratify the 13th Amendment because today's Congress is so toxic. But the truth is it passed only because Lincoln was able to buy off as many people as he needed.

Silver Linings Playbook I loved. It was hard to watch during the first third because Bradley Cooper (most excellent) was so manically obsessed with his wife that it was unnerving; then it settled in and rocked until David O. Russell decided to give it a typical Hollywood feel-good ending.

Zero Dark Thirty was well made, but highly overrated. It was a film that covered the historical progression of modern terrorism starting with 9/11---along with the search for Bin Laden until he was found and killed. And yes, the excessive time spent on torture was unnecessary and factually not accurate in its aiding of the discovery of UBL.

Best Director will go to Steven Spielberg.

Best Actor will go to Daniel Day-Lewis. I thought Joaquin Phoenix's performance in The Master has been the most overlooked by the critics though. Bradley Cooper was simply terrific as well. (And he was Sydney's BFF in Alias)

Best Actress will go to Jennifer Lawrence. I've been a fan since I saw her in Winter's Bone and thought she should have won then. When she was introduced in the movie I thought she was too young to play the role of a widowed sex addict, but after a few scenes she flat out blew me away. Her monologue to De Niro disproving his idea that she's a jinx to the Eagles was fantastic and should not be missed.

Best Supporting Actor might be the hardest one to pick. Every one of them was awesome in their roles. Christoph Waltz made Django Unchained watchable. Tommy Lee Jones is always excellent. Philip Seymour Hoffman was tremendous as an L. Ron Hubbard-esque character. Alan Arkin was hysterical in Argo, but my pick is Robert De Niro. I know, I'm going against the grain here. I think I felt this way partially because his character was so similar to the way I root for my sports teams. Yes, don't get to close to me if the NY Giants are in a Super Bowl, but it wasn't just his crazed rituals whenever an Eagles game was on, but the low key way that he made you understand why Bradley is the way he is.

Best Supporting Actress is going to be Anne Hathaway. What a performance.

This is your Academy Awards open thread. Use it.

Ahhh...the glory of never having to admit that you're clueless. In the face of tonight's Academy Awards program and the surprisingly high percentage of political films nominated, host George Stephanopoulos asks his panel to give their predictions of who will take home the Oscar.

Whodathunk that the partisan hacks--who are equally as clueless about their domestic policy predictions--use the opportunity to thump Democrats:

Of the three politically charged films up for Best Picture, ABC News contributor George Will thinks “Zero Dark Thirty” should take home Oscar gold.

“It’s a genuine contribution to public education,” he said. “Sufficient reason for voting for it is a rebuke to Sens. Levin, Feinstein and McCain, who have enough to do without being movie critics and falsely accusing that movie of taking a stand on torture it does not take.”

TIME Magazine contributor Steven Brill agreed.

Because, you know, those Academy voters are always looking for an opportunity to teach a lesson to Democratic senators.

And even then, Will doesn't get the criticism correct. Levin and Feinstein did not object to 'Zero Dark Thirty' for taking a supposed stand on torture. They objected to the way the film elides over the years and false information given via torture before they finally did get actionable intelligence, something an FBI agent involved confirmed.

In arguing with Susie Madrak against a 'Silver Linings Playbook' Best Picture win, I reminded her that Academy voters love sweeping epics and elevated films and tend to reward that. Kathryn Bigelow's 'Zero Dark Thirty' did not do that and even the nominations reflect that:

But I suspect that the real problem for academy voters with Kathryn Bigelow’s film is not the torture sequences, but how utterly devoid of larger context the movie is. Should that matter? No, unless you make the claim, as the filmmakers have done, that your version of “history’s greatest manhunt” carries the imprimatur of journalistic accuracy — durable enough to become the art of record.

The duty of a dramatist is to tell a story, with conflict, peril and resolution. The duty of a historian is much the same, with the added responsibility of assembling a factual narrative. In trying to have it both ways, “Zero Dark Thirty” lost a large segment of thinking movie lovers.

I first saw the film with two highly opinionated women, and we had the same instant reaction: best picture. Maya, the composite character of the C.I.A. band of sisters that tracked Osama bin Laden, was mesmerizing. It was emotionally satisfying to see a mass killer in a body bag. The stomach-turning visual style was similar to Bigelow’s best-picture winner, “The Hurt Locker,” which I loved.

That was six weeks ago. A second viewing with journalist friends who know the story well led to a more troubling take-away. It’s not just the torture and its inherent message that young, attractive Americans got the ultimate payoff in part by doing what German bad guys used to do in the movies.

It’s the omissions. In “Zero Dark Thirty,” several larger truths — the many intelligence mistakes, the loss of focus and diversion of resources, and the fallout from the folly of the Iraq war — are missing. This is a crucial point, because the film is likely to end up as the most popular version of the singular trauma in the first decade of the 21st century.

It’s obvious, now, why the C.I.A. was cooperative with the filmmakers: it couldn’t have asked for better product placement.

The Academy--unlike George Will--does not want to appear to be in bed with the CIA. That's why we can chalk up yet another incorrect statement out of the mouth of Will. Not that it will ever matter to ABC News.

As Jimmy Kimmel joked this week, it's time for the focus to move from all those attention-grabbing teachers and firefighters to poor, underappreciated Hollywood.

If you want to dish on the awards, laugh at the fashion or argue the merits of "The Artist" over "Hugo" for Best picture, here's the thread to do it. Personally, I'm devastated that we are being prevented from seeing Bret McKenzie's (of Flight of the Conchords) "Man or Muppet" being performed as one of only two Best Song nominees.

The full list of nominees is here.

If you think that the Oscars is nothing more than a self-indulgent exercise in navel-gazing when there are so many more important things to focus on in the world, you do have an inarguable point. We suggest that you focus on the other posts on this and our sister sites during the ceremony.

It's Oscar weekend again. Growing up in LA, there was a palpable buzz on the west side of the city on Oscar weekend, lots of celebrity sightings. There were also a significant increase of tourists hoping to catch a glimpse of actors going in and out of the area hotels, restaurants, spas, etc. That doesn't include the ones that line up on the sidewalk for days before to be in the bleachers in front of the red carpet.

It sounds to me that Tweety would be one of those people camping out for a seat on the bleachers if he could. Can I say that as much as I do lust over Colin Firth myself, hearing Tweety gushing over him was a little uncomfortable?

Meanwhile, there is one nominee we know we won't be seeing at the awards ceremony. Street artist Banksy, whose first film "Exit Through The Gift Shop" (a BRILLIANT look at what constitutes art) is nominated for Best Documentary, was refused permission by the Academy to appear at the ceremony disguised.

Here's a list of nominees, and I'll put mine and Amato's predictions for the big awards in the comments. Add yours and we'll see who has a finger on the pulse of the Academy.

Oh, and I know that the Academy Awards and awards shows in general are not everyone's cup of tea. Perfectly understandable, and if it's not yours, I hope you use this time to comment on any of our political topic threads. Please do not use this thread to voice your disdain for those who do enjoy the Oscars.