Oscar's complicated history with the "complicated woman"

by Matt St Clair

Remember when Maggie Gyllenhaal won a Golden Globe for her starring role in the miniseries The Honorable Woman? During her acceptance speech she spoke about not just the wealth of strong roles for women on television, but roles as complicated women, saying, “when I look around the room at the women who are in here and I think about the performances that I’ve watched this year, what I see actually are women who are sometimes powerful and sometimes not. Sometimes sexy, sometimes not. Sometimes honorable, sometimes not.” Complicated female characters on TV still receive more proper acknowledgement than those in the movies. 

While Carey Mulligan earned a recent Best Actress nomination for her role as the duplicitous avenging angel Cassie Thomas in Promising Young Woman, the Oscars have a historically spotty track record when it comes to acknowledging actresses for playing complicated, and sometimes calculating, women....

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The 25 Oldest Men Ever Nominated for Best Actor

by Nathaniel R

John Wayne just misses the list. Denzel almost double dips. And Hopkins tops the list setting a new recordWe did a "Youngest Best Actor" list a few years back so we thought we should balance it out with their counterparts given the return of Sir Anthony Hopkins this year at 83 years of age with The Father. He makes history in the process as the oldest nominee ever in this category. As we all know Oscar likes some years on his men (as opposed to how he feels about women) but that doesn't mean the golden years. Oscar loves men to be in their late 30s through mid 50s (whereas with women they prefer late 20s through mid 40s) but ageism  works against men, too. Just not as severely as it does against women. The roles still dry up at a certain age... though perhaps that's more on filmmakers and studios than the Oscars themselves. 

LIST HAS BEEN UPDATED WITH MINOR CORRECTIONS. (04/02). And a surprising piece of trivia about this list. Only one of the top 25 oldest nominees in this category actually won the Oscar. Not a strong success rate for senior men. Oscar likes to bid them farewell but doesn't feel the need to send them off with the statue (or a second statue)...

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Yeun Trouble Now

by Jason Adams

It's really no surprise that writer-director Jordan Peele is at that point in his career, after Get Out and Us, where he could land anybody he wanted to land for the cast of his next movie -- he's got the sort of heat that would get the dead stars of yore reanimating in their caskets for a slice of that sweet cinematic success. But instead of choosing, say, the skeleton of Gary Cooper to star in his next flick, Mr. Peele is going with a cast of current babes and we cannot complain! (Although hey Gary Cooper's skeleton, call me.)

The title and the contents of Peele's new one are naturally being kept under wraps but we already know it will reunite him with his Get Out leading man Daniel Kaluuya as well as co-star the should-be-a-superstar-already KeKe Palmer -- this was announced back in February, along with the whisper that whatever this movie is KeKe is playing the villain in it. And today comes word that that tag-team of hot trouble is actually a trouble throuple, as Best Actor nominee and everybody-crush Steven Yeun is also joining the film. As who? Who cares? Buy your tickets today!

Doc Corner: 'Tina' on HBO

By Glenn Dunks

Tina Turner does not like to talk about herself and her life with abusive ex-husband and artistic collaborator Ike Turner. She notes this in Tina, a new HBO documentary about her life. But she is aware that public interest in it, which is why she has to keep on telling us all about it. This is show business after all, and if she doesn’t, somebody else will. First it was People magazine. Then it was Kurt Loder’s I, Tina. That was followed by a film adaptation, What’s Love Got to Do With It?

One would have hoped that that film would have been the end of it for Turner, her story of abuse and late career triumph captured on film to great acclaim and with an Oscar-worthy performance by Angela Bassett. Nearly 30 years later, however, Tina is back as the subject of T.J. Martin and Daniel Lindsay’s documentary. Whatever the directors’ reasons for doing so, I am unsure. But for Turner herself at least, she has decided to take this opportunity to bid farewell to her fans and to (hopefully) put her story to bed.

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93rd Academy Awards: A strong Adapted Screenplay race

by Eric Blume

We have our strongest list of contenders for the Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar that we’ve had in years…I’d argue one of the strongest ever.  These five films represent vastly different stories and emphasize different screenwriting strengths, and involve an array of intelligent decisions from the writers in delivering the best cinematic experience possible based on their source material...

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