First of all, I’m very grateful to the hundreds of you who read and shared my piece about Philip Seymour Hoffman. Like many other fans, I am revisiting his work these past few days and find myself laughing, smiling, and crying all over again. It is a great loss, but I’m so moved by our community’s reaction to it, including Anthony Breznican’s story for EW of how Hoffman changed his life, Lee Siegel’s insightful look into the actor’s unique talent for The New Yorker, and Thelma Adams’s propitious story of what Hoffman told her about the process of grief.

But as Hoffman would surely acknowledge, the show must go on, and I wanted to share with you some articles I have published elsewhere over the last few weeks. Hope you enjoy them.

• For The Atlantic, I wrote about the original purpose of the Academy Awards as a propaganda tool for the industry. In that context, we can view this year’s nominees as part of a significant shift towards promoting Hollywood’s younger actors. Read more here.
• The Square, a gripping documentary that puts you on the ground during the Egyptian Revolution of 2011, was nominated for an Oscar for Best Documentary, just days after I gave it a stellar review in Washington City Paper. You can read the review here.
• I may have let my partisanship get the better of me in a piece for Salon about the success of Lone Survivor in flyover states. My hypothesis, that January is a good month for movies that appeal to rural conservatives because urban liberals are busy catching up on Oscar bait, can be read in full here.
• Lastly, I made up for my condescension towards rural America by praising Labor Day, a movie about a small town single mother and her son that was almost universally dismissed by critics. In this piece for Movie Mezzanine, I suggest an urban bias against films that wholeheartedly embrace the small-town, country ethos.