With the Oscars airing tonight, the categories that always seem to lead to a lot of head-scratching in office Oscar pools are the three shorts categories. Even with Shorts HD Oscar Nominated Shorts program, which gives viewers a chance to see all the shorts in theaters and in other formats, it's often hard to figure out how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences might decide which of the shorts deserve the Oscar. With that in mind, ComingSoon.net reviewer Joshua Starnes sat down and watched all 15 Oscar shorts to give you some idea what they're about in case you haven't had a chance to watch them yourself:

There are 24 categories for which awards are given by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences at the main ceremony in February, not counting the technical or student Oscars. I'm sure everyone reading this has some opinion on the major categories: director, picture, actor, and screenplay. A smaller percentage will even delve deeply into the technical side, maybe even to the point of being able to explain to their friends what a sound designer does, or who the likely winner is for the sound mixing category when filling out the office pool.

At the obscure end of the line, where only the voters themselves can speak intelligently, are the shorts categories—live action, documentary and animated. And now you can, too, because we've watched them for you so you don't have to.

The 85th Annual Academy Awards, now simply known as "The Oscars," take place on Sunday, February 24, live from the Dolby Theater in Hollywood, and ComingSoon.net's Oscar Warrior, Edward Douglas, will be live-tweeting the festivities starting at 6 p.m. Eastern, 3 p.m. Pacific. Stay tuned on Sunday for how you can follow along here on ComingSoon.net!

Over a month since the first films were announced for the 42nd Annual New Directors/New Films program held in conjunction by the Museum of Modern Art and the Film Society of Lincoln Center between March 20 and 31, they've announced the full line-up of films. Alexandre Moor's Blue Caprice, starring Isaiah Washington, Joey Lauren Adams and Tim Blake Nelson, which premiered at Sundance last month has been named the Opening Night film while Penny Lane's Our Nixon takes the Closing Night.

The shorter month of February comes to an end with a couple of surprise hits and some serious disappointments, but this is a lighter weekend with just two new movies before the absolutely nutty month of March where there's nearly 20 movies in the first weekend alone.

This week's options in wide release include the crime-thriller Snitch (Summit Entertainment), starring Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, and the alien invasion thriller Dark Skies (Dimension Films).

Oscar night is less than a week away and two more movie guilds announced their awards over the weekend with the Writers Guild of America (WGA) following the other guilds by awarding Ben Affleck's Argo for its adapted screenplay by Chris Terrio. Mark Boal's original screenplay for Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty won in that category.

Meanwhile, the Motion Picture Sound Editors (MPSE) gave out their 2013 Golden Reel Awards for sound editing with Ang Lee's Life of Pi taking two awards, one for its music sound editing and another for its dialogue and ADR (automatic dialogue replacement). Les Misérables won award for music sound editing in a musical while the James Bond movie Skyfall won for sound effects and foley.

Yesterday, two technical guilds announced their top honors for the year and once again, Ben Affleck's Argo, was in the mix as it won the the 63rd Annual American Cinema Editor's ACE Eddie award for drama. David O. Russell's Silver Linings Playbook took the Eddie award for film comedy.

The Cinema Audio Society made up of film sound mixers gave its own awards out yesterday with Tom Hooper's Les Misérables (Universal) winning their top honor.

Oscar night is roughly ten days away and one of the complaints we hear almost every single year from readers and colleagues alike is that "there are no surprises left." Often that's because every award in the months leading up to the big show tends to go to the exact same actors and movies so that when they win an Oscar, it's not nearly as exiting as winning an Oscar should be.

Right now, it's looking pretty definite that Daniel Day-Lewis will win his third Oscar for Lincoln and Anne Hathaway will win her first for Les Misérables and Ben Affleck's Argo has created such a huge momentum for itself by winning just about every recent award since Ben Affleck was snubbed for a directing Oscar nomination that it would only be a shocker if it DIDN'T win Best Picture.

But what about all the other categories and which of them offers the closest races and potential for surprises? Read on!

We're back to doing separate "Chosen Ones" again, and I apologize that it's running a bit later than usual, but this one combines my thoughts on the movie with a couple quotes from the filmmaker.

Pablo Larrain's No has been doing the festival rounds for nine months going back to Cannes in May, which culminated in its Oscar nomination in the Foreign Language category. This is considered the third part of a thematic trilogy that began with his Tony Manero and continued into Post Morten (which I missed), but thanks to distributor Sony Pictures Classics, the presence of Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal, it may be the first chapter that many Americans will see.

It's President's Day weekend but more than that, it's also a weekend that starts somewhat early as the Hallmark holiday of Valentine's Day lands on Thursday, which means a lot of couples will be going out on dates that night, going back to school or work on Friday and then some will have off on Monday. There's quite a variety of movies including the first family movie in quite some time, and some movies may take better advantage of Valentine's Day and be more frontloaded then others. Either way, this could be the weekend where movies take advantage of the generally slow weeks in January so that we see one of two big openings as movies do better than expected.

Leading the way is Bruce Willis' return as Detective John McLane in A Good Day to Die Hard (20th Century Fox), the Nicholas romantic drama Safe Haven (Relativity Media), the animated family film Escape from Planet Earth (The Weinstein Company) and the young adult novel adaptation Beautiful Creatures (Warner Bros.)

So we're back with another look at the movies coming out in two months or more. Originally I wanted to look at the two movies pening on the weekend of April 12, but then Screen Gems moved their horror remake of Evil Dead up a week to April 5, meaning it wouldn't open directly against Dimension Films' return to horror spoofs with Scary Movie 5. Undaunted, we're going to still look at both of their box office prospects and how this move might potentially help both of them.

Both movies have seemingly been in development or talks for years, at least since the middle of the last decade with Scary Movie 5 following nearly seven years after the last installment in a series that saw four movies released in four years. Even though it opens one week later, we're going to look at that one first since it's somewhat of a known quantity.