It was a record year for Hollywood, as domestic ticket sales reached an all-time high in 2013 of over $10.8 billion. Eight of the top 10 highest-grossing movies were sequels or revivals, and 13 films exceeded the $200 million mark, led by the $409 million performance of “Iron Man 3.”

It is no surprise of course that most of the year’s big earners were animated or genre movies — action, fantasy, and science fiction to be specific — but those are not traditionally the kinds of movies that get rewarded during movie awards season. The big push at the start of the new year for movie studios both big and small is to capitalize on the multitude of awards leading up to the Oscars on March 2 in hopes of affecting box office receipts.

Lots of award-worthy films are entering the home video and streaming video marketplace, and at least eight films up for many of the major movie awards are currently playing in Lawrence theaters. Still more (“Inside Llewyn Davis,” “Her”) are opening within the next couple of weeks, so now is the perfect time for film fans to catch up with some of the year’s most recognized films.

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The Golden Globe Awards is voted on by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, a mysterious group made up of sketchy foreign junketeers who report on Hollywood movies abroad. The show kicks off the year with its televised event on Jan. 12, hosted for the second year in a row by Tina Fey and Amy Poehler. “12 Years a Slave” and “American Hustle” lead the nominees with seven nominations each, while “Nebraska” earned five and “Gravity” and “Captain Phillips” have four nominations apiece.

That’s why all the television ads you’ll see in the next couple of months for these movies will feature all kinds of graphics of little statues. In fact, this year they have gotten so misleading that many of them print the word “WINNER” in huge capital letters next to the number of nominations and “nominations” in a tiny, hard-to-read graphic bar below, referring to the fact that a movie has won nominations. Tricky, right?

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Believe it or not, the HFPA — not the most credible of organizations itself — has actually asked the studios to stop running this style of graphic, in an effort to preserve the “integrity” of the Golden Globes. (The Academy Awards addressed this years ago.) In recent years, the Globes have become less and less relevant as predictors of the Oscars, and with the infamous three nominations for the critically reviled Johnny Depp-Angelina Jolie rom-com “The Tourist” three years ago, the HFPA has come under fire for catering to big-name movie stars.

The Academy Awards nominations themselves will be announced the morning of Jan. 16, and the televised Critics’ Choice Movie Awards — voted on by the Broadcast Film Critics Association, of which I am a voting member — also take place that night. The Critics’ Choice Movie Awards is certainly a better Oscar predictor, as every best picture winner from the BFCA since 2006 has matched up with the Oscars, save one, and rightly so: “The Social Network” beat eventual Oscar best picture winner “The King’s Speech” in 2011.

Like the Globes, the Critics’ Choice Movie Awards separates comedies from dramas, and in the last couple of years they have added awards for action and genre moves as well. With 28 different categories, it could make for a pretty crowded and long TV show, so I’m anticipating that many of the awards will again be given off camera. I just hope that they prioritize better to avoid the embarrassment of last year, when “Lincoln” scribe Tony Kushner accepted his best adapted screenplay award during a commercial break.

One person who has already won and accepted his 2013 Oscar is Steve Martin. Back in November, he received an honorary Oscar for lifetime achievement as a writer, producer and actor at non-televised event called the Governors Awards. This invite-only gala was created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) so they could give career awards out without pestering the millions of TV viewers during the Oscars with something as petty as movie history.

I’ll never forget the Oscar moment two years ago when Francis Ford Coppola, George Lucas and Eli Wallach were introduced onstage as honorary Oscar winners — only to be given time for a quick wave to the crowd before they cut to commercial. But I digress.

Tuesday night, Liberty Hall will be presenting the movie that features Steve Martin at his most stupidly absurd. 1979’s “The Jerk” was directed by old-school comedy legend Carl Reiner, and although it’s steeped in a long tradition of portraying absolute idiocy in movies, it may also be the forebearer of “Dumb and Dumber” and the Farrelly brothers’ brief reign in the ’90s as comedy kings.

“The Jerk” is the perfect movie to bridge the gap between modern comedies and the vaudeville tradition (it even stars Jackie Mason), and viewed today, it’s a pretty nutty time capsule. The movie gets away with a lot because Martin’s Navin Johnson (the son of a poor black sharecropper who somehow never knew he was adopted) is so sweetly naïve.

Liberty Hall is showing this politically incorrect classic on its big screen at 7 p.m. Tuesday for only $5, and this will likely be the only chance you’ll have to see it that way for a long time.