Now that the mtvU Fandom Awards are less than two weeks away, the battle of the fan groups is getting hotter.

Your votes have been counted, and the second round of the Fandom of the Year tournament is under way. And if you thought the choices were tough to make in round one, you might not want to look below. The categories are that competitive!

Movies

It’s YA dystopia versus YA dystopia and quippy teens versus quippy former teens.

We can’t say that we’re surprised to see these four films facing off, but that doesn’t make it any easier to choose.

TV Dramas

Some of TV’s best dramas couldn’t even make it past round one. “Breaking Bad,” “Game of Thrones,” “Pretty Little Liars” and “Vampire Diaries” may have bitten the dust, but there’s still a fierce competition raging.

TV Comedies

Sure, it was pretty “Awkward” when you learned “How I Met Your Mother,” but if you vote as a “Community,” there’s sure to be some “Glee.”

Animation

Anime versus anime versus anime versus anime. Fandoms, make your voices heard!

Voting in round two is open until Friday, July 18 at 12 p.m. ET, so get clicking, and watch the mtvU Fandom Awards on July 27 at 8 p.m. ET / 7 p.m. CT.

MTV News Staff

In its first two episode, “The Leftovers” struggled because it wanted to have its cigarette and smoke it too.

Creators Damon Lindelof and Tom Perrotta have made clear that we’ll never know what happened to the vanished two percent, which is a brave creative idea because it puts the audience in the same position as its cast and denies them what would be the most obvious payoff from the start.

To make up for this lack of mystery, however, “The Leftovers” has kept the motivations of character like the GR and Wayne Gilchrest from the audience entirely, making us wonder why these people do any of the things that we see them do. It’s a great way to add an air of mystery to a show, but it’s just as alienating for the audience, since we don’t get to know much about anyone or why we should care at all about the mysterious things they do.

Episode three fixes that problem in many ways by laying bare Christopher Eccleston’s character, the town pastor Matt Jamison, who we’ve seen only briefly in the previous two episodes. The hour, entitled “Two Boats and a Helicopter” features short appearances by Justin Theroux and Amy Brenneman, foregoing every other storyline in favor of focusing squarely on Matt and his life post-disappearance.

Where the previous two episodes purposefully obscured the main characters for the sake of the show’s need for mystery, “Two Boats and a Helicopter” succeeds because of how unflinchingly it dives into Eccleston’s character ...

There’s a movie opening this weekend on a handful of screens in New York and Los Angeles. It’s a movie that you may not have heard of, but it’s one that everyone will be talking about for the rest of the year and a long time to come.

Richard Linklater, best known for his “Before” trilogy, has been working on the same movie for 12 years, three or four days at a time. That dedication resulted in something wholly unlike anything that’s ever hit the big screen before, and it’s the reason everyone will soon be talking about “Boyhood.”

If you haven’t heard, “Boyhood” is a fictional movie that feels real because we watch the characters age over the course of 12 years. It focuses primarily on Mason, played at the beginning of the movie by 7 year-old Ellar Coltrane, but we also peer in to the lives of his sister and divorced parents. Over the course of nearly three hours, we watch him age and simply live life.

Nothing that happens in Mason’s life is extraordinary, but watching him grow and go through familiar experiences is extraordinarily fascinating.

With 94 reviews tabulated, “Boyhood” is currently sitting at 100 percent fresh on RottenTomatoes. The universal critical acclaim, combined with its one-of-a-kind production will undoubtedly lead to serious Oscar buzz. If Linklater doesn’t get nominated for Best Director, some unfathomably good movie will have to have come out between now and the end of the year.

So be sure to ...

Fresh off of new details from writer/creator Nic Pizzolatto, Variety is reporting that the second season of HBO’s “True Detective” has found its first cast member.

According to the site, Colin Farrell is in talks to join “True Detective,” presumably as one of four leads for the brand new story Pizzolatto plans to tell next season.

The Wrap also reported that in addition to Farrell negotiating for a role, HBO is taking a serious look at “Friday Night Lights” alum Taylor Kitsch for another role. Kitsch had been previously mentioned in early casting reports, but it seems now that those talks have advanced.

There’s no word on when the next season of “True Detective” will air, but Pizzolatto indicated that he was about halfway done with the scripts.

Kevin P. Sullivan

Writer/editor for MTV. If it involves cowboys, spies, or hitmen, I'm there. All three would be ideal.

@KPSull

The internet can be a silly place, especially when it comes to rumors about superhero movies. Offhand comments become concrete evidence in no time at all. That’s what happened last night, when the internet became convinced that Benedict Cumberbatch has been cast as Doctor Strange.

It all started with a single tweet.

That’s all it took to start off a firestorm of speculation and quickly drawn conclusions.

For those who aren’t familiar with the work of Latino Review, they’re the guys who pride themselves on releasing Marvel Studios casting and story details before anyone else, and this kind of purposely teasing tweet is a specialty of theirs. While Latino Review obviously has good sources when it comes to Marvel movies, the tweet essentially means nothing. Anyone can tweet something like that.

See? It might sounds like I have inside info, but I’m not really saying anything.

But that didn’t stop other Twitter users from completely losing their minds. Immediately people, assuming El Mayimbe’s tweet confirmed a definite casting choice, began connecting the dots and even making some dots up that weren’t even there.

The conclusion: Benedict Cumberbatch is definitely playing Doctor Strange.

How did people get from El Mayimbe’s vague hint that he knows who Marvel has picked as their Sorcerer Supreme to declaring Cumberbatch signed on? Let me demonstrate how internet fandom works.

According to an initial casting report from Deadline in June, Marvel Studios had drawn up a wish list for Stephen Strange and it supposedly included Tom Hardy and Cumberbatch. ...

The cast and crew of “Fast & Furious 7″ have had a tougher production than they ever could have imagined, and in a bitter sweet Facebook message, they have announced its completion.

“Today we completed the last shot in the production of FAST & FURIOUS 7,” the post reads. “We wanted to take this moment to express how thankful we are for your support. We felt the love and strength from our fans throughout this journey, and it’s because of you that we got here. There was a time when we didn’t know how we could go on, or even if we should. But we listened to you, and you inspired us not only to keep going but to try and make the best FAST & FURIOUS movie yet.”

The entire post is a gracious “thank you” to the many fans of the “Fast & Furious” series, as well as to all of the people who worked on the franchise’s seventh installment.

The passing of Paul Walker was obviously a driving force behind the post, but the message only made brief mention of the star, who died in a car crash last year. “Our family is big and strong but it won’t ever quite be whole again without Paul,” it said. “All of us — those who’ve been here from the start and those whose first FAST film is 7 — wanted to create a special film for him and for you. We believe we have.”

“Fast & Furious ...