5 things that happened today, March 23rd, in Oscar History only...
1950 The 22nd annual Academy Awards honoring 1949 are held. All the King's Men wins Best Picture but it's the Olivia de Havilland classic The Heiress, among the Best Picture honorees, which wins the most Oscars (Actress, Costume Design, Art Direction, and Score) and has had the longest cultural shelf life thereafter.
1990 Pretty Woman hits movie theaters becoming a sensation and Julia Roberts ascends to superstardom...
She nabs Best Actress Oscar & BAFTA nominations as well as her second consecutive Golden Globe win. Who would you have voted for that year?
- Kathy Bates - Misery
- Anjelica Huston - The Grifters
- Julia Roberts - Pretty Woman
- Meryl Streep - Postcards from the Edge
- Joann Woodward - Mr & Mrs Bridge
And would you have traded any of them for the non-nominated leading ladies that year?
- Mary Alice - To Sleep With Anger (Spirit Nominee)
- Cher - Mermaids
- Laura Dern - Wild at Heart
- Mia Farrow - Alice (Globe nominee)
- Anjelica Huston - The Witches
- Jessica Lange - Men Don't Leave
- Genevieve Lemon - Sweetie
- Andie MacDowell - Green Card (Globe nominee)
- Maria de Medeiros - Henry & June
- Helen Mirren - The Cook The Thief His Wife and Her Lover
- Demi Moore -Ghost (Globe nominee)
- Michelle Pfeiffer - The Russia House (Globe nominee)
- Natasha Richardson - The Handmaid's Tale
- Susan Sarandon - White Palace (Globe nominee)
- Debra Winger - The Sheltering Sky
1998 The 70th Academy Awards honoring 1997 are held with Titanic performing a near-sweep winning 11 Oscars (losing only Best Actress, Best Supporing Actress, and Best Makeup). It shares the record of most Oscar wins with Ben-Hur (1959) and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) but the latter is the only one of the three that managed a clean sweep, winning every category it was nominated in.
2003 The 75th Academy Awards are held honoring 2002. Chicago and The Pianist battle it out for Best Picture in an extremely December heavy year (all the Best Picture nominees, 4 of the directing nominees, and 15 of the 20 acting nominees were December releases). We discussed this Oscar year both last summer and also recently on This Had Oscar Buzz.
2018 Wes Anderson's Isle of Dogs hits US movie theaters in limited release. It will later score two Oscar nominations for Best Animated Feature and Best Original Score, both of which it totally should have won.
Oscar-approved birthdays today
Happy 57th birthday to three time Best Costume Design nominee Mary Zophres (True Grit, La La Land, and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs)
Happy 62nd birthday to two time Best Supporting Actress nominee Catherine Keener (Being John Malkovich, Capote).
Happy 73rd birthday to Best Supporting Actress nominee Penelope Milford (Coming Home). Other film credits include Heathers, Valentino, and Take This Job and Shove It
Happy 92nd birthday to director Mark Rydell, Oscar nominated for On Golden Pond (1981). He also directed various actors to Oscar nominations in The Reivers (1969), Cinderella Liberty (1973), The Rose (1979), The River (1984), and For the Boys (1991).
Happy 79th birthday to two time Oscar nominated Austrian master Michael Haneke of Amour, The White Ribbon, and Caché fame.
Today in 1925 the Oscar winning cinematographer David Watkin (Out of Africa) was born in England. Out of Africa was his sole nomination but he also shot Oscar nominees like Yentl, Moonstruck, Chariots of Fire and hit movies like The Three Musketeers and Help!. Oscar was pretty stingy with him. He was more popular with BAFTA where he received 9 nominations and 1 win (also for Out of Africa)
Today in 1914, the Oscar winning screenwriter Nedrick Young (The Defiant Ones, Inherit the Wind) was born.
Today in 1910 the legendary director Akira Kurosowa was born. Oscar only officially nominated him once for Best Director for his King Lear adaptation Ran (1985) but they also gave him an Honorary Oscar for his career as well as showing favor on several of his movies like Dersu Uzala and Rashomon which both won Best Foreign-Language Film and Oscar nominations in various categories for Ran, Seven Samurai, Kagemusha, Dodes-ka-den and Yojimbo.
Today in 1904 the incredible Joan Crawford was born. Oscar resisted her for years but finally caved with Mildred Pierce (1945), arguably her best work and you know how rarely Oscar rewards gifted actors at exactly the right time (!). She received two additional Best Actress nominations for Possessed (1947) and Sudden Fear (1952).
Today in 1893 in Dublin, Ireland Art Director Cedric Gibbons was born. He is the all time Oscar champ for Best Art Direction (now called Best Production Design) with 40 nominations and 11 wins. Some of his classics include The Wizard of Oz (1939), Gaslight (1944), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1945), The Yearling (1946), An American in Paris (1951), I'll Cry Tomorrow (1954), Lust for Life (1956), and Somebody Up There Likes Me (1956)