Talk about the Academy Awards, which will be broadcast on Sunday, always revolves around the major categories: Best Picture, Best Actor and Actress, Best Director, etc. That's because acting and even directing are easy for the average moviegoer to understand and form an opinion on. A couple of the more technical categories, like visual effects  and costume design are more obscure but still simple to grasp. (And how does the ring of "three time Oscar-nominee Transformers" strike you?) But what exactly is editing? If you're just assembling all the shots and forming them into a coherent movie, isn't that just part of directing? Well, no. (Unless you're "Roderick Jaynes," which is just an editing pseudonym inexplicably used by the Coen brothers.) Even knowing that, I have never walked out of a theatre and said, "Damn, that was some sharp editing." Today Slate posted an interesting video of film editor Mark Helfrich attempting to explain what makes the movies nominated for Best Editing worthy of the award:

For real this time: the Writers Guild of America strike is over. The final deal between the writers and studios is complicated, as union wage deals tend to be. The gist is that writers will be getting a small slice of the internet revenue pie, just not as much as they originally asked for. But that’s how compromises work: win-win-win. Sometimes.

The real winners are, hopefully, we the TV viewing audience. And our award will be delivered, well, some time within the next few weeks. Possibly months. As if TV wasn’t already a confusing patchwork of schedules, we’re now forced to read TV-columnist tea leaves to find out when shows are coming back. The most comprehensive list I’ve seen so far is this continually-updated post from New York magazine. (But I ask you, New York magazine, whither comes It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia?) Here’s the short list of what matters to us here at ScreeNerd:

Battlestar Galactica: First part of the final season begins on April 4, the rest will inexplicably air in the fall or in 2009. (WTF? Just run the whole frakking season.)

Heroes: No new episodes until this fall.

Lost: Already in progress, but the total episode order for the year will likely be cut down from 16 to 13 episodes. The show could benefit from a compressed season anyway, forcing them to cut the extra fluff.

The Office: Will air 6 to 7 new episodes, beginning on April 10.

Pushing Daisies: No new episodes likely until the fall.

Reaper: Will produce 6 to 8 new episodes; no indication of when they will air.

Weeds: Will start up again this summer.

One thing I will miss about the strike is the incredibly watchable time-wasting on late-night shows like Conan O’Brien, The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, and The Colbert Report. And when those three guys conspire to waste time together, well, it’s pretty hilarious. Check it out after the jump:

My Tivo inexplicably failed to record Jericho last night. So instead of a review, I thought I'd post about this amazing game my co-workers and I made up. It's called... ummm... Theme Song Challenge. Sure, that'll work. Here’s how you play: You and a challenger sit at opposing computers so that you can't see each other's monitor. Both contestants sign on to YouTube and take turns calling up different television show theme songs for the other to guess. Every one you get right earns you a point. The person with the most points wins.

This game is AMAZING. In my first match, I confounded my co-worker with the theme from Alf, which is the perfect theme, totally familiar but completely unplaceable. It sounds more like bad elevator Muzak than the intro to a show about an alien living with a suburban family. My co-worker hit back with 227 (nice!) and then showed his age with Manimal and Great Space Coaster. I riposted with Airwolf, a total pass, only he had never heard of it. (Me: It's like Knight Rider except with a helicopter. Him: The helicopter talked?! Me: No, it was just a bad-ass helicopter.) [If I was in a metal band, we would totally cover the Airwolf theme. –eds] Then disaster struck when he tried to play the theme from Gimme a Break, whose very first line is "Gimme a Break." Foul! Minus 2 points. [If you need an edge, Wikipedia has a helpful list of TV themes with no lyrics. – eds]

The Writers Guild of America strike, which has shut down production of TV and movies since November 5 and, more to the point, turned prime time television into a depressing swamp of reality contests and second-string series, may soon be over.

The excitement picked up yesterday when Michael Eisner – who was ousted as the CEO of Disney three years ago, mind you – said on CNBC’s Fast Money that “it’s over.” Deadline Hollywood Daily, the well-sourced go-to site for news on the strike since the first rumblings, points out that the strike is, in fact, not over, but things are looking promising. The WGA will hold meetings with writers in NYC and LA on Sunday to tell them the details of the proposed deal. DHD says the meetings are expected to be “very long and very contentious,” but if both coasts finally agree that the new contract terms are generous enough, then the strike will be called off.

Could there be an Arrested Development movie in the near future? The New York Post certainly thinks so. I miss that show like a fat guy misses his johnson, but I’m honestly not sure if I really want to see that exercise in bizarre, Freudian (but painfully funny) free-association compressed into a 2-hour feature film.The humor in the eccentric rich family who suddenly lost it all came from about about 60 percent story, sexual innuendo, ironic narration, and slapstick. The other 40 percent was how the show would repeat or reference the same gags across 53 episodes. It was fantastic if you managed to follow Fox’s arbitrary airings of new episodes (or simply bought the DVDs), but it ultimately made the series impenetrable to new audiences and arguably led to its downfall. So the movie will either keep repeating those inside jokes, which probably feels tired by now to even loyal AD fans, or will try to reel in a new movie-going audience by attempting to put every reference in context, which will surely deflate any inherent comedy.Of course, another problem was that Arrested Development, like The Office, is set up as kind of a mock reality show. And with the exception of The Real Cancun, there are no reality movies. (I’m sure if you saw The Real Cancun – admittedly, I never bothered – you understand why that is.) The AD movie might be better off if instead of rehashing low-budget reality TV conventions, the writers made it more like a real film documentary. Those things have become such awards whores since Michael Moore struck box office and critical gold, they’re ripe for a send-up. (King of Kong was awesome, though.) [And they're making a fictionalized version of KOK, right? -the editors]