Misc: Lawrence & Schumer, Gaga & Bomer, Léa & Channing, Guest & Cast

Pajiba Tom Hardy on Dubsmash with his stunt double. Awwww
The Wrap Michelle Pfeiffer is going to play Robert DeNiro's wife again (because that worked so well for them in The Family?) in HBO's movie about the Bernie Madoff scandal called Wizard of Lies
AV Club Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Schumer wrote a movie together and they'll play sisters
Comics Alliance in praise of the superheroic male miniskirt 
Film School Rejects terrifies us with a list of actors returning to franchises they departed both real and suggested. Make it stop, universe. Oh god make it stop.
Vulture has a new podcast about the art of the TV pilot. Fun discussion (and excoriation of Fear the Walking Dead) but I was disappointed that Glee doesn't get props. That show turns into a disaster in record time but damn that pilot was a beauty.

Film Actually suggests 10 awesome Bollywood soundtracks for your listening pleasure
Vanity Fair whoa. A.J. Langer (better known as Rayanne Graff on My So Called Life) is now a British royal of sorts. She married a Count.
The Tracking Board Wes Ball, who directed The Maze Runner, will make a Norse mythology movie called Fall of Gods 
Toybox Batman figures that look like they were designed by Aardman animation
Vulture talks to Kate Winslet about Shakespeare ("you're saying that because I'm British") and Steve Jobs
MNPP shares a terrifying NSFW moment from a movie I've never heard of featuring Chris Pine
MNPP also has a book shelf in the movies fetish. I thought I was the only one so this is kind of unnerving
/Film Léa Seydoux joining Channing Tatum as Gambit's leading lady
MNPP first looks at the cast of American Horror Story: Hotel in character. There is a lot of punk dandy boy looks happening
Coming Soon Remember when everyone thought Joaquin Phoenix was too crazy to go on working?  Things didnt pan out that way and he became a bigger star. But one thing he is crazy about is auteurs. He loves working with them and repeating the trick. Next up is another M Night Shyamalan film which will be his third 

Regret to Inform...

Eugene Levy & Catherine O'Hara are NOT in talks to star in Christopher Guests's new Netflix film Mascots. But a lot of the other regulars are including Jane Lynch, Parker Posey, John Michael Higgins, Bob Balaban and Jennifer Coolidge. Joining the family is Chris O'Dowd, who worked with Guest on the shortlived Family Tree for HBO.

And The Honorary Oscars Go To... Debbie Reynolds, Gena Rowlands, and Spike Lee.

No sooner had I published a list of speculation / suggestions for November's Honorary Oscars then the actual awards were announced. (I  must have misread the date on the Academy's meeting about this so we've unpublished and will revisit that topic at a more appropriate time.) For now, a hearty congratulations to a satisfying trio of recipients with very different appeals. We're throwing streamers and popping out of (okay eating) cakes this afternoon to celebrate!

Our Oscar Theme Song

All I do... is dream of you... the whole night through
with the dawn... i still go on... and dream of you
you're every thought... you're every thing
you're every song i ever sing
Summer. Winter.... Autumn and Spring 

DEBBIE REYNOLDS, "America's Sweetheart" back in her heyday (roughly speaking the 50s through the mid 60s), is your populist choice, not unlike Maureen O'Hara last year. Well liked showbiz legends that were never really critics darlings or in the Oscar hunt competitively can win Honorary Oscars if they stick around long enough. So here's to longevity! Reynolds, who is 83, made her first credited movie appearance in 1950, received her sole Best Actress nomination for the musical The Unsinkable Molly Brown (1964)... and has literally never stopped working. This is a true showbiz trouper.

OF NOTE # 1: Carrie Fisher is going to be much in demand for the next several months given a) her mom's Honorary Oscar victory lap, publicity for her new memoir, and her own return to her signature Princess Leia this December in Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens.

OF NOTE # 2: Postcards from the Edge, the thinly veiled Carrie Fisher/Debbie Reynolds comic biopic starring Meryl Streep and Shirley Maclaine hits its 25th anniversary in a couple of weeks and we'll be celebrating that too.

GENA ROWLANDS was a regular Oscar player in her heyday (roughly speaking the late 60s through the early 80s) and is easily your aesthete's choice this year. She's a hugely influential actor and cinephiles have been bemoaning her Oscar losses for years, due in large part to her groundbreaking early indie work with her husband John Cassavettes. She's also worshipped by discerning film buff actors. Consider Tilda Swinton's quote on her film Julia, which was a loose remake of Gena's earlier film Gloria.

One's always downloading one's heroes, I suppose, all the time.  I remember being asked whether I thought about Gena Rowlands for "Julia" and thinking 'well, I think about Gena Rowlands all the time!' Not just for 'Julia'.

SPIKE LEE you could safely and cynically call this point in the 2015 honorary triangle their diversity choice but he's also entirely deserving so bless the media for putting so much pressure on Oscar voters to diversify! There's more to cinema than old white men (many of them are worth celebrating, too, but Oscar amply covers that without prodding). What's more, unlike Debbie Reynolds and Gena Rowlands, who couldn't really be called mistreated by the Academy for various reasons, AMPAS truly owes this maverick auteur. His indisputable classic Do The Right Thing (1989), his biopic epic Malcolm X (1992), his late career best 25th Hour (2002), and his biggest hit Inside Man (2006) have a measly 4 Oscar nominations between them with no wins. His only nominations to date were for his documentary 4 Little Girls (1997) and the screenplay of Do The Right Thing which, insane as it may sound, both lost. 

AND HERE'S WHERE YOU COME IN DEAR READER...

Last year we did mini-retrospectives on the Honorary winners when we noticed a dearth of coverage on movie sites (for shame) beyond obligatory news posts of the names and the later ceremony. Which films from each of their filmographies would you most like to revisit or discover for the first time with us before the ceremony on November 14th? 

Viola 'on the move'

How did I miss this incredible news in the New York Times?!? Viola Davis, on the Emmy campaign trail for her Shondaland series How to Get Away With Murder, talked about all her future projects. It's good news times three.

Q. In addition to “Suicide Squad,” what else are you working on?

A. They are making “Fences,” August Wilson’s play, into a feature that Denzel Washington is directing and I’m going to be in. My husband and I started a production company, and we are doing Harriet Tubman’s story for HBO that Kirk Ellis is writing. And Tony Kushner is writing a project that we got greenlit at Fox Searchlight about the great congresswoman out of Texas, Barbara Jordan. I’m always moving.

She also explains the reasoning behind her recent populist / less prestigious genre choices...

Q. So starting your company let you be in control?

A. Yes, but it’s a lot of work to be the boss. You’ve got to have two trains going at the same time. You have to stay relevant, hence “How to Get Away With Murder,” hence “Suicide Squad. “You have to stay relevant, because if you are not, no one will take a chance with you on even a $2 million budget. But then at the same time you have to take risks in terms of material that moves you.

Good luck to her as ever. We've been in her corner since 2002 (the "who is that" triple whammy of Far From Heaven, Antwone Fisher, Solaris) and we don't plan to go anywhere!

I don't want to say that we willed movement onto the Fences adaptation but IT'S ABOUT DAMN TIME. And though her Barbara Jordan project has been talked up for three or four years now, there's been no real movement on it until now. Thank you Fox Searchlight! Now let's get all of this fast-tracked right now since Viola Davis just turned 50 and you know how Hollywood likes to turn on women when they do. There's no time to waste!

Pointless But Fun What If Trivia: If Viola wins the Emmy for HTGAWM next month and the Oscar for Fences when that movie is released (astoundingly big "ifs" but go with it) than she'll just be a Grammy short of an EGOT since she already has two Tony Awards (for lead and featured). It's worth noting that if she wins all four competitively she'll be the very first African-American to accomplish it and only the second woman of color after Puerto Rico's Rita Moreno. Now, technically, three black icons (Whoopi Goldberg, Harry Belafonte, and James Earl Jones) have all four but those statistics come with the heavy asterisks that also plague Liza & Babs in that at least one of the prizes was given non-competitively or in a "lesser" form. I mean, sorry Whoopi, but you shouldn't count daytime Emmies anymore than you'd count regional Emmys (they give those things out like candy!) towards the showbiz quadruple. (Yours truly personally prefers the Triple Crown -- easier to follow and the Grammys aren't actor-focused like the other three so there's less beautiful symmetry! -- but Tina Fey's 30 Rock destroyed popular culture's interest in that statistic by popularizing the notion of the EGOT.)

Ingrid Bergman at "The Inn of the Sixth Happiness"

Tim continues our Ingrid Bergman centenary retrospective which concludes Saturday...

The two films Ingrid Bergman headlined in 1958 offer a splendid study in contrasts. Both are obvious attempts at image control as she re-entered the American film industry following the scandal of her out-of-wedlock pregnancy by Italian director Roberto Rossellini, and they approach that mission as differently as they could. Indiscreet, which Anne Marie just looked at, is a head-on confrontation with the scandal, humorously defusing it with satiric candor. The Inn of the Sixth Happiness, on the other hand, is a forthright piece of special pleading that we should ignore all of that unpleasantness by squashing Bergman into the role of the saintliest damn woman who could be scrounged up.

The living saint in question was Gladys Aylward, a London housemaid who became gripped by the idea that she should give up everything to move to China in her 30s to be an informal missionary and later became a national hero for her charitable work with orphans. Bergman was such a poor fit for the tiny Cockney brunette that Aylward herself openly complained about the casting, as well as just about every plot detail in a screenplay by Isobel Lennart that fairly should be counted more as a fantasia on the themes of Aylward's life than a legitimate biography. [More...]

Click to read more ...

Nicole with 'Photo 51'

Nicole Kidman shared this photo to her facebook page yesterday 

It was a privilege to actually prepare with the original Photograph 51! Thank you King's College London for the opportunity…Love, Nic xx

She doesn't list the photographer (argh) but it's quite beautiful, don't you think? For those who are like "what's 'the original Photograph 51'?" and I readily admit that I fell into that category yesterday, it's the first photographic evidence of DNA. She's starring in a play titled after this historic artifact of both photographic and scientific history and the subsequent sexist accreditation for said discovery. Murtada previously wrote about her involvement in the play. Previews begin on September 5th in London for the limited run play that will close on November 21st.. Tickets here if you're lucky to be in London this fall. And, yes, this does mean we won't see her on many red carpets this season but it's a noble sacrifice as returning to the stage often rejuvenates smart serious thespians.