Showbiz History: Ingmar Bergman's Rise and Vera-Ellen's Centennial

6 random things that happed on this day, February 16th, in showbiz history

1938 Screwball classic Bringing Up Baby premieres in San Francisco with a release following two days later. It's one of the best films of 1938 or maybe even the best... but it was not appreciated in its day.

1957 The Seventh Seal premieres in Sweden and becomes the first of four consecutive Swedish Oscar submissions from Ingmar Bergman. Unfortunatly Oscar ignores it...

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Thinking of her...

Congratulations to the National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Nominees

The nominations for the the Los Angeles Press Club's 13th annual National Arts & Entertainment Journalism Awards have been announced and some of the nominees are people you definitely read if you're into films and awards. There are many categories so several journalists are double, triple, or quadruple nominated, in that they're honored for their overall work and then for specific articles or podcasts  or whatnot.  Like any awards body the Press Club mostly only honors very high profile work so if you look at the nominees you'll notice that The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, Hollywood Reporter (33 nominations), and Variety (99 nominations) are all over the place. 

Congratulations to all the nominees! We've shared six categories that we think might interest you most after the jump... 

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Best International Feature: Denmark, Hong Kong, Norway

by Cláudio Alves

With the shortlists announced, we now know which of the 93 Best International Feature submissions still have a chance to contend for Oscar gold. AMPAS has selected 15 finalists, a third of which will be honored with an Academy Award nomination come March 15th. Here at The Film Experience, the team has reviewed most of the shortlisted titles. However, four still haven't been analyzed. To start correcting that, here's another trio of capsule reviews. It's time to explore the pictures submitted by Denmark, Hong Kong, and Norway… 

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Gay Best Friend: Plato in "Rebel Without a Cause" (1954)

a series by Christopher James looking at the 'Gay Best Friend' trope

Sure, Plato stared at Jim that way just because he wanted to be his good friend, right?After a few months of looking at the gay best friend trope over the past 30 years, we wanted to go back to a time where the “gay best friend” couldn’t be called a “gay best friend.” The Hayes Code stopped queer life from being outwardly depicted on screen. However, that didn’t keep gay characters off the screen. Screenwriters, directors and actors would “code” certain characters as queer. This allows them to pass as “straight” and make it through the sensors, but people could look at signals and recognize the characters as queer.

One of the more famousl “gay best friends” during the code era was Sal Mineo’s Oscar-nominated portrayal of Plato in Nicholas Ray’s Rebel Without a Cause. How could we tell he was gay?

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