Last week I made note of some of the more conspicuous Best Actor Oscar omissions – Lew Ayres for ALL QUIET ON THE WESTERN FRONT (1930), Charlie Chaplin for CITY LIGHTS (1931), Joseph Cotten for SHADOW OF A DOUBT (1943) – while some of you brought up other favorite shutouts such as James Cagney for WHITE HEAT (1949) and Humphrey Bogart for IN A LONELY PLACE (1950). Starting with 1955 and continuing up to 2000, here are the rest of my Best Actor choices which deserved nominations.     READ MORE

Back when TV Guide was as important a publication to me as The Cub Scout Handbook or Famous Monsters of Filmland, I often ran across the phrase “Good fang work” in the one-sentence reviews that accompanied listings for vampire movies.  I don’t know whose wording that was (the neologism was ported into Leonard Maltin’s movie guides in the 1980s) and its provenance is immaterial to this discussion.   “Good fang work” always struck me as a touch condescending even back before I really understood the meaning of the word.  I didn’t need some faceless adult patronizing me.  I knew good fang work when I saw it… and I still do.

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Motherhood and the movies have often made for boffo box office returns. My glowing memories of those warm-hearted, endearingly fluttery, or nobly self-sacrificing mothers played by Spring Byington, Mary Astor, Fay Bainter and Barbara Stanwyck and others in classic movies may have fogged my vision of celluloid motherhood a bit.

The Silver Cord (1933), a 77 year old film made at RKO, broke that clichéd Mom mold with a disquieting crack, blending a domestic drama with strong elements of high camp. There were Bad Moms around in dramas before and after this exercise in theatrical Freudianism. Noel Coward enjoyed his first big success in the mid 1920s dramatizing the unhealthy relationship between a glamorous nymphomaniac socialite and her drug addicted son in The Vortex (1927), which was made into a silent movie in 1927. The same year as The Silver Cord (1933), director John Ford offered a surprisingly negative portrait of a mother played by Henrietta Crossman in Pilgrimage. Crossman’s dour character was so fixated on avoiding a marriage by her only son to “an unsuitable girl,” she sent him off to the trenches of World War I. And Gladys Cooper brought the Bad Mom to an artistic high point with her portrayals of lethally clinging matriarchs in Now, Voyager (1942) and Separate Tables (1958) in the ’40s and ’50s. The grandma of many of the later indictments of maternal love, however, might be this early talkie, which is statically staged but electrifying, thanks to the author, the actors and their under-appreciated director, John Cromwell.

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Last week I looked at six of the Best Picture nominees from 1943, the last year the Academy nominated ten films for Best Picture, until they expanded the category once more in 2010. Today I’ll look at the remaining four titles, with James Agee and Manny Farber again providing perspective with their reviews from the period. The idea is to approach these films with fresh eyes, outside of the reputations (or lack of) that have accrued over time.

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I love to watch documentaries in a theater on the big screen, where the camerawork can be seen in all its glory and any subtleties of technique are more noticeable. According to some documentary websites, the popularity of this mode of filmmaking has increased, and the advent of DVD has made it more financially viable.

Despite the increase in documentaries, the exhibition and distribution of nonfiction films is spotty. The most lucrative exhibition opportunities exist in the broadcasting market, particularly on public television and cable channels, though filmmakers who make deals in this market find themselves shackled by the tastes and limits of the broadcasting industry. In terms of a theatrical release, docs are generally distributed by small companies, or by the filmmakers themselves who work hard to get their labors of love shown. Few have the money for marketing campaigns, and movie reviewers seldom write about them, let alone advocate for them, preferring to write yet another piece on the latest Hollywood blockbuster. Though mainstream theater chains rarely exhibit feature-length documentaries, doc fans who keep their eyes open know that alternative venues, such as cinematheques, university film programs, museums, small film festivals, and arts centers frequently show nonfiction films of all types.

I am fortunate that my job at Facets Multi-Media allows me to see documentaries I might not otherwise hear about. Nonfiction films are frequently part of the program in our cinematheque, and we often release them on DVD either on our own label or through our distribution partners. Recently, I caught two documentaries that actually made me feel joyful after watching them—something I can’t say for most Hollywood films that I see.

BILL WITHERS NEAR THE BEGINNING OF HIS CAREER

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Most of my cinematic heroes have been ignored by the Academy over the years, and after hearing James Cameron’s “King of the World” speech in 1997 for Titanic I stopped tuning in. Now comes Avatar and I’d rather walk around the block to stick my snout by the fire hydrant to sniff out the more interesting details of what goes on behind the scenes of this momentous occasion. In honor of the fact that this year the field has been extended to ten films, I’m here to offer my top-5 Oscars – that’s right; I’m going to be sloppy about this because my Oscars are named after Jack Klugman’s Oscar Madison from The Odd Couple. Which is to say that these are dedicated to the colorful people I’ve personally come across who went on to walk, or happily stumble (as the case may have been), down the red carpet for the Oscars ceremony in their own unique way. READ MORE

The Best Actor Academy Award. Like every other Oscar category, the idea that there can only be five nominees (or less in some years) is an absurd concept and it’s easy to understand why such actors as Marlon Brando and George C. Scott eventually refused to participate in what the latter called “a goddamn meat parade.” They were clearly in the minority though because most members of the Academy are thrilled to be honored by their colleagues in this yearly competition. Still, for most of us, what constitutes great acting is a purely subjective assessment. Looking back over the years, I’ve compiled a list of my favorite shutouts in the Best Actor category – some of which are glaringly obvious, others less heralded but nonetheless deserving.      READ MORE

By that I mean I’m mad at the Oscars.  More to the point, I hate them.  And I hate that you still love the Oscars even though they take and they take and they give nothing back.  And I want to break you guys up.  And the way I plan to do that is to introduce you to some awards way cooler than the Academy one.  READ MORE

As noted earlier this month in the Personal Journal section of the WSJ, there haven’t been very many sports-related movies nominated for a Best Picture Oscar.  While the sport of boxing has received the most attention from the Academy, only two other sports have had more than a single nominee among the year’s best over its 82 year history:  America’s former and current pastimes – baseball and football, respectively.  Last year’s dramatization of football’s Michael Oher story – The Blind Side (2009) – just received a nomination, but was likely aided by Sandra Bullock’s performance (and nomination for Best Actress) and the fact that AMPAS increased the number of nominees from 5 to 10 for the first time since 1943, when Casablanca (1942) won.

During the Academy’s tenure, only 14 of 479 (less than 3%) nominees for Best Picture – arguably its most vaunted, certainly its most remembered and discussed if not always most acclaimed category – have been sports-related movies despite the inherent drama in stories like that of Jim Braddock (Cinderella Man (2005)), which failed to earn a BP nomination.  One can only speculate whether The Champ (1931) – one of eight nominees for the top award that year, Here Comes Mr. Jordan (1941) and even The Pride of the Yankees (1942) would have been nominated if the Academy had limited the category to 5 nominees, as it did from 1944 through 2008.

But a more interesting question might be:  which sports movies “woulda, coulda, shoulda” been contenders if there had been 10 Best Picture nominees in their respective years?

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