3 Must-Have Movie Apps for Oscar Night

The Oscar telecast this Sunday, which starts at 4 PM PT on ABC and ends approximately three days later, is the movie buff’s Super Bowl. Film geeks gather excitedly around their HDTVs with friends and make bets on who will win. They eat and drink. And then they get bored when the speeches drag on or there’s yet another tedious montage/tribute.

During those “down” moments, it helps to have a few apps ready to go on your second screen. Here are three free mobile apps to download in advance of this year’s Oscars.

* Oscars. The official app of the Academy Awards is a field guide to this year’s nominees, with movie trailers, photos and social media hooks. This app isn’t for gossip or the latest thinking on who’s going to win. Instead, the app promises streaming red carpet and backstage videos via an “exclusive” Backstage Pass. The app is available for iOS and Android.

* Guess The Movie is a fun iOS and Android game that tests your movie knowledge. There’s a category for “Best of 2012 Movies,” for instance. To play, you click an image, such as a line-art drawing of Lincoln. Then you type in which movie you think the image represents (an obvious choice, in this example). It sounds easy but actually isn’t. Some of the images stumped me.  

* MovieQuoter is a new iOS and Android app that features over 150,000 movie quotes, which you can add to photos you take or that are in your camera roll to create a social media meme. (Really, you can’t create a meme, you put something out, and it either becomes a meme or not but you get the point.) Anyhow, being brand new, this app could use some further development. For instance, I found absolutely zero quotes from this year’s ten Best Picture nominees. And a search for one of my all-time favorites, Annie Hall, came up with quotes from Annie the musical. As Little Orphan Annie’s dog would say, “Arf.”