The British historical drama "The King's Speech" leads the list of Oscar nominees released this morning, picking up a dozen nominations, including best actor for Colin Firth, best supporting actress for Helena Bonham Carter and best supporting actor for Geoffrey Rush.
The Coen brothers' remake of the John Wayne classic "True Grit" earned 10 nominations, including best supporting actress for 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld, in her first movie role, and a best-actor nomination for Jeff Bridges.
"The Social Network" and "Inception" each had eight nominations.
On the local front, Kenosha-born Mark Ruffalo was nominated for best supporting actor for his role in "The Kids are All Right."
For the second year in a row, there are 10 movies nominated for Best Picture.
For six decades, there were only five nominees, but doubling the list allows for more commercial movies to be included -- potentially bringing more viewers to the over-long awardscast, scheduled for Feb. 27.
Here are the best-picture nominees:
- "Black Swan"
- "The Fighter"
- "Inception"
- "The Kids Are All Right"
- "The King’s Speech"
- "127 Hours"
- "The Social Network"
- "Toy Story 3"
- True Grit"
- "Winter’s Bone"
You can find the complete list of nominees at the official Oscar site.
Green and gold TV: The SportsMoney blog at Forbes.com is predicting the Packers-Steelers Super Bowl will be a ratings bonanza, citing the popularity and fan bases of both teams and the story-lines of their quarterbacks.
The piece cites a 2010 Harris Poll listing Green Bay and Pittsburgh as the third and fourth most popular teams in the country as one reason that the game is likely to draw a bigger TV crowd than last year's 106 million viewers for the Saints win over the Colts. That was the biggest audience ever for a U.S. television show.
Blogs Patrick Rishe: "In the ratings game, all television execs beg for the sexiest game. And for the Super Bowl, the biggest game of them all, begging turns into praying.
"Well, I don’t know if they could have chosen a sexier match-up for Super Bowl XLV than Pittsburgh versus Green Bay."
Meanwhile, Sunday's game had a higher rating in Milwaukee than in Chicago. Nielsen Media Research numbers show Chicago's Fox affiliate, WFLD-TV, had a 50.6 rating/81 share for the game.
Yeah, that's big, but the final overnight for Milwaukee's Channel 6 showed a 57.0 rating/85 share. So we won on that field, as well.
The rating is the percentage of all TV households in the market, the share is the measure of TV's that were on and tuned to the game.
On TV: The Super Bowl of presidential politics airs tonight at 8 tonight with the president's State of the Union Address up and down the dial. Wisconsin's player in the game, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan, delivers the Republican response following the president.
- Keith Olbermann made his first comment via Twitter on Monday, following his surprise departure Friday from MSNBC. "My humble thanks to all Friends of Keith for the many kind words. The reports of the death of my career are greatly exaggerated."
- TVGuide.com says reports that TNT's "Dallas" remake will feature Larry Hagman after all.
- MTV is developing a British version of "Jersey Shore" set in Newcastle.
Oprah and her sister: The best news in Oprah Winfrey's discovery of a half-sister in Milwaukee, identified as Patricia, in Milwaukee, is that "she never once thought to sell the story."
Said Patricia: "Family business should be handled by family."
Then, Oprah put her family business on TV.
Here's a clip from the show:
Tim Cuprisin is the media columnist for OnMilwaukee.com. He's been a journalist for 30 years, starting in 1979 as a police reporter at the old City News Bureau of Chicago, a legendary wire service that's the reputed source of the journalistic maxim "if your mother says she loves you, check it out." He spent a couple years in the mean streets of his native Chicago, and then moved on to the Green Bay Press-Gazette and USA Today, before coming to the Milwaukee Journal in 1986.
A general assignment reporter, Cuprisin traveled Eastern Europe on several projects, starting with a look at Poland after five years of martial law, and a tour of six countries in the region after the Berlin Wall opened and Communism fell. He spent six weeks traversing the lands of the former Yugoslavia in 1994, linking Milwaukee Serbs, Croats and Bosnians with their war-torn homeland.
In the fall of 1994, a lifetime of serious television viewing earned him a daily column in the Milwaukee Journal (and, later the Journal Sentinel) focusing on TV and radio. For 15 years, he has chronicled the changes rocking broadcasting, both nationally and in Milwaukee, an effort he continues at OnMilwaukee.com.
When he's not watching TV, Cuprisin enjoys tending to his vegetable garden in the backyard of his home in Whitefish Bay, cooking and traveling.
