Joining “The Tree of Life” in Best Picture are Michel Hazanavicius’ “The Artist”, Alexander Payne’s “The Descendants”, Nicolas Winding Refn’s “Drive” and Martin Scorsese’s “Hugo”. Malick, Hazanavicius, Refn and Scorsese were joined in the Best Director race by “Melancholia” director Lars von Trier.

“Drive” was the second most nominated film picking up six mentions including the aforementioned Picture and Director as well as Best Supporting Actor (Albert Brooks), Best Adapted Screenplay, Editing and Cinematography. Brooks was nominated alongside John Hawkes in “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Nick Nolte in “Warrior”, Pitt and Christopher Plummer in “Beginners”. In Best Supporting Actress, the nominees were Chastain, Melissa McCarthy for “Bridesmaids”, Janet McTeer for “Albert Nobbs”, Carey Mulligan for “Shame” and Shailene Woodley for “The Descendants”.

Woodley and Mulligan’s co-stars shared nominations in the Best Actor slate, George Clooney and Michael Fassbender respectively, who were nominated alongside Jean Dujardin in “The Artist”, Gary Oldman in “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy” and Michael Shannon in “Take Shelter”. The Best Actress category features Kirsten Dunst in “Melancholia”, Elizabeth Olsen in “Martha Marcy May Marlene”, Meryl Streep in “The Iron Lady”, Tilda Swinton in “We Need to Talk About Kevin” and Michelle Williams for “My Week with Marilyn”.

Each year, the OFCS also submits nominations for Special Achievement Awards, granted only by a majority vote of the membership. This year, the Online Film Critics have selected two individuals, Jessica Chastain and Martin Scorsese, to receive special citations.

Chastain’s tremendous and quality-filled output this year has brought her instant acclaim and recognition marking one of the most stellar debuts in recent memory.

Scorsese has long been a champion of film preservation and with his love letter to the cinema this year, “Hugo”, he continues to show his admiration for film history and the many pursuits to keeping those records alive.

The full list of nominees for the 15th Annual Online Film Critics Society Awards:

Best Picture:
The Artist
The Descendants
Drive
Hugo
The Tree of Life

Best Animated Feature:
The Adventures of Tintin
Arthur Christmas
Kung Fu Panda 2
Rango
Winnie the Pooh

Best Director:
Michel Hazanavicius – The Artist
Terrence Malick – The Tree of Life
Nicolas Winding Refn – Drive
Martin Scorsese – Hugo
Lars von Trier – Melancholia

Best Lead Actor:
George Clooney – The Descendants
Jean Dujardin – The Artist
Michael Fassbender – Shame
Gary Oldman – Tinker Tailor Solider Spy
Michael Shannon – Take Shelter

Best Lead Actress:
Kirsten Dunst – Melancholia
Elizabeth Olsen – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Meryl Streep – The Iron Lady
Tilda Swinton – We Need to Talk About Kevin
Michelle Williams – My Week with Marilyn

Best Supporting Actor:
Albert Brooks – Drive
John Hawkes – Martha Marcy May Marlene
Nick Nolte – Warrior
Brad Pitt – The Tree of Life
Christopher Plummer – Beginners

Best Supporting Actress:
Jessica Chastain – The Tree of Life
Melissa McCarthy – Bridesmaids
Janet McTeer – Albert Nobbs
Carey Mulligan – Shame
Shailene Woodley – The Descendants

Best Original Screenplay:
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Midnight in Paris
A Separation
The Tree of Life
Win Win

Best Adapted Screenplay:
The Descendants
Drive
Moneyball
Tinker Tailor Solider Spy
We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Editing:
Drive
Martha Marcy May Marlene
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy
The Tree of Life
We Need to Talk About Kevin

Best Cinematography:
The Artist
Drive
Hugo
Melancholia
The Tree of Life

Best Film Not in the English Language:
13 Assassins
Certified Copy
A Separation
The Skin I Live In
Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

Best Documentary:
Cave of Forgotten Dreams
The Interrupters
Into the Abyss
Project Nim
Tabloid

Special Awards
To Jessica Chastain, the breakout performer of the year
To Martin Scorsese in honor of his work and dedication to the pursuit of film preservation

Winners will be announced on Monday, January 2, 2012

Founded in 1997, the Online Film Critics Society has been the key force in establishing and raising the standards for Internet-based film journalism. The OFCS membership consists of film reviewers, journalists and scholars based in the U.S., Canada, Europe, Latin America and the Asia/Pacific Rim region. For more information, visit the Online Film Critics Society at ofcs.org.

Even though the autopsy report shows she had two dozen bruises on her body, including on her left cheek and arms, the actress’s death was ruled an accident. Lana Wood, Natalie’s sister, and actor Robert Wagner, the captain of the yacht on which Wood was last seen, asked the sheriff’s office to reopen the case last year. Homicide investigators are now revisiting the case after they were contacted by people who claimed they had “additional information” about the incident, the sheriff’s department said in a statement.

It is still unclear whether the sister and yacht captain are the parties responsible for persuading the sheriff’s department to reopen the case.

In addition to the bruises, questions have surrounded the case ever since the coroner ruled the drowning an accident. According to police reports, Wood was found floating a mile away from the yacht wearing a nightgown, socks, and a down jacket.

“My sister was not a swimmer and did not know how to swim, and she would never go to another boat or to shore dressed in a nightgown and socks,” said Lana Wood. “I just want the truth to come out, the real story.”

Dennis Davern, the former captain of the yacht Splendour has said he believes Wood’s death was a direct result of a fight she had with Wagner that night, a fight Wagner acknowledges occurred in his 2009 book “Pieces of My Heart.”

Police spoke to the owner of the yacht Rob Nelson Saturday. Details of the conversation have not been released.

The story centers on a slave-turned-bounty hunter (Foxx) who embarks on a rescue/revenge mission to free his wife from her sadistic slavedriver. Baron Cohen’s prospective role would be that of Scotty, a gambler who purchases Django’s wife to be his female companion.

Shooting is scheduled to begin in early 2012 with a US release planned for Dec. 25, 2012.

The Weinstein Co. will release “Django Unchained” domestically and Sony Pictures will release the pic overseas.

Johnny Depp will produce and likely star in Dr. Seuss biopic.

After starring as the Mad Hatter in “Alice in Wonderland,” Willy Wonka in “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory,” and Peter Pan author J.M. Barrie in ”Finding Neverland,” it seems only logical for Johnny Depp to take on one of the most iconic figures in all of children’s literature — Dr. Seuss.

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THR reports that Depp will produce a live-action pic about the life of beloved author and illustrator Dr. Seuss (Theodor Geisel), with the option to star.

The project is already well into development at Illumination Entertainment and Infinitum Nihil, with Keith Bunin (HBO’s “In Treatment”) tapped to pen the screenplay and Universal Pictures on board to distribute.

Universal is no stranger to adapting Seuss’s material for the big screen, having produced “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” (2000) and “The Cat in the Hat” (2003). Also, the studio, along with Illumination, is currently putting the finishing touches on an animated adaptation of Seuss’s “The Lorax,” which is slated for a wide theatrical release in March.

Geisel, born in 1904, spent his early years working as an illustrator for advertisements and comic strips, and then political cartoons during World War II. By the time he died of throat cancer in 1991, his books had sold more than 150 million copies worldwide.

Even before 1976’s “Taxi Driver,” which clearly owes to Dostoevsky’s “Crime and Punishment” and, more notably, “Notes from the Underground,” the director had wanted to adapt “The Gambler” for the screen. In the early 1970s, he was shell-shocked when “Taxi Driver” screenwriter Paul Schrader gave his version of the novel to Brian De Palma instead of him. The result was “Obsession.”

Yet this event did not destroy Scorsese’s passion for Dostoevsky. Years later, in 1989, he offered his take on the Alexei/Polina angle from “The Gambler” in “Life Lessons,” his segment of the omnibus movie “New York Stories” with Woody Allen and Francis Ford Coppola. It converts the protagonist into Lionel Dobie, an aging painter played by Nick Nolte, and also stars Rosanna Arquette as Paulette, his young assistant and female object of desire.

Now, and this should not come as a surprise to anyone who is familiar with how fixated Scorsese is on realizing projects dear to him[1], news has spread that he is determined to tackle “The Gambler” again – this time as a full-length feature. “The Departed” screenwriter, William Monahan, whose script finally won Scorsese the prestigious Oscar for Best Achievement in Directing, has already signed to adapt the novel for the screen. Leonardo DiCaprio, who has assumed major roles in all of the filmmaker’s features of the 2000s, is also attached as the leading man for the new version.

Yet it is hard to tell when (or if) the Scorsese/DiCaprio/Monahan reading will finally surface. The director is constantly developing new projects, many of them slated for release in the next few years, while the status of others is perfectly unclear. “Hugo,” his first 3D adventure, is in post-production; so is the documentary “George Harrison: Living In The Material World.” But, the proposed biopics on the lives of Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, for instance, remain in limbo. The same goes for “The Irishman,” a mob flick supposed to star Scorsese’s longtime collaborators, Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci, as well as Al Pacino; the 17th-century thriller “Silence” with Daniel-Day Lewis and Gael Garcia Bernal; and “The Wolf Of Wall Street,” based on the memoir of white-collar criminal Jordan Belfort to be played by DiCaprio.

The Scorsese/DiCaprio/Monahan version of “The Gambler” will probably not see the light of day for several years, if at all. But it is certainly fun to speculate. Even though it is just one among the numerous Hollywood remakes these days, the participants involved and the story it is based on make it a very intriguing project. This writer, for one, will definitely keep an eye on it.

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[1] See The Last Temptation Of Christ, which took him years to make. It was originally scheduled for theatrical release in 1983, then cancelled by Paramount Pictures, and eventually shot as a low-budget movie for Universal Pictures in 1988. Or take Gangs Of New York, which he had wanted to realize for about 25 years until he was finally able to do so in 2002

This year the Riga International Film Festival ‘Arsenals’ has chosen to honour Latvian documentarist Herz Frank on the occasion of his 85^th birthday. Sporting his signature knitted beret and Leica camera, Frank attended the opening of an exhibition on his life and work at Riga’s small but modern Film Museum, where he signed copies of his book, Turn Back on the Threshold (Uz sliekšņa atskaties, Kino Raksti Library).

Frank is a representative of the ‘Riga Style’, a poetic and observational approach to documentary. One of his most celebrated shorts is 10 Minutes Older (Vecāks par 10 minūtēm, 1978) which presents close-ups of children watching a puppet show. Although the film’s spectators never see the puppets, there is a far more interesting show in the childrens’ faces as they are affected by different emotions. Many years later, this film inspired two omnibus features, Ten Minutes Older: The Cello and Ten Minutes Older: The Trumpet (both 2002): illustrious directors including Jean-Luc Godard, Claire Denis, Bernardo Bertolucci, Aki Kaurismaki and Werner Herzog all contributed short films reflecting on the notion of time’s passage.

While Frank’s 10 Minutes Older is screening in a loop as part of the Film Museum’s exhibition, ‘Arsenals’ is hosting a screening of 235 000 000, written by Frank and directed by fellow ‘Riga Style’ documentary maker Uldis Brauns. The title refers to the number of citizens of the Soviet Union in 1967, the year the film was made. Spanning just 70 minutes, this ambitious project sent four film crews across the U.S.S.R. to capture significant moments in the context of both individual lives and society as a whole.

235 000 000 will be screened tomorrow, the 14th of September at 7pm, at Kino Citadele, Riga.

Ruiz, not known for a specific standout film, was rather known for his vast catalog of more than 100 innovative, experimental works, which shirked cinematic conventions in favor of the surreal, the satirical and the strange.

Ruiz died Friday in Paris from complications from a pulmonary infection.

Ruiz had called Paris his home since fleeing Chile to escape the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in 1973. It was there he enjoyed the freedom to indulge his varied, curious cinematic whims. Among his filmography are a number of literary adaptations, including the work of Nathaniel Hawthorne (“Three Lives and Only One Death,” 1996), Franz Kafka (“The Penal Colony,” 1970), Marcel Proust (“Time Regained,” 1999) and Shakespeare (“Richard III,” 1986).

Born July 25, 1941, in Puerto Montt, Chile, Ruiz displayed a talent for writing at an early age. After studying law and theology at the University of Chile, he received a Rockefeller Foundation grant which allowed him to devote his time to writing. He claims he wrote more than 100 plays before he was 20-year-old.

Ruiz is survived by his wife, filmmaker Valeria Sarmiento.

The change comes just two years after increasing the number of nominees from five to 10.

“With the help of PricewaterhouseCoopers, we’ve been looking not just at what happened over the past two years, but at what would have happened if we had been selecting 10 nominees for the past 10 years,” said Academy President Tom Sherak.

After analyzing the data, Academy officials recommended that 5 percent of first place votes should be required in order to receive a nomination, which would result in five, six, seven, eight, nine or 10 Best Picture nominees per year..

“In studying the data, what stood out was that Academy members had regularly shown a strong admiration for more than five movies,” said Academy executive director Bruce Davis. “A Best Picture nomination should be an indication of extraordinary merit. If there are only eight pictures that truly earn that honor in a given year, we shouldn’t feel an obligation to round out the number.”

The 84th Annual Academy Awards will be presented on Sunday, February 26, 2012, at the Kodak Theatre in Hollywood, Calif. The ceremony will be broadcast by ABC.

After “Black Swan,” which grossed $315 million worldwide on a $12 million budget and brought the arthouse director international fame, Aronofsky was attached briefly to direct “The Wolverine,” the sequel to the Hugh Jackman vehicle, “X-Men Origins: Wolverine.” He dropped out of that project citing family reasons and is now circulating his Biblical script called “Noah.”

Deadline has learned that Aronofsky is seeking a $130 million budget and that New Regency will likely join the project as a co-financier. Paramount, Fox and Summit are also interested in joining in financing roles.

It’s being described as a “big fantasy epic,” which will give Aronofsky the chance to “create a world.”

John Logan is currently rewriting Aronofsky’s script.

Brad Pitt stars in the Palme d'Or-winning "The Tree of Life"

Writer-director Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” the year’s most anticipated and buzzed about film, won the Cannes Film Festival’s Palme d’Or Sunday night. The award is the festival’s highest honor.

“He remains infamously and notoriously shy and humble,” said producer William Pohlad, who accepted in Malick’s stead with producer DeDe Gardner. “But he is very happy to get this.”

Led by president Robert De Niro the jury also included Uma Thurman and Jude Law.

Fellow American Kirsten Dunst won best actress for her performance in Lars von Trier’s apocalyptic drama “Melancholia.”

Other big winners included Danish director Nicolas Winding Refn for “Drive,” Israeli filmmaker Joseph Cedar, who won best screenplay for “Footnote,” and Jean Dujardin who won best actor for his role in “The Artist,” set in 1920s Hollywood.