EricJ

No, Black Panther is the one they "wanted", and sort of had pegged from February as "Maybe this will be good enough!" (Ie., in its "social significance", not the fact that they just found out for the first time that Marvel movies are actually kinda neat.) The black voters wanted it as "their" nomination long before BlacKKKlansman made a showing; everyone else wanted it for the Pixar Value of finally seeing a Marvel movie get something non-technical after ten years. The "Guesses" happen when we get Acting nominations upgraded to a Picture nomination (qv. Bohemian Rhapsody)--Or start cribbing buzz-favorites from the Golden Globes, like those people who, stack of bibles, actually thought Mary Poppins Returns would be a Best Picture contender. And yes, they've been trying to kill '09's failed ten-nomination "experiment" ("Maybe it'll bring more commercial films in, and Dark Knight and Wall-E would have had a chance!") since 2015, but something always keeps them from getting around to it.

(The prosecution rests.) 😓

And only a few movie directors ever died of drug overdoses.

Since Rob Lowe & Snow White had been long gone by the time Billy Crystal was embedded in the 90's, the historical cutoff point at where The Audience Started to Hate the Ceremonies can be pinpointed to one moment in the 1999 ceremony: Debbie Allen choreographs a dance tribute to "Saving Private Ryan". (Well, that's the legend--In fact, it was a "Dance tribute" to all that year's Picture nominees, including "Life is Beautiful", but one moment stuck forever in our collective memories.) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TFA2BbuImyc That was something the audience thought they could never un-see: After that, for the next twenty years, every single bit of miscellaneous variety was symbolically punished for the crime of its predecessor. Anything...ANYTHING...that didn't shut up and give the awards and keep things moving--including the speeches--were subconsciously considered the Antichrist on a Harley whipping puppies. Best Song, Life-Achievement, In Memoriam, explanatory Best Picture excerpts, and yes, even the Chuck Workman classic-clip montages were considered "wastes" of the audience's valuable time. And faced with grumbling imaginary lynch-mobs, the ceremony kept bending over farther and farther backwards to placate them, until they snapped a spine. (The second year Jon Stewart hosted in '08, they tried experimenting with cutting out ALL extraneous entertainment, and the resulting graduation-line was one of the dullest Oscar disasters of the 00's.)

I'm not fond of Tony Richardson (or Tom Jones, and certainly not Loved One), so maybe I'm biased in saying Hotel New Hampshire was a hot mess-- George Roy Hill and Robin Williams could make head or tail out of "The World According to Garp", and Michael Caine made "The Cider House Rules" watchable, but both wandered off of their John Irving books to create something relatively cinematic. Richardson, OTOH, films Irving straight out of the text, and...yikes. 😵 Irving may simply be one of those unfilmable authors, just like nobody's ever yet done a watchable Kurt Vonnegut movie.

Yeah, see, that's supposed to be the "ironic" title of the movie, especially for gritty, cynical Nixon-era crime thrillers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hI1nPd7hezM (Aw, c'mon, most of us already knew that...)

There's more good 80's-90's Matthew Broderick than bad--oh, there we go mentioning The Freshman again, he makes the "middle" Neil Simon Biloxi Blues watchable, and if you're one of those people who consider "80's" as a film genre, Project X is about as nostalgically genre-generic as they come--but War Games and Ferris Bueller were the lone Insufferably Smug exceptions...Judge not by those two directorial/screenwriter indulgences. Yes, John Hughes was one of the few people who could turn even Matthew Broderick into a prime a-hole. (Or even, as YouTube pop-culture conspiracy theorists have suggested, a textbook sociopath.) He's his usual fresh-faced "good" character in Ladyhawke, but even Broderick couldn't make his weird script-stylized dialogue sound like something actual human characters would say.

Lee Grant got the only "Oscar moment" of the actresses, as she cracks up near the end, giving Faye the chance to go over the top. As for Katharine Ross, she seemed to be in every All-Star Epic, but she still wasn't a face I recognized. And no, Orson wasn't wearing a cape, but he did have a cravat, sit in Cuban cafe's, and deliver all his lines as if he was reading the script for the first time off of his "newspaper", doing one of his voiceover-narration hosting jobs, or tossing humorous anecdotes off the cuff on Dick Cavett. ("It seems the...passengers' lives have now...just become a....matter of...political NEGOTIATION?") Now I've got an urge to look up "The Cassandra Crossing"--an early film from the "Rambo" director--which had no Oscar ambitions whatsoever and even looks even cheesier for All-Star Lord Grade epic.

Voyage of the Damned (1976) Watching Amazon Prime is starting to become like the "Storage Wars" of overlooked movies: Some independent distribution company will buy back packages of expired studios, license them to Amazon who'll show anything, and searching Prime can become like browsing the back shelves of that favorite mom-and-pop VHS store. Just this week--this week--one distributor dug up a package of late-60's to late-70's Lord Grade ITC "All-star international epics!", bringing up "March or Die", "The Tamarind Seed", "The Cassandra Crossing", and many of those other little-pictures-of-the-cast All-Star International Epics that disappeared after "Raise the Titanic" sank them out of favor along with the studio. (And yes, if I'd just been patient a few months, I wouldn't have had to look that one up on YouTube...Darn.) I'd been curious, as the studio had floated this one as their big Oscar-bait of the year before it pretty much dropped off the face of the earth, and it's easy to see why--For the first hour, in the story of a thousand 1939 German refugees relocated to Cuba as a propaganda stunt, we get so many of the standard "Wartime passengers of destiny" subplots, those who didn't know their history would think it was a rewritten Titanic epic, and the ship was going to sink. The story, of course, is that a corrupt, bureaucratic Cuba didn't want them, a 30's isolationist US wouldn't take them, and the doomed passengers might ultimately be sent back to Germany. That should be drama (and provides plenty of Trump parallels), but it's oddly uninvolving--Compared to the less realistic Wartime Passengers of Destiny in Robert Wise's The Hindenburg that same year, that one had a better feel for prewar tensions hiding in luxury class..."Hindenburg" made you dream of traveling on luxury zeppelin, "Voyage" just makes you feel like you're on a long trip with a rude staff. Director Stuart Rosenberg plays the Jewish-history angle too subjectively, he feels as if the audience is already on his side from the beginning, like "Schindler's List Goes to Havana". 70's-era Faye Dunaway plays her usual ruthless hysterics, Max Von Sydow is the sympathetic ship captain, and Ben Gazzara gets the noble speeches as the government representative, but most of it falls apart in the over-the-top climaxes. Malcolm McDowell looks a bit confused at having to play a good character as a teen steward who finds romance (when he helps foil a German-intelligence ploy, watch the Alex deLarge bad-boy come back out again) and Orson Welles shows up as a Cuban bureaucrat, but with his strange 70's-Welles delivery, you're genuinely not sure whether he's trying for "casual raconteur", or whether he's befuddled by his own lines because he was at the career point where he couldn't remember them anymore. I find I'm digging up better movies on Prime than on Netflix, but it's not a good situation for streaming when most of it's dumpster-diving for good big-budget movies that show up there by accident.

Most of the circus tricks aren't in the rules, so once black players could get in the NBA, there was no need for "negro-league" basketball or baseball (qv. Bingo Long's Traveling All-Stars & Motor Kings) except as exhibition teams. And never had a better dream-team than the 70's lineup most of us children of 70's TV-culture grew up with--I'd forgotten Meadowlark's crazy ball control or bouncing a free-throw. "Fast Break", and no. "Pittsburgh" was the one with Stockard Channing as the astrologist/sports-nut who coaches the team, and Jonathan Winters as the token dopey-white owner.

"Oh, I hate working on deadlines..."

I remember Siskel & Ebert staring at the smugly-Coen-stylized "Kinky bowling warriors" scene, and--like most sober people watching Big Lebowski--shrugged, "So...what are we supposed to make of that?: That bowlers take themselves too seriously?" (Basically, either you have the same love for the Coens that they have for themselves, or you DON'T.) I'm not crazy about the Farrelly Brothers either, but at least they managed to make Kingpin before they burned themselves out and went mainstream. And am I going to mention Dreamer as the low point of mid-late 70's underdog-sports movies, where we officially proclaimed the genre dead?...Nahh. 😛 Unless it's the Pittsburgh Pisces, with Meadowlark Lemon up against Dr. J: (The only time we saw Harlem Globetrotters moves onscreen outside of Saturday morning or Gilligan's Island.)

Well, that's pretty much WHY Thenryb put Eight Men Out on his list: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LlJx0tWUuGY You could make a separate list for Best Baseball movies, topped with The Natural and Eight Men Out. (Field of Dreams would rank lower for being "too hippie", Bull Durham close behind, A League of Their Own for being too Lifetime-Network, and Pride of the Yankees would be pretty far down the list. And just because Disney later drowned us in two dozen other bad saintly-coach and/or ragtag-team sports epics hoping "The Mighty Ducks" would happen again, doesn't mean that 2004's Miracle isn't one of THE best sports movies ever made, period, full-stop: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bd0_Dm2xlEM

Some of the good ones came out in the 80's (like Misery)-- Christine (1983) feels like the purest straight "text" version of King's style, via John Carpenter; everyone started going back and watching David Cronenberg's The Dead Zone (1983) during the '16 Trump campaign, and Cat's Eye (1985) is more of a fun tongue-in-cheek fluff-diversion to clear the palate. The 70's stories, like Brian dePalma's Carrie (1976), were a little too early in his writing style, and his 90's-00's stories were starting to drift out of genre-horror, although I'll still defend what Tom Holland could make out of Thinner (1996)--If we couldn't have prime 80's Holland direct prime 80's King, this is the next best thing. Actually, they were promoting it because the '60 videotape was just being released on VHS! at the time. And where it was probably the best version on TV we had for about twelve years, until they put the '00 Cathy Rigby production on DVD. I believe Rigby's performance will solve a lot of the 1960 problems you may have had with Mary's production. "Gaudy" was certainly the word for a lot of late-50's/early 60's TV variety. (A rare package of 50's kinescope stage productions surfaced on Amazon Prime, including the original B/W 50's first Mary Martin version, but it's fairly identical, and...no improvement.)

"Screen legends" out of the movies they HAVE. Movies on cable/streaming don't exist before 1985, you know.

Private Life of Sherlock Holmes has some occasional Wilder-ish moments, mostly in side comic situations where Watson finds people constantly mistaking his relationship with Holmes--not that the movie itself doesn't, either--but they feel like Wilder's own stylistic additions to a big-budget early 70's UA movie that anyone could have directed. It's Wilder with a big budget, but could just as easily have been Blake Edwards with a big budget. (Albeit slightly better.) It's a few steps above what the Will Ferrell/John C. Reilly movie wanted so desperately to be, but...........WASN'T. 😱

Okay, I'll cite the same Bugs Bunny quote I used every other time I heard some easily impressed Criterion fan rapture over Terrence Malick's "vision": "Tell us your story from the beginning:" "Well, in the beginning, the volcanoes were erupting, the earth was forming!...Then, in a little pool, two tiny amoeba--" "No, no, that's TOO far back!" 😄 (And Honest Trailers already did the joke about Boyhood, ie. that we already had a movie where we got to watch the young cast grow up into teen years as they were filmed in real time over the course of ten years--Namely, the Harry Potter movies.) Btw, was it Gene Siskel who first officially coined the "Hours of your life you'll never get back" phrase, or does anyone remember an earlier usage before 1978-81?

I'm not sure which is funnier, Marlon Brando as Don Corleone ice skating, or Brando as Corleone discussing Curious George. ("Yeah, yeah, the...'Man with the Yellow Hat'.")

Back when we still had a TCM/Filmstruck blog, the blogger tended to get a little, um, overexcited during Gay Cinema themed month, point out that veteran Lewton writer Dewitt Bodeen was "one of us, one of us! ", and tried to find all the buddy-shoutout "hidden lesbian subtexts" in Cat People that were sure to be there. (And, like most "hateful/intolerant" folks who objected, I was kicked off for asking what she made of Irena & Amy's "secret" relationship in Curse of the Cat People. I don't recall whether there was anybody left to comment on the blog, by the time it moved to Tumblr.) So, yeah, I was sniffing a little in that direction, although we're told how free-spirited the sister was, I took the "Suicide" angle more to be that of the self-destructive party life in the artists' Village community. Which, again, six o' one... (Accdg. to IMDb, Bodeen's original draft just had the heroine investigating a string of murders before she might become the Seventh Victim--But like most Lewton title-switches, we can only guess what was on Val's mind.)

In fact, not to show off or anything, but believe that IS California Suite in the picture?

The Seventh Victim (1943) The last RKO film on Warner's Val Lewton boxset that I could never find at the library, but it just turned up on Amazon VOD, and I had a free digital rental, so thought I'd clean up the oversight. I'm not sure if this is the film that officially caused RKO to rein in their errant art-horror guru--and stick him with Boris Karloff to make sure they got actual horror, just like Universal--but, more than most Lewton films that started out as a completely different story, this one's probably his most...muddled. The story feels like it spends so much time trying to be an "allegory" for something, it's hard to nail down what the flipping heck it IS. Supposedly, we follow virginal girls'-school student Kim Hunter, as she has to go to NY to track down her missing sister who disappeared into the Greenwich Village life, and later discovers her sister has been marked for death by a sinister occult organization among the city elite, and you can never tell who might be In On It--Call it "Rosemary's Sister". There's an intriguing beginning with a private detective, two helpful male romantic-leads, and the usual Cat People-esque Val Lewton nervous street chases, but once we meet the sister, the story keeps trying to lecture us on something else. We learn that the sister was starting to feel unfulfilled and suicidal, but once the Sinister Organization catches up with her, to "sacrifice" her into silence, their method is to sit her at a table and browbeat her into trying to drink a glass of poison--after all, she wanted to kill herself, didn't she?--like Eyes Wide Shut re-enacting the Death of Socrates. And although we're told who the Sinister Occult Organization is, we never actually see them doing anything sinister or occult: With a few rewrites, the baddies could just as easily have been secret Nazi saboteurs, and, in DeWitt Bodeen's earlier murder-mystery draft of the story, probably were. The movie ends with our two heroes catching up with the baddies and self-righteously lecturing them, for reasons that seem to go a lot deeper than just being Sinister or Occult. Unlike the usual tight Lewton button-pushing (there's a neat chill that foreshadows Hitchcock's shower scene, seventeen years early), there's so much Message, Metaphor and Allegory muddling the thriller, it feels like a screenwriter wanted to get something off his chest--It's the kind of story that a screenwriter would write after going through his own personal issues, and forget to not make them so personal for the studio.

A while back, we had one female movie blogger/essayist who (wishfully) thought Norma was the tragic martyred "heroine" of the movie, still preserving her pure love for Hollywood gone by, and sadly crushed by it as her "We had faces then" went unheard... And the reaction from most of the actual movie fans was: "Nnnno. No, no, no, no, no. NO." She's what Joe could have become if he stayed around longer--The movie opens with studio hopeful Joe floating in a pool, and as we learn, it was Hollywood that pulled the trigger. To borrow the Eagles' metaphor, no one ever checks out of the Hotel Hollywood, and certainly not on their own two feet.

More than that, though--Think one of the reasons a foreign genre-based hit, like "Let the Right One In", "Shall We Dance?" or "Girl With the Dragon Tattoo", even when they do become hits in mainstream cineplexes with subtitles, immediately have studios thinking they "have" to do big-budget Americanized remakes with A-list stars, is a sort of snobbery about the type of films that foreigns have been associated with. We see "French" and think it'll be artsy and obscure, "German" and think it'll be disturbing and experimental, or "Swedish" and think it'll be full of whispering sad people, but when a country produces a real action movie, horror or fantasy, Hollywood studios think those countries have gotten "too big for their britches": Hey, Norway, you're not allowed to make "Trollhunter", you're one of those European countries, you're just supposed to make obscure talky dramas about forbidden affairs, play arthouses, and just get snooty critics' awards! "Snobbery", yes, but here's the thing: HOW did they get that reputation in the first place? Nobody's exactly innocent.

I didn't mean YOU-you, I meant the rhetoric reader. Most people picked that up. We've actually had very few foreign-language Picture nominees, and those were considered to be the good ones of the indies--It's just the glut of indies itself that's been considered the bane of the Post-'04 Oscars, and yes, isolating it down to just "Americans don't like non-American films" did come off a bit too snobby in adopting that as what looked like one oversimplified explanation. Okay, you liked Roma, we've established that. If this were a five-nomination year, it would make the "A"-list five-nomination cut. It's just the Academy still stubbornly sticking to its failed '08 idea that "Eight or ten nominations would bring in more commercial films"--When, as it turned out, exactly the OPPOSITE happened, and glutted the Picture races with minor cerebral indie films more suited for just a handful of Acting and Writing nominations just to fill out the list, and caused the natives to turn restless. Most of us spotted it the first year, when a lot of buzz about "Gee, will Quentin Tarantino get something for 'Inglorious Basterds' like he usually does?", or "'District 9' will probably get a Picture nom, it's, like, really metaphorical about South Africa!" gave us the distinct hint that the voters were starting to get a little desperate and guess.

Those are the black marks, but Front Page is worth watching for being the "real" (un-coded) version of the original 20's play, tailored for Wilder's usual Lemmon/Matthau team-up. (Btw, I am the first person so far to mention the funny Lemmon/Matthau team-up in The Fortune Cookie, I'm guessing?) Reportedly, it was originally going to be a Dan Aykroyd & Bill Murray TV-news "Front Page", on the heels of Ghostbusters' success, but Murray was starting to act like a diva and wanted to get out of comedies, and the project fell into studio-hell mutation.