with Gavan Reilly

Yup, it’s that time of year again – time for glitz and glamour, time for small statuettes named after the Grouch from Sesame Street, time for “I’d like to thank my mom, and my dad, and my agent, and everyone at the Academy who voted for me, and most of all I wanna thank God, blub blub boo hoo hoo”. That’s right: it’s Oscars season, and to celebrate, WebWatch offers the cinematic best of the interwebs.

Of course, movie awards season isn’t for everyone; there are many of us who simply can’t connect with the silver screen in the way others might. Where some see grandeur, grace and beauty, the rest of us might only perceive mass delusion and pretence. What better way for the latter to indulge themselves, therefore, in a selection of movie posters that reflect what really happens in some of the modern era’s more famous movies (http://short.ie/uo91).

Another bugbear that many of us have about Hollywood is its overbloated tendency, once it has found a franchise that works, to bludgeon a movie to commercial death by cooking up sequel after sequel. How many Matrix fans were delighted with how the trilogy ended? None, that’s how many. How many X Men devotees have been heartbroken by the sheer uselessness of the third part of the trilogy? Probably all of them. (Especially me- Ed) And as for Sofia Coppola turning Godfather 3 to muck… well, let’s not go there. And if this is the kind of chat that makes you feel underprepared for Oscar season, then a quick gander at http://short.ie/uo92 will speedily bring you up to date with the best of the big screen’s big trilogies.

One person unlikely to bother the Oscars this year is Christian Bale, whose stock around Tinseltown has fallen through the floor since his so-legendary-it’s-now-actually-boring rant on the set of Terminator Salvation (http://short.ie/balerant if you haven’t, http://short.ie/baleremix if you have and want it set to a trippy dance beat). What most won’t realise about Bale – other than his curiously mongrel accent, being Welsh but American-raised – is his bizarre likeness to Kermit the Frog. Check it out for yourself at http://short.ie/uo93.

Which leaves just enough time for a quick motivational boost from Samuel L Jackson (http://short.ie/uo94), a side-splitting collection of reworked finales from How It Should Have Ended (http://short.ie/uo95), a career condensed in the Morgan Freeman Chain of Command (http://short.ie/uo96), and – coming soon to a poster sale near you – the really-rather-detailed tube map of the best 250 movies ever (http://short.ie/uo97).

As ever, if you have any decent links, share them with webwatch@universityobserver.ie or with @otwo on Twitter.