The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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.
Anne Marie has been chronicling Judy Garland's career chronologically through musical numbers...
On September 29th, 1963, The Judy Garland Show finally premiered. With a backlog of several episodes already in the can, CBS chose to start the show with the seventh filmed episode, which guest-starred Donald O'Connor. Reviews of Judy were favorable, though reviewers were less enamored of Jerry Van Dyke and the variety show format. But unfortunately the network's fears about Bonanza were realized: The Judy Garland Show garnered a miserable (for the time) 18 rating, compared to Bonanza's juggernaut 35 rating. As always, the network and the production team was left scrambling to make new changes.
The Show: The Judy Garland Show Episode 7 The Songwriters: Various, arranged by Mel Torme The Cast: Judy Garland, Jerry Van Dyke, Donald O'Connor, directed by Bill Hobin
The Story: Despite some dismal Nielson ratings, the Donald O'Connor episode would prove to be a sweet walk down memory lane for Judy Garland. Though they had never starred in a movie together, O'Connor and Garland knew each other from their days on Vaudeville, when O'Connor was a child dancer and Garland was still one of the Gumm Sisters. Garland and O'Connor reminisce, sing, and dance together, inadvertantly proving something Norman Jewison hadn't quite figured out yet: Judy Garland's power on television came from her long history on stage and screen. While Jewison would continue to make segments poking fun at Garland's legend, fans were tuning in precisely for that legend, and they were very protective of how their star was shown. As Saturday Evening Post reviewer Richard Sherman Lewis lamented,
"The absurd notion of debasing Judy's reputation as a legendary figure and molding her show into an imitation of other prosaic variety shows has been a disaster where it hurts most, in the audience polls."
Despite these protestations, Judy Garland - and by extension her show - would garner a devoted television fanbase that tuned in every Sunday night at 6pm.
Netflix has a paltry offering of new movies coming in November but they're losing a lot of titles (which is their MO of late) so you have just a week to watch the following titles. Amazon Prime is also losing a lot (though they have very strange and sometimes very short streaming schedules and the following titles may be back again before you know it).
It's your last week to watch these titles. You know how we do -- we'll freeze frame a handful of titles and random places just for fun and share what we found. Share your memories of these movies, too.
Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening we'll look back on a horror-connected nomination until Halloween. Here's Sean Donovan on an atypical player...
I miss Joel Schumacher. Aside from two episodes of House of Cards in 2013, the man who brought bat-nipples, bat-codpiece, and lots of bat-ass to the original Batman film franchise has been largely distant from our screens today. Say what you will about Schumacher’s ability to craft fine cinematic art; his movies are fun. And for me, Batman & Robin and the gorgeously camp vampiric coming-of-age tale The Lost Boys more than earn him a spot in Hollywood’s gay hall of fame (do we have one of those?). Is there a more gloriously queer gesture than taking the Batman franchise, one of the sacred cows of straight male comic book fandom, and lathering it in trashy homoerotic leather daddy gear?
Flatliners, Schumacher’s 1990 near-horror falls inbetween The Lost Boys and his Batman era...
tfw you always think of Best Supporting Actor as the dullest and weakest of Oscar's annual acting races but then remember it's only because of how they pick 'em because there are already more than enough stellar candidates for a truly exciting and deserving lineup and even more worthy players to come with movies left to see so this list could double in size and it's going to be so painful to say goodbye to any of these men when you have to narrow it down to a measly five at year's end and how are you going to do that exactly and why do you put yourself through this to "list"? [WHEW. Run on sentence intentional. Sometimes you have to spill and all the feelings want to come out at once.]
Twelve favorite supporting actors to date for 2016 in no particular order are pictured below. Films left to see that could affect this race include: Hell or High Water, Sully, Bleed For This, Hacksaw Ridge, Fences, and Silence... and probably a few I'm forgetting.
Of course Oscar views these things differently and Best Picture heat and level of fame helps more than it should in the acting categories. Let there be Chart Updates!
Wednesday, October 26, 2016 at 10:30AM 
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.
