Back about 14 years ago, when Martin Landau was doing interviews promoting his dazzling turn as Bela Lugosi in Ed Wood, I told him he was a cinch to win a Best Supporting Actor Oscar. "Do you really think so?" he asked, doubtfully. I insisted that there was no competition. Besides, he'd paid his dues -- a long career as a character actor, and two unsuccessful nominations in recent years (1988 and '89). I felt vindicated, months later, when he won, but he must have felt especially so, given that his Oscar-nominated bid in 1988's Tucker: The Man and His Dream marked the beginning of a career comeback for him.
1988 was a good year for striking supporting performances by character actors like Landau in films that, unfortunately, too few voters seemed to have watched. Besides Landau's turn as the voice of age and experience in Tucker, there was Alec Guinness' heartbreaking turn as the woebegone father in Little Dorrit, River Phoenix's first mature performance as a teen who tires of his fugitive family's rootlessness in Running on Empty, and Dean Stockwell's surprisingly sympathetic and goofy turn as a villainous Mafia don in Married to the Mob. Guinness already had an Oscar and several nominations to his credit, but 1988 saw the only career nomination for Phoenix (sadly, the Academy must have imagined there would be many more chances to nominate him) and the only nomination to date for Stockwell, who was outshone that year by another comical thug.
That was Kevin Kline, of course, whose dimwitted, short-tempered, live-fish-swallowing thief in A Fish Called Wanda was perhaps the year's most exuberant screen performance. Wanda was also the biggest hit among the nominees' five films. I'd say Kline deserved the award that year, though it's too bad the others had to settle for the honor of just being nominated. At least Landau's vampire eventually earned him a day in the sun.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these performances do
you think was the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Tuesday, Dec. 9, we'll look at the controversial 1998 Best Actor
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
It was Jack Nicholson versus four veteran character actors in the 1983 Best Supporting Actor race, and perhaps no big shock, the grinning Oscar ceremony front-row fixture won the trophy. Surprisingly, however, Nicholson's Terms of Endearment character, retired astronaut Garrett Breedlove, wasn't even in Larry McMurtry's novel, and the actor was the filmmaker's fourth choice for the part (after Burt Reynolds, James Garner, and Harrison Ford turned it down). Nonetheless, Nicholson made the lecherous spaceman one of his signature characters and earned the second of his three Oscars to date. It's certainly impossible now to think of anyone else in that part. (Harrison Ford? Really?) So I think his win was deserved, but it's too bad the all-star supporting players who were his competition couldn't get some recognition; indeed, none of them has been nominated since.
This was the year that Sam Shepard earned his only Oscar nod to date, for his thoroughly convincing portrayal of laconic test pilot Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff. (Having met Yeager myself when he was older but not the least bit slower, I'd say Shepard got him just right.) Rip Torn also earned the only Oscar nomination of his career for his role in Cross Creek, a film that was up for four trophies in 1983 but is almost forgotten today. (Indeed, we couldn't even find a clip of it online.) Charles Durning, who earned a lifetime achievement prize last January at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, picked up his second and (to date) last Oscar nomination, for his broadly cartoonish role as a Nazi colonel in Mel Brooks' remake of Ernst Lubitsch's satirical farce To Be or Not To Be. And Nicholson costar John Lithgow earned the second of his two career Oscar nods for his less showy Terms role as Debra Winger's adulterous lover. (So much less showy that we couldn't find a clip of this one, either.)
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these performances do
you think was the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Thursday, Dec. 4, we'll look at the 1988 Best Supporting Actor
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
I got to bask a tiny bit in the Oscar glory of Steven Spielberg's victory at the 1994 Oscars. I had scored an invite to Elton John's Oscar party, and after the ceremony was through, I looked over, and in came Spielberg, Tom Hanks, and Bruce Springsteen, along with their wives and their multiple Oscars picked up earlier that evening. They all sat down at a booth together at the restaurant, Oscars on the table like so many extra salt shakers, casting a blinding glow of fame, glamour, and accomplishment, at once casually matter-of-fact and jaw-droppingly impressive.
Spielberg deserved his directing prize for Schindler's List that year (he also won as a producer for Best Picture). You could argue that he was overdue after three previous unsuccessful nominations over the past 16 years, but I still think he won on merit. Aside from being a moving story told bracingly and unsentimentally (until the weepy last five minutes) that found an artful way to address the incomprehensible horror of the Holocaust, it's also a dazzling display of technique, with every tool at the filmmaker's vast arsenal brought to bear, and a tale told with the blazing urgency of a man determined to get off his chest before he dies the story he was born to tell. (It's astonishing that he finished this and Jurassic Park in the same year.)
Good as the other directors were that year, no one really came close to Spielberg's achievement. Robert Altman, hot off The Player, directed another sprawling masterpiece of social satire in Short Cuts, but the movie was lacking in heart, and Altman's nod was its only nomination. Jim Sheridan's In the Name of the Father, a true-life tale of injustice and imprisonment, was nothing but heart, but it was otherwise a fairly conventional movie. James Ivory's The Remains of the Day was the sort of elegant, literary chamber piece he'd been churning out for decades, finely polished but almost the same movie as Howards End, his film from just one year before. The only other real standout was Jane Campion, who told a unique and bizarre story in her romance The Piano, and who became only the second woman ever nominated for this prize. Her work here was visionary, and had she not been up against Spielberg, she might have won.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these directors do
you think did the best job? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Tuesday, Dec. 2, we'll look at the 1983 Best Supporting Actor
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
The 1993 Best Actor race was Tom Hanks' to lose, and he didn't. There were several striking performances that year. Laurence Fishburne was searing as the mercurial Ike Turner in What's Love Got to Do With It. Anthony Hopkins was understated to the extreme as the ultimate stiff-upper-lip butler in The Remains of the Day, though his 1992 win for The Silence of the Lambs may have let voters decide it was someone else's turn. Same with Daniel Day-Lewis, searing in In the Name of the Father as a wrongly imprisoned man, but who had also won just four years earlier for My Left Foot. And Liam Neeson was fascinating and mysterious as the unlikely savior in Schindler's List, but the Academy must have felt it had several other opportunities to honor the Holocaust drama (it won in seven of its 12 categories, including Best Picture).
It's easy to chalk up Hanks' prize for his Philadelphia performance to political correctness. A lot of observers thought he was doing something brave and risky, as a straight actor playing a gay man with AIDS (though William Hurt had won an Oscar for playing an embattled gay man eight years earlier in Kiss of the Spider Woman and hadn't seen his career suffer at all). Others may have thought Hanks was owed, having paid his dues, established himself as a serious actor (no longer the goofball from Bosom Buddies and Turner and Hooch), and missed out on the award five years earlier (when his Big kid lost to Dustin Hoffman's Rain Man). Today, Philadelphia seems more heavy-handed and obvious than bold, with Hanks' character a colorless martyr without much of a personality, except when he's passionately discussing opera (see the clip after the jump). In contrast, Neeson's character continues to surprise to this day, as the actor was faced with the more difficult task (to my mind) of trying to answer the riddle of what made Schindler do the right thing. In a movie era where slashers and serial killers are abundant and performances like Hopkins' Hannibal Lecter in Silence try to explain the mystery of evil (even though nothing could be more commonplace and banal), it's much more interesting to probe the mystery of goodness, of why, when it was so easy to do wrong, Schindler risks all to do right. I'm not sure the movie ever finds an answer, and Neeson's performance remains all the richer today for preserving the ambiguity.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these performances do
you think is the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Thursday, Nov. 27, we'll look at the 1993 Best Director
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
The 1988 Best Supporting Actress Oscar race was one of those "Huh?" contests. It was hard to pick out a clear favorite before the race, and the award could have arbitrarily gone to anyone besides Geena Davis. Davis became an A-List serious thespian with her role as a kooky dog trainer in The Accidental Tourist, but the character (a wacky free spirit who helps a dour, work-obsessed, stuffy guy loosen up and embrace life) seemed a stale '60s cliché, and the movie still plays today like it's as starchy as its protagonist.
Then again, who was more deserving? Joan Cusack made the most of her best-friend character in Working Girl, but it was a slight role, and she was competing against costar Sigourney Weaver in the same category. Weaver, in turn, was competing against herself, with her serious, Best Actress-nominated role in Gorillas in the Mist probably siphoning votes away from her comic Working Girl supporting character. First-time nominee Frances McDormand of Mississippi Burning, playing a woman who decides to do the right thing and pays dearly for it, managed to create a fully rounded character, but she had little screen time, and the Academy probably saw her as a young talent who'd surely be nominated again. (Eight years later, she'd win Best Actress for Fargo.) That leaves Michelle Pfeiffer, who gave the most purely dramatic performance as the put-upon prey of John Malkovich and Glenn Close in Dangerous Liaisons. Had I been an Academy member, I'd have voted for her.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these performances do
you think is the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Tuesday, Nov. 25, we'll look at the 1993 Best Actor
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
The 2003 Best Picture Oscar race was one of the few times the Academy voters, the critics, and moviegoers were all in sync. No one was surprised or disappointed when The Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King won Best Picture. (In fact, it won all 11 awards it was nominated for.) If anything, the award seemed like recognition for all three films in Peter Jackson's trilogy, as they were all part of one massive project, filmed at the same time but released over three consecutive Decembers. Given the enormous scope of Jackson's accomplishment at turning the seemingly unfilmable Tolkien saga into movies that were critical successes, fanbase pleasers, and colossal worldwide hits, the award seemed well-deserved, but even judging Return of the King on its own merits -- the thrilling battles, the heartbreaking intimacies of Sam and Frodo's friendship, and the long and poignant farewells -- it was still the most cathartic moviegoing experience of the year.
That's no slight on the other Best Picture contenders. Lost in Translation remains a dreamy gem of a film. Mystic River turned the crime drama into an emotionally wrenching Greek tragedy. Seabiscuit transformed a typical underdog sports story into a national epic. And Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World remains one of the decade's most woefully underrated movies, a thoroughly satisfying banquet.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these films do
you think is the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Thursday, Nov. 20, we'll look at the 1988 Best Supporting Actress
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
Today's Recall the Gold looks back at what may be the most controversial race in the whole series, save for the first one, which was the 1998 Best Picture upset of Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan. It's the Best Actress race from that same year, when the momentum for Shakespeare also swept leading lady Gwyneth Paltrow up to the podium. I actually think Paltrow did a fine job in her gender-bending role as Will Shakespeare's lover/muse/costar; she was funny, emotional, and carried off the English accent. But in retrospect, it seems as clear to me now as it did then that Cate Blanchett's star-making performance in the title role of Elizabeth should have taken the prize. Blanchett took the character from callow schoolgirl to fearsome, isolated monarch, transforming before our eyes. (Trivia note: Both Blanchett and Paltrow played opposite the same love interest, Joseph Fiennes, who was not nominated for either film. Also, while Blanchett did not win for playing Queen Elizabeth I, Judi Dench did, for her supporting role in Shakespeare.)
Also nominated was Meryl Streep (for the 11th time), doing typically excellent work in One True Thing as a dying woman trying to reconnect with her disdainful daughter, but it was for a movie that was otherwise greeted with indifference by both the Academy and moviegoers. Emily Watson did a remarkable job as real-life cellist Jacqueline du Pré, facing down multiple sclerosis with passion and humor in Hilary and Jackie, but the film was probably too-little-seen to have had much impact on the Academy. Fernanda Montenegro may have given the year's most moving performance as the cynical old woman whose heart is melted by a motherless boy in Central Station, but she lacked the glamor and youth appeal of Paltrow, Blanchett, and Watson, and her Brazilian film may have bumped up against the Academy's language barrier (though Life Is Beautiful's Roberto Benigni managed to leap over it that same year.)
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these performances do
you think is the best? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which
may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Tuesday, Nov. 18, we'll look at the 2003 Best Picture
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
Ingmar Bergman never won a competitive Oscar. Hard to believe, but out of all his nominations for writing, directing, and producing, the Swedish cinema giant went 0 for 9. (He did win the Academy's honorary Irving Thalberg prize in 1970.) He was nominated for both writing and directing awards for his monumental swan song, 1983's Fanny & Alexander, but that was the year that Terms of Endearment was not to be denied. James L. Brooks (pictured) won three of that film's many Oscars that year, for directing, writing, and producing the now-classic tearjerker. By usual Academy Awards logic, Bergman didn't really have a chance at a Directing prize that year, since his movie was not also nominated for Best Picture (though it did win Best Foreign Language Film). Same with Mike Nichols, whose Silkwood displayed uncharacteristically quiet and measured work from the director, but which also failed to score a Best Picture nod. (Conversely, the two Best Picture nominees that went unrepresented in the Best Director race were The Big Chill and The Right Stuff, thus shortchanging Lawrence Kasdan and Philip Kaufman. Sorry, guys.)
Also in the directing competition in 1983: Peter Yates for The Dresser, an exquisitely acted movie that nonetheless looks stagebound and claustrophobic, though that fits the story's backstage setting; and Bruce Beresford for the homespun Tender Mercies, a movie whose gentle subtlety has often been mistaken for blandness and inertia. Still, Beresford coached Robert Duvall to his only Oscar win and told a beautiful, sad story of loss and redemption.
Looking back from today's perspective, which of these directors do
you think did the best job? Vote in our poll, and list your comments below.
(For a refresher, watch the clips embedded after the jump, which may contain some NSFW language.) Remember, we'll be running the Recall the Gold surveys every Tuesday
and Thursday until January, so you may go back at any time and vote in
the other polls (click here
to see them all), reexamining the Oscar races of 5, 10, 15, 20, and 25
years ago. On Thursday, Nov. 13, we'll look at the 1998 Best Actress
competition. Watch also for commentary and context throughout EW.com,
including on Dave Karger's Oscar Watch blog.
I'm not really sure what "influential" means in the context of Forbes' new list of the 10 most influential stars. Apparently, it means most trustworthy as a spokesperson (or potential spokesperson) for some off-screen product or philanthropic or political cause. I mean, everyone loves James Earl Jones (No. 9, pictured right), but has he actually influenced people to watch CNN just because it's his voice telling you that, um, you're already watching CNN?
Look at the list as a whole, however, and a trend emerges. Four of the 10 stars on the list are African-American men (including Denzel Washington at No. 1, pictured center), and two of them (Jones and Morgan Freeman, pictured left) have played the president of the United States. Could this "influential" thing is more subliminal and far-reaching than even Forbes had imagined? Just sayin'...
More on Forbes' celebrity lists:
Forbes' 2008 Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list
Forbes' 2008 Most Overpaid Celebrities list
Forbes' 2008 Celebrity 100 Power list
Forbes' 2007 Most Overpaid Celebrities list
Forbes' 2007 Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list
Forbes' Ultimate Star Payback list
Forbes' 2007 Celebrity 100 Power list
Forbes' 2006 Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list
Forbes' 10 Most Trustworthy Celebrities list
Forbes' 2006 Celebrity 100 Power list
Forbes' 15 wealthiest fictional characters list
Forbes' 2005 Top-Earning Dead Celebrities list
There's been a lot of hand-wringing over the past few days about whether comedy will suffer under an Obama presidency because comics (especially the all-white corps of late-night hosts) will feel squeamish making jokes about the new president. I find such talk irksome; it assumes that the president-elect lacks the capacity to make or enjoy jokes at his own expense (clearly not true, given his recent remark that his daughters' new puppy should be "a mutt, like me"), and that his presidency will usher in an era of no-fun-allowed political correctness in which dissenting voices will be silenced. I think fears of comedic censorship (or self-censorship) are overblown and unrealistic, but it will be tricky to make Obama jokes, though maybe not for the reasons the hand-wringers expect.
Granted, we've not heard a lot of Obama jokes so far; the ones floating around since the election, as this Gawker post points out, have mostly been about assassination fears. (Of course, that's more a joke about pervasive American racial paranoia than about Obama specifically; in fact, Eddie Murphy was making similar jokes about Jesse Jackson 25 years ago, and Gawker has found the NSFW clip to prove it.) The reason, however, isn't political correctness but rather the difficulty of finding something in Obama himself to make fun of. He hasn't done anything yet, so he can't be lampooned for his gaffes in office, and he hasn't revealed the personal idiosyncracies that would be easy for comics to caricature. (Poor Fred Armisen on Saturday Night Live, pictured, has successfully mimicked some of Obama's oratorical tics, but beyond that, his Obama has been the straight man in sketches about other politicians with traits that are easier to ridicule.) If there's one positive effect that an Obama presidency will have on comedy, as Gawker suggests, it's that it'll force comics to be more creative and clever in order to find something spoof-worthy about Obama; they won't be able to rely, as they have for the past 30 years, on cheap and easy jokes about, say, Reagan's dottiness or Clinton's libido or W.'s dimwittedness.
