75th Anniversary: The 1945 Oscars Revisited

by Baby Clyde

Bob Hope and the 1945 winners

The war was over and finally Hollywood could get around to more important matters like giving Joan Crawford an Oscar.

It had been a pared down ceremony for the preceding few years with tuxes and ballgowns discouraged. Even the statuette itself had been made from plaster rather than gold plated bronze but at the 18th Academy Awards, which took place at Graumann’s Chinese Theatre 75 years ago today, the glamour was back and there was no one more glamorous in town than 20 year veteran Joan. She skipped the ceremony...

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FYC: Sean Bobbitt for Best Cinematography

by Cláudio Alves

Director Shaka King (left) and Cinematographer Sean Bobbitt (right)

Sean Bobbitt started as a news camera shooter, a photojournalist more than a cineaste. His first feature was Michael Winterbottom's 1999 Cannes Competition entry Wonderland, an auspicious beginning to what would become a splendorous filmography. The collaboration with British director Steve McQueen came to define the cinematographer's career, their work running the gamut from commercials to museum installations and award-winning films like Hunger, Shame, and 12 Years a Slave. Despite all this, Sean Bobbitt has never been nominated for an Oscar. Thanks to Shaka King's Judas and the Black Messiah, that sad state of affairs may be about to change…

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FYC: Julia Garner in "The Assistant"

by Ben Miller

This year’s Best Actress race is filled with powerful women going through big things.  Viola Davis and Andra Day portray groundbreaking artists dealing with systems stacked against them.  Frances McDormand and Vanessa Kirby are women trying to work through immense grief.  Carey Mulligan is exacting revenge for monumental wrongs.

In The Assistant, Julia Garner portrays Jane, an assistant to a Hollywood big wig.  Jane is not going through something big.  She is just doing her job.  Something big is happening nearby, she recognizes, but she can’t do anything about it...

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Rank these 8 time winners, 8 days before the Oscar noms

It's 8 days until Oscar nominations are out. How fun is it that exactly 8 movies have won exactly 8 competitive Oscars? For dumb fun rank the films which pulled off that feat, only one of which didn't win Best Picture.
*cries in Cabaret*

• Gone with the Wind (1939)
• From Here to Eternity (1953)
• On the Waterfront (1954)
• My Fair Lady (1964)
• Cabaret (1972)
• Gandhi (1982)
• Amadeus (1984)
• Slumdog Millionaire (2008)

Showbiz History: Emmys repeating Oscars, Divine's passing, Bigelow's win.

6 random things that happened on this day, March 7th, in showbiz history

Loretta Young, the first actress to chase an Oscar with an Emmy.

1946 The 18th Academy Awards are held honoring the films of 1945 with The Lost Weekend taking Best Picture. We'll discuss this Oscar night later today given that it's the 75th anniversary. 

1955 The 7th annual Primetime Emmys are held. Loretta Young becomes the first Best Actress Oscar winner to then win a Best Actress Emmy prize for a continuing series. Only one other actress ever did this with Shirley Booth following her the next decade (Sally Field would make this a three person list except she actually won an Emmy before her Oscars and subsequent Best Actress Drama series Emmy). In those days TV and Movies were very separate showbiz forms and once you started doing television on the regular, the movie offers dried up. It's different nowadays though not completely; almost everyone who wins the Oscar first and then an Emmy wins the latter for a miniseries or one-off appearance of some kind...

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