Emmy Watch: Best Lead Actor in a Limited Series/Movie

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

Let's move on to the acting races for limited series and TV movies. Last year, this category didn’t have a single nominee from a TV movie. The two leading contenders in this race are sure to reverse that trend – Hugh Jackman (Bad Education), a past Emmy winner for hosting the Tony Awards, and Aaron Paul (El Camino), who took home three Emmys for playing the same part on Breaking Bad. After that, it’s back to the limited series to find most of the other probable nominees…

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And here's to you, Mrs. Robinson

by Cláudio Alves

Some days ago, as part of our 1981 coverage, we talked about Katharine Hepburn's famous Oscar record. She's the only actor to ever have won four statuettes, all of them in the Best Actress category. In that piece, the idea was put forward that, despite her amazing career, the actress wasn't deserving of most of those victories. She might have merited four Academy Awards, but not for those particular works. We didn't explore who should have won in the years Hepburn triumphed, mainly because there isn't a lot of consensus about the matter. Still, while that's true regarding the 1933, 1968 (a tie!) and 1981 Oscars, the same can't be said about the 1967 awards. In that Best Actress race, one performance has shined brighter than all others, gaining a legendary status that goes way beyond the Oscars. 

Since her movie is newly available to stream on Hulu, it seems like a good time to talk about Anne Bancroft as Mrs. Robinson in The Graduate…

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1947: Kathleen Byron in "Black Narcissus"

by Nick Taylor

Ah, 1947. Back when the Golden Globes only announced their winners and neither NYFCC (age 12) nor NBR (age 2) had supporting acting categories. Searching for alternatives to Oscar’s lineup -- as we like to do when approaching a new Smackdown --  is appealingly open-ended. There are ways to find other options without awards bodies, though. The simplest is to call upon decades of film history to see which of any year’s most durable films have noteworthy female performances. For instance, has any other 1947 film so formidably established itself in the canon as Powell & Pressburger’s Black Narcissus... particularly as an offering of great actressing?

Centered on a group of Anglican nuns instructed to open a school on a Himalayan mountainside already infamous for scaring off other settlers, the film maintains the directors’ penchant for overripe atmosphere and jaw-dropping spectacle... 

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Emmy Watch: "Made-for-Television Movie"

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

El Camino

The Emmy race for made-for-television movie hasn’t exactly been the most interesting category in recent years. This category was merged with Best Miniseries in 2011 for three years, during which only six of the nominees were TV movies, and then it was unmerged. Actors in made-for-TV movies still compete with actors in mini-series though in shared categories. Last year marked the first time that not a single acting nominee came from a TV movie. That will definitely not happen this year given the quality of the contenders...

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Introducing... Matty Walker / Kathleen Turner

by Nathaniel R

We thought that a nice subversive way to end our 1981 retrospective party would be to focus on the year's most memorable beginning.

A lot of very famous actors began their big screen careers in 1981 including (but not limited to) Ben Affleck, Kim Basinger, Kevin Costner, Tom Cruise, Jeff Daniels, Holly Hunter, Jennifer Jason Leigh, Bill Nighy, Alfred Molina, Kenneth Branagh, Demi Moore, Sean Penn, and Meg Ryan. Some of those debuts were quite promising. Others gave no clear sign of a superstar to come, just the site of an unknown actor with the ink not yet dry on their SAG card.  But the year's most exciting debut, hands down, belonged to Kathleen Turner. She was the only one of them to emerge fully formed right out of the gate; a movie star merely waiting at the bar for her filmography to arrive.  Risking the ghosts of both Lana Turner (figuratively) and Barbara Stanwyck (literally) for your debut and coming out the other side without remotely suffering from the comparisons is an all time flex...

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