You’ve got to feel a bit for Naomi Watts. Her 2013 started so promisingly, with a second Oscar nomination for “The Impossible.” She’d waited pretty long, and fought pretty hard, for it — cue a second wind for her career, right? Wrong. Well, not yet, at any rate. Only days after the nomination announcement, Watts’ silly romantic drama “Adore” (yes, the one where she and Robin Wright shag each other’s sons) was laughed out of Sundance. And that wasn’t the worst of it: once talked up as a possibility for Oscar nod #3, “Diana” has been humiliated by critics and ignored by audiences. And there was “Movie 43″… Nathaniel Rogers considers her briefly triumphant nightmare year, and wonders what she can do to put it behind her. [The Film Experience]
Roxane Gay would like to see a few more prestige films about black people in which they don’t suffer or struggle. [Vulture]
Bruce Dern on the long wait for “Nebraska” to get made, and why he thought it would happen without him. [Variety]
Vadim Rizov on the growing cult of “The Counselor,” an example of the Twitter-generation film maudit. [Film.com]
Gregg Kilday is tired of ageist dismissals of Academy members who are supposedly too genteel for “12 Years a Slave.” [Hollywood Reporter]
The Producers’ Guild has decreed that the late Laura Ziskin is one of three producers eligible for Oscar consideration for “The Butler.” [The Wrap]
Why “Thor: The Dark World” is an example to the “New Abnormal” blockbuster. [House Next Door]
Ryan Lattanzio argues that the commercial art film is soon to be a thing of the past. [Thompson on Hollywood]
The LA Times appears to have launched its own pundit-prediction chart. Not much different from the others, but if you feel like cross-referencing them all… [The Envelope]