In 1977, at the age of 8, I sat in a theater and experienced the awe and wonder that was Star Wars. At the time, no one had any idea what kind of cultural significance it would have or what it would mean for cinema in general and science-fiction films in particular. Though there have been many books, essays and college theses that have attempted to quantify and examine those impacts over the years, at age 8 I didn’t really care about such things.

If I’m being completely honest I should admit that I still don’t, I just remember sitting in the darkened theater being completely pulled into a new and completely realized new universe of awe and wonder and being completely captivated and immeasurably entertained by it. Thanks to James Gunn and Guardians of the Galaxy, that feeling has returned 37 years later.

According to a joint press release, Paramount Pictures and J.J. Abrams’ Bad Robot Productions have agreed to an extension of their exclusive, first-look agreement through December 2015. The deal looks to be incredibly lucrative for both sides.

“J.J. is a unique talent and a captivating storyteller,” said Brad Grey, Chairman and CEO of Paramount Pictures. “J.J., Bryan Burk and the whole Bad Robot team are an integral part of Paramount and we’re proud to continue our collaboration. Their pictures have extraordinary resonance around the world and we’re so pleased Paramount will be their home for years to come.”

Bad Robot Productions’ original first look deal with Paramount began in 2006. Since then we have had releases of a variety of successful films and franchise continuations. Considering that grosses on Mission: Impossible – Ghost Protocol are now $670M globally, while those for the Star Trek reboot hit $385M worldwide, it is no surprise that Paramount is excited about the continuation of this deal. Under the previous Paramount deal, Abrams also had made Cloverfield and Super 8, both of which did well at the global box office.

At 5:30 AM Pacific Time on Tuesday, The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences revealed their nominations for this year’s Oscars.

Hugo leads with 11 total nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director. The Artist scored 10 nods.

Some of the nominations were a big surprise, especially in the Best Picture catagory. While films like The Artist and The Descendants were a shoe-in, especially after their performance in the Golden Globes, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close and The Help were also recognized. Also curiously, there were only nine pictures nominated as opposed to ten, which we’ve seen the past two years.

Best Director is chock full of veteran Oscar nominees. Woody Allen, Terrance Malick, Alexander Payne, and Martin Scorsese have earned almost 40 nominations all together. Michel Hazanivicus, however, is up for his first nomination.

Most notably absent from several catagories was Drive, for Best Picture, Best Actor for Ryan Gosling’s spectacular performance and Best Supporting Actor for Albert Brooks. It dig snag a nomination for Sound Editing, but I would have liked to see it recognized a bit more.

The Oscar buzz continues until the Academy Awards ceremony airs on Sunday February 26th. You can see the full listing of nominees after the jump, and let us know what you think of the nominations!

Kevin Smith can’t seem to get a break. Sure, things were great back when Clerks blew up and his deal with Mirimax helped him form a career. But between his issues with Dogma and the church, getting an audience for Clerks 2, the problems with getting Zack and Miri Make A Porno and the trouble with Cop Out,  the guy can’t seem to get a break lately in Hollywood.

Yesterday, Smith brought his newest project, the horror film Red State, to Sundance and had planned on a public auction for the film’s distribution immediately after the screening. He later decided that he was going to distribute the film itself to prove that the indie film world still held strong.

So, for a whopping $20, Smith bought the film from himself, and is now planning on taking the flick on the road with a very grassroots plan to get awareness and make back the film’s $4 million budget. From THR:

The film will go out via Smith’s SModcast with no marketing spend, though he said that he will talk to “any smart exhibitor” about potentially showing the movie.

“We are going to make our money back by going out on the road and going city by city,” said Smith. The tour will begin March 5 at Radio City Music Hall in New York City and make a stop at Midland Theater in Kansas City one week later.

In a time when not even adaptations of board games are off the table for most of the bigger Hollywood studios, a story like this isn’t as far fetched as it should be. McG, director of the Charlie’s Angels films and Terminator Salvation, is taking the lead on directing Ouija for Universal. From THR.

The studio’s planned film adaptation of the classic Hasbro board game about conjuring up spirits of the dead has had a tough go at finding a director but before the town shut down for the holidays, Heat Vision reported that McG presented Universal execs his vision for the project, which has a script by Tron: Legacy writers Edward Kitsis and Adam Horowitz and is being produced by Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes.

He was vying for the gig against The Crazies director Breck Eisner, who pitched his take on the material the week before.

So not only is a multi-millionaire director taking on this project, but he was actually battling another one for this acclaimed position. Unfortunately, this one has been done. A few times, actually, since 1986’s Witchboard.

That hasn’t stopped McG from taking home the prize….of directing a film based on a supernatural board that allows people to speak with the dead. Well worth it.

Some films deserve to make the record books or be encapsulated forever in history books, and some films are Big Mama’s House 2. Luckily, the National Historic Registry hasn’t selected that film, but instead is including 25 films on their list for 2010 and immortalizing some of Hollywood’s best of the past few decades. From THR:

The films, which include Hollywood classics, documentaries, innovative shorts and genres from virtually every era of American filmmaking, span the period 1891-1996. This year’s selections bring the number of films in the registry to 550.

George Lucas’ 15-minute student film — Electronic Labyrinth: THX 1138 4EB, made in 1967 at USC — also made the list, as did The Empire Strikes Back, his much-lauded 1980 Star Wars sequel that was directed by Irvin Kershner.

Other classics such as Airplane, The Exorcist, and All the President’s Men also made the list of soon to be immortalized films. Check out the complete list after the jump.

For the longest time, not much was known about Kevin Smith’s newest written film since 2008’s Zack and Miri Make A Porno, which is also the writer/director’s first horror film, titled Red State.

The cast was revealed a few months ago, with a pretty interesting bunch of names like John Goodman, Kevin Pollak, Stephen Root, and Michael Parks. And then we got this synopsis.

Red State begins by following three horny high school boys who come across an online ad from an older woman looking for a gang bang. Boys being boys, they hit the road to satisfy their libidinal urges. But what begins as a fantasy takes a dark turn as they come face-to-face with a terrifying “holy” force with a fatal agenda.

So you’re probably asking yourself what a writer director like Kevin Smith has to do with horror, but this film has allegedly been in his nerdy vault of a brain since the early days of View Askew.

Going along his grassroots style that made him famous 16 years ago, Smith released the very first teaser for Red State on his site, the Smodcast. Check it out after the jump, and catch the flick in theaters early next year.

It’s funny how the general perspective on Seth Rogen and Michel Gondry’s upcoming Green Hornet for Sony has changed over the past year. The film was destined to fail several times after playing musical chairs with the director, pushing the date back more that 6 months, and converting the film to 3D after it was in the can. However, now that the film has been released to critics, word is coming out that the movie may be worth something after all.

The script comes from Rogen and Evan Goldberg, the best friend team that brought us Superbad and Pineapple Express, so you know these two can at least bring the funny. The biggest concern has been the trailer that was released, which shows the film in a very unfunny light.

After checking out what things looked like on the set, however, this could end up being just an editing error, and the movie may just be what we expect in a campy superhero comedy.

Check out the behind the scenes featurette after the jump and catch skinny Rogen in The Green Hornet in theaters on January 14th in both 2D and 3D.

You know you can judge the merit of a film by the fact that it has 3D in it’s title. As if that gimmick alone is enough to draw an audience. Well that’s exactly what they’re doing over at Lionsgate with their newest schlocky film, Drive Angry 3D, starring the ever-talented Nic Cage.

The premise of the film is so original, it made the suits at Marvel’s heads spin. Get this: Nic Cage is a badass who escapes from hell to punish the gangsters that killed his wife and baby. Along the way, the Devil’s right hand man (played by William Fichtner) heads to Earth as well to find and bring back this escaped soul. So far the only major difference we can see between this film and Ghost Rider is that this flick replaces a motorcycle with a muscle car. Big change.

Cage is joined by Hollywood’s next big thing, Amber Heard, as they take down a ganglord and his army of thugs. The script comes from the guys who brought us Jason X (the one in space) and Dracula 2000. The new trailer is slightly redeeming, because it gives the film a bit of a Grindhouse look, which could make it all worthwhile in the end.

Check it out after the jump, and catch Drive Angry 3D in theaters February 25th.

There has been plenty of heat on the MPAA as of late. Cult horror director Adam Green (Hatchet, Frozen) recently had trouble with the organization giving his sequel to Hatchet an NC-17 rating, which is the financial kiss of death at the box office. They did the same with an upcoming Weinstein film starring Ryan Gosling titled Blue Valentine.

Upon receiving the NC-17 rating, The Weinstein Company filed litigation against the organization for an appeal to get their film down to an R-rating. This was a classic tale of Davey (a small studio) going up against the MPAA’s Goliath. The good news? They won.

News has just been released that TWC has won the appeal against the MPAA and the rating of Blue Valentine will get modified back down to a standard R. This is pretty historic for the industry, considering that nobody ever goes up against the MPAA and lives to tell the tale. It looks like the brothers Weinstein are now the exception to that rule.

This could very well change the face of how MPAA does things, as indie directors like Adam Green now have a case against the way the organization runs things. Consider this an official turning of the tide.

Check out the details in the full press release after the jump. Blue Valentine is expected to hit limited theaters on December 31st.

Shakespeare’s The Tempest may be one of the most contrived and story-heavy piece of work in his collection, but that’s not stopping director Julie Taymor, who plans on bringing a direct adaptation of the play to theaters next year.

Yes, this is the same Julie Taymor who is begrudgingly bringing Spider-Man to Broadway, but she’s also the director behind Across the Universe, which introduced a whole new generation to the music of The Beatles, and adapted Shakespeare once before with Anthony Hopkins in Titus.

Now she’s at it again, with a new gang of players including Helen Mirren, Russell Brand, Alfred Molina, Djimon Hounsou, David Strathairn, Chris Cooper, and Alan Cumming.

The premise is a bit confusing, so we won’t try to bog you down with the details. Instead, we have two great clips featuring Mirren, Hounsou, and Brand, which you can check out after the jump.

Catch Disney’s Tempest in theaters this Friday.

While we may still be getting films like Warrior’s Way here in the states, there are still plenty of mind-blowing martial arts films being made across the world. One of those films is the first in the Ip Man franchise. Now that list may get slightly larger as the first trailer for Ip Man 2: Legend of the Grandmaster has arrived. From the official press release.

After escaping the Japanese occupation of his hometown of Foshan, China, Ip Man and his family have arrived in Hong Kong, which is living under the iron fist of British colonial rule.

Ip wants to support his family by opening up a martial arts academy to teach his unique Wing Chun style. But a corrupt cabal of Hong Kong martial arts masters, led by Hung Chun-nam (the legendary Sammo Hung), refuses to allow Ip to teach until he proves himself – and prove himself he does, in an intense series of fights against the masters showcasing a dazzling variety of martial arts styles, culminating in a highly anticipated brawl between Ip and Hung atop a rickety table.

But even after gaining the respect of the masters, Ip’s troubles are far from over. Hong Kong under British rule is a world of corruption, and when a Western-style boxer named Taylor “Twister” Milos comes to town to entertain the British upper-class, and insults both Chinese martial arts and the native citizens in a horrifically violent way, Ip must step up and fight for the honor of both his kung fu and the Chinese people.

Yes, the film has been seen in many parts of the world by now, but we’re getting the original, un-dubbed international version that was released in Asia, and it’s hitting major theaters in both the US and Canada on January 28th. Check out the first full teaser trailer after the jump.