The Oscars almost didn't happen this year, thanks to the Hollywood writers' strike, and some people said that was a bad thing.

However, when the strike ended, the producers of the Oscars had a brainwave. "What's better than The Oscars That Didn't Happen?" they reasoned, "Why, The Oscars That Nobody Cares About!"

And, as such, the big winners at last night's Oscars were No Country For Old Men, There Will Be Blood, La Vie En Rose, The Counterfeiters and Michael Clayton – a selection of films whose combined box office grosses would just about stretch to buying you a particularly nice clothes peg. Oh, and Ratatouille won an Oscar too, but hopefully the tremendous oversight of giving an award to a popular film that people actually liked will be rectified by next year.

This year's Oscars had something of a traumatic birth, thanks to the writer's strike. As the Golden Globes and the People's Choice awards fell victim to the strike, no amount of wheezy rhetoric could ever fully convince anyone that the Oscars would really go ahead unless the writers went back to work. 

But the Oscars were saved by the bell when the strike ended in the nick of time, setting up the most talked about Oscars race in decades – who'd win Best Picture? Would it be that film that nobody went to see, that other film that nobody went to see, the other film nobody went to see that had George Clooney in it, Juno, or the film nobody went to see about British people bimbling sadly at each other?

Not a showstopping year for the Oscars, then, all said. In fact, the nominees for Best Picture were Michael Clayton – the 55th biggest movie of the last year – Atonement (the 53rd), There Will Be Blood (the 78th), No Country For Old Men (the 39th) and Juno (the 18th). More people went to see Alvin And The Chipmunks than any of the nominated movies, and that's a film about a shit-eating rodent for christ's sake. 

But still, the Oscars are becoming synonymous with high-end, deeply unpopular movies, so this wasn't really a surprise. But, hey, who won the Oscars this year?

Well, if you've been keeping an eye on awards season prior to the Oscars, you'll have noticed that the two frontrunners were No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and that's the way it went last night, with No Country For Old Men winning four Oscars for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Directing, and There Will Be Blood scooping Best Actor and Best Cinematography.

Although hopefully there'll be some decent ridiculous Eddie Murphy-style controversy bubbling up from this year's Oscars in the next few days, the only really interesting things to happen during the ceremony were Steve Carell possibly saying the word 'shit', the three billion mindless clip montages and Helen Mirren doing something so preposterously actorly during her time on the microphone that we wanted to shatter her ankles. Oh, and if you missed the Oscars and have been looking for clips on YouTube, we should probably point out that Miley Cyrus wasn't the only person to turn up, despite what it looks like.

But, if not, this year's Oscars might just go down in history as the one that people cared least about. Perhaps next year a big Oscar could go to a film that's done well at the box office, just for a change. Yes, we're basically saying that Jumper deserves to win an Oscar. God help us all.

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Winners – Oscar 

Usually the most exciting thing about Oscar nominations day is knowing that all the months of  suffocating hype will soon be at an end, but not this year.

Because this year's Oscar nominations have just been announced – and, thanks to the writers' strike, nobody even knows whether there'll even be an Oscars this year. But if the Oscars do happen, then No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood should probably get their tuxedos pressed.

And so should Atonement. Even though it's bloody Atonement.

It's been a funny awards season, this one. Thanks to the neverending writers' strike, actors have been unwilling to cross picket lines to appear on televised awards shows like the People's Choice awards and the Golden Globes, leading to embarrassing clip shows and press conferences being hastily prepared instead of the glitz you'd usually expect.

And without anywhere to smarmily bluster about what an important job they do, several movie actors have been getting so bloated on their own trapped hot air that some of them might actually explode if the Oscars are cancelled as well.

That'll be a distinct possibility unless the writers and producers cut a deal before next month's ceremony, and even then it won't give Oscars host Jon Stewart much time to get a decent show going. But don't tell the Oscars that the Oscars might be cancelled, because the Oscar nominations have just been announced and as fas as the Academy is concerned it'll be business as usual right up until the bitter, face-losing last-minute cancellation.

So let's just assume that the Oscars are happening and see which films got nominated, shall we? As you'd expect, it's a big year for No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, with Michael Clayton emerging as the dark horse of the year. Here are the nominations for the main categories at the 2008 Oscars:

BEST PICTURE
Atonement
Juno
Michael Clayton
No Country for Old Men
There Will Be Blood

BEST ACTOR
George Clooney, Michael Clayton
Daniel Day-Lewis, There Will Be Blood
Johnny Depp, Sweeney Todd
Tommy Lee Jones, In the Valley of Elah
Viggo Mortensen, Eastern Promises

BEST ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, Elizabeth: The Golden Age
Julie Christie, Away From Her
Marion Cotillard, La Vie en Rose
Laura Linney, The Savages
Ellen Page, Juno

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Casey Affleck, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford
Javier Bardem, No Country for Old Men
Philip Seymour Hoffman, Charlie Wilson's War
Hal Holbrook, Into the Wild
Tom Wilkinson, Michael Clayton

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Cate Blanchett, I'm Not There
Ruby Dee, American Gangster
Saoirse Ronan, Atonement
Amy Ryan, Gone Baby Gone
Tilda Swinton, Michael Clayton

BEST DIRECTOR
Paul Thomas Anderson, There Will Be Blood
Joel and Ethan Coen, No Country for Old Men
Tony Gilroy, Michael Clayton
Jason Reitman, Juno
Julian Schnabel, The Diving Bell and the Butterfly

Notice there's a strong skewing towards really miserable, grim-looking films? Well don't be – because Norbit, the film that did so well in yesterday's Razzies nominations, has got an Oscar nomination too! Admittedly it's just for Best Make-Up – the Oscars equivalent of Best Kept Village – but it's another stone-cold reason why the Oscars shouldn't be cancelled this year.

After all, if Norbit loses and the Oscars are cancelled, what the hell is Eddie Murphy supposed to storm out of?

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Oscars 2008: And the Nominees Are… -

There Will Be Blood - the film about how many words Daniel Day-Lewis can say in a funny voice within the space of two and a half hours – is really doing rather well at winning awards this year.

Although it has already won a bunch of awards already, There Will Be Blood is still gaining momentum all the time, picking up a handful of awards at Saturday night's National Society Of Film Critics awards in New York for Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Cinematography. Now, the continuing success of There Will Be Blood - along with that of its rivals No Country For Old Men and Into The Wild – might make it look as if I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry has been edged out of the Oscars running, but we still live in eternal hope that Blake Clark gets the credit he deserves for imbuing Crazy Homeless Man with such dignified pathos.

So it looks like awards season might be dead on its feet already thanks to the WGA strike banning everyone from going to the Golden Globes, but the clever kids at the National Society Of Film Critics knows a simple way around that. Instead of hosting a glitzy gala evening full of stars dressed up to the nines heartily congratulating themselves on being able to make films about important things like war and malformed babies, the National Society Of Film Critics instead just gathers its members up in a restaurant and lets them shout at each other until some winners get decided.

And the National Society Of Film Critics awards are even more refreshing because they have absolutely no bearing on the outcome of the Oscars either. Like last year when it decided that Pan's Labyrinth was the best film and everyone else was fawning over The Departed, for example, or any of the other times when the National Society Of Film Critics got it wrong that we can't be bothered to find out about at the moment.

That's good news for us, but rubbish news for There Will Be Blood, because it swept the board at Saturday's National Society Of Film Critics awards so probably won't get a sniff come Oscar night. There Will Be Blood managed to win awards for best picture, best director, best cinematography and best actor for Daniel Day-Lewis' compelling portrayal of a man who talks quite slowly in an unusual voice, adding to the tally of awards that already includes an LA Film Critics trophy and a New York Film Critics trophy.

Apart from that, though, the National Society Of Film Critics awards went just as you'd expect. Julie Christie won an award because she played a woman with a degenerative mental condition in a film, Cate Blanchett won an award because she played an old musician in a vaguely biopic-ish film, No End In Sight won an award because it's a documentary about the Iraq war and Casey Affleck won an award because it was getting late and everyone had been drinking a little bit by the time they got round to choosing the Best Supporting Actor prize.

We expect.

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National Critics Draw Blood – E! Online 

Not that you'll care on the day – you'll be too busy wondering where Reese Witherspoon bought her wonderful shoes – but No Country For Old Men looks like the movie to beat come Oscar Night.

The New York Film Critics Circle yesterday announced the winners of their annual awards, and No Country For Old Men came out on top. As with all movie awards, industry experts are already analysing the results to see how the New York awards will influence the result of next year's Oscars, which already looks like a two-horse race between No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood. That's at least until the East Surrey Association Of Women Who Get The Bus To The Supermarket On Thursday Mornings reveals that I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry is their choice for top movie of the year. Very influential bunch, them.

You know, if you're part of an organisation and you haven't managed to tell the world what films you like in a deliberately haughty way to make it seem like you're more important than you actually are, you should really get a wriggle on, because you're falling behind.

Awards season still has 11 weeks of mindless, endless backslapping to go as everyone from actors to producers to the illegal immigrant gardeners of the producers to the people who look after the illegal immigrant gardeners' poorly cats when they go and do gardening for the producers prepares their list of what films they did and didn't like this year in the hope that it'll somehow influence the results of the Oscars.

And already, in these inexplicably still quite dull early stages of awards season, two films are emerging as the movies to beat on oscar Night. There's There Will Be Blood, which won the LA Film Critics Association a couple of days ago, and there's No Country For Old Men, the Coen brothers film that won the National Board Of Review prize last week and scooped the New York Film Critics Circle Best Movie Best Picture award, as announced last night.

No Country For Old Men didn't just win Best Picture – it also won Best Screenplay, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor for Javier Bardem. Best Actor, as with the LA awards, went to Daniel Day-Lewis for his slow-speaking role in There Will Be Blood. The New York Film Critics Circle also continued the impressive run of wins for Amy Ryan, who so far hasn't managed to lose any Best Supporting Actress awards for her role in Ben Affleck's Gone Baby Gone.

Looking good, huh? So far the big award-winners are a movie that isn't being released in this country until next month, a movie that hasn't been released anywhere yet and a film that nobody in Britain will ever see because of that Madeleine McCann thing. Who knows, by the time the Oscars are revealed, we might have even watched one of the winning films. Let's hope not – we're not sure our hearts could take the strain.

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Coen brothers add to awards haul - BBC 

Since we'd watch a 14-hour movie about a slowly-hardening eczema scab if Daniel Day-Lewis was in, we've come to the conclusion that he's probably a fairly decent actor.

And that's not just our opinion, either – all the film critics in Los Angeles seem to think so, too. Last night was the LA Film Critics Association's turn to heap their shovel of opinion onto an already-boring awards season, and it's named There Will Be Blood, the Paul Thomas Anderson drama starring Daniel Day-Lewis as a rich man who speaks slowly and leaves lots of pauses in sentences where you wouldn't really expect them to, as the best film of the year. All in all at the annual vote, There Will Be Blood won four awards and came runner-up in three other categories, blowing the competition out of the water.

Don't worry, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry, we're sure you're still in with a chance somewhere, and we'll keep wearing your garish promotional baseball cap until you get the recognition you deserve.

Los Angeles is a city built on movies. Well, movies and the 90 billion photographers whose sole aim in life is to take a picture of Britney Spears' genitals. And since LA is a movie city, it's only right that the LA film critics should have their own awards ceremony where, say, the film critics of Cockermouth shouldn't. Cockermouth isn't a movie city. Cockermouth is a small town in Cumbria with two cycle shops and a slightly rude-sounding name.

And when better for the LA Film Critics Association to announce the winners of their awards than right at the start of awards season before the average citizen gets so overwhelmed by all the little groups and organisations deciding what films they like that they beat themselves around the head with a boot to kick-start some kind of self-induced coma?

So that's what's happened – the LA Film Critics Association announced the winners of its annual awards last night, and it was an incredible night for There Will Be Blood, the admittedly impressive-looking new movie by Paul Thomas Anderson. As well as winning Best Movie, There Will Be Blood also picked up Best Director, Best Production Design and Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, whose role as a grumpy old oil baron is Very Important because he doesn't make many films any more and he leaves a lot of big pauses between his words in the trailer.

And There Will Be Blood could have won even more, getting second-place nods for cinematography, music and screenplay. All of this LA Film Critics Association love has shunted There Will Be Blood out to become an Oscar front-runner along with No Country For Old Men and, when some of the Academy see us in our natty baseball cap, I Now Pronounce You Chuck And Larry.

Other winners announced by the LA Film Critics Association included Romanian bag of fun 4 Months, 3 Weeks And 2 Days and buddy-cop movie The Diving Bell And The Butterfly. It might be that you're more used to these titles by the time the Oscars come around, it might be that you're not, or it might be that even the sound of someone saying the word 'Oscars' to you will literally make your brain explode because it's all you've heard for three months solid. Tenner says it's the latter.

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L.A. film critics go for `Blood' – LA Daily News