Oscar Horrors: "What Ever Happened to Baby Jane?"

Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening 'til Halloween we look back on a horror-connected Oscar nomination. Here's David on the cinematography of a camp classic...

What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? is hardly remembered as a horror classic; its camp reputation precedes it, as its recent appearance on RuPaul’s Drag Race: All Stars attests. (Only the finest for that crop of drag queens!) While the film is not what we might traditionally think of as a horror film, it has the same elements of lost souls, grotesque faces and physical cruelty that you might expect from any product of the genre. Just one year after Alfred Hitchcock changed the genre forever with Psycho, Baby Jane features a close-up of Joan Crawford’s face mushed against the floor - an eerie recall of Janet Leigh’s glassy-eyed demise.

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Transparent Season 3. Part 3 - The Wrap Up

The marvelously special Amazon show Transparent, keeps on delivering dynamically as season 3 wraps up.  When Chris left us off, faith and religion had begun to take a firmer hold on the show and its characters, and Josh (Jay Duplass) was on his way to visit his biological son Colton to tell him of mother Rita’s death...

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42 Days Until...

Are you excited for the latest live TV musical offering or are you already exhausted by this trend? I'm personally excited about this one since the casting is so good. I saw Harvey Fierstein do this onstage during original previews and it's still one of my all time favorite Broadway memories. Plus the score is great fun.

Oscar Horrors: The Dangerous Editing of "Fatal Attraction"

Boo! It's a bonus episode of "Oscar Horrors". We're looking back on horror-connected Oscar nominations until Halloween. Here's Daniel Crooke on a Best Picture nominee's brilliant rhythms

Fatal Attraction wants you to keep your doors locked; it gets off on invasion. On lulling you into a false sense of security, sneaking in through the back gate, and shredding the nerves of you and everyone inside while it wreaks increasingly deranged havoc with maniacal glee. Such manipulation is not only the mark of a great psychopath but of a great editor, as well. In Fatal Attraction, you’ve got both; Glenn Close’s rhapsodic performance as jilted stalker Alex Forrest slashes at unexpected intervals but she meets her match in the finely screw-tuned cuts of Michael Kahn and Peter E. Berger. Adrian Lyne’s classic cautionary tale of infidelity gone wrong and what happens when you turn down someone’s invitation to the opera goes for the jugular (and the groin and the brain) but it’s up to Kahn and Berger to keep your guard down, raise the hairs on your neck, and provide a clear path for Close to sneak up behind you with the knife.

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Oscar Chart Updates in All Categories!

We're just 90 days away from our Christmas (Oscar Nomination Morning) and 123 days away from Hollywood's High Holy Night now (our New Year's Eve, the Oscar Ceremony) and we can definitely see the excitement building. All charts have been updated to reflect current buzz mixed with crystal ball hunches.

The biggest mover on the chart is Lion moving up in multiple categories for 6 predicted nominations. It won the Audience Award at Middleburg Film Festival this weekend (beating La La Land which beat it for the same prize in Toronto). With each festival outing it proves itself a true crowd pleaser and with its smartly positioned November release (away from one of the biggest Christmas gluts we've ever seen) it will have built up considerable momentum by the time precursors are hitting.

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