Sessue Hayakawa: From sex symbol to Oscar nominee

We've been celebrating 1957 for a couple of weeks. Here's one more from Cláudio Alves

In 1957, Miyoshi Umeki became the first and only Asian woman to win an acting Oscar. However, the Best Supporting Actress champion wasn't the only Japanese performer to score an Academy Award nomination that year. Sessue Hayakawa, who played the ruthless Colonel Saito in the Best Picture winner The Bridge on the River Kwai, became the first male actor of Japanese descent to be nominated by the Academy. Unlike Umeki, who had less than a decade of experience in show business by the time she achieved Oscar glory, Hayakawa had a long history with Tinsel Town. Many decades before his nomination, when the American film industry was creating itself and Silent Cinema was entertainment for the masses, Sessue Hayakawa had been one of the first sex symbols… 

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Yul Brynner Centennial: "The Ten Commandments"

by Eric Blume

Back in the day, Cecil B. DeMille’s epic The Ten Commandments received an annual Easter airing in network prime-time, much the way The Wizard of Oz and other family classics would be broadcast annually with much fanfare, delivering consistently high ratings each year (remember:  only three network options!).  I feel like I saw The10Cs multiple times when I was a little kid, each year mesmerized by its massive sweep, colossal size, and amazing special effects.

Revisiting the film for the first time as an adult, in honor of Yul Brynner’s Centennial, wowza is it a howler...

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Smackdown '57: Sayonara, Peyton Place, and Witness for the Prosecution

In the Supporting Actress Smackdown series we take a particular Oscar vintage and explore it with a panel of artists and journalists. This time we're talking 1957

THE ACTRESSES & CHARACTERS
In 1957 Oscar voters were in the mood for fresh faces. Four rising stars (Hope Lange, Carolyn Jones, Miyoshi Umeki, and Diane Varsi) were honored along with one Old Hollywood mainstay, the Bride of Frankenstein herself (Elsa Lanchester). The shortlisted characters were a counter culture partygoer, an exasperated nurse, a Japanese newlywed, and two 18 year-old besties in a small town with both love and grief on their minds.

THE PANELISTS
Here to talk about these performances and movies are filmmaker Q Allan Brocka, theater and film critic Kenji Fujishima, Be Kind Reward's Izzy, film critic Kimberly Pierce, writer/ director/ archivist Brett Wood and your host Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

1957
SUPPORTING ACTRESS SMACKDOWN + PODCAST  
The companion podcast can be downloaded at the bottom of this article or by visiting the iTunes page...

 

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TCA obsesses over "Watchmen" and "Mrs America"

by Nathaniel R

We have mixed, even contradictory, feelings about the Television Critics Association. On the one hand they've exhibited good taste over the years. Their limited categories mean that their awards are focused and precise and uniquely theirs (always a good thing to have your own voice). As a bonus history shows that they value female actors more than male actors. Same, TCA, same.

On the other their narrow focus can also feel like a curse, or even sometimes read as misanthropic stinginess. Consider that not only do they only have two acting categories but they don't divvy up between female and male actors. This means that even in the Golden Age of Television (are we still calling it that?) only 13 actors get name-checked. 13 from hundreds and hundreds of shows (and dozens of them reportedly great)...

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Mira Sorvino Pt 2: A Mini Retrospective

By Nathaniel R

Mira Sorvino in MIghty Aphrodite (1995)

After interviewing Mira Sorvino about her new projects, the Emmy hopeful Hollywood and two recent indies, our conversation drifted back over her whole career. 

For fun, we asked her to program her own mini three or four film retrospective by naming her favourite projects. She acknowledged immediately that Mighty Aphrodite (1995) would be selected for any retrospective since it was her Oscar-winning role, but she wanted to shine the light on lesser-known titles. "I fall in love with every project," she noted, as that three or four film group kept growing and becam eight titles in our conversation. She might have changed the list on another day but here were the titles she hoped people would rediscover or see for the first time that she's very fond of.  How many how these have you seen? 

BARCELONA (1994)
"One of my first movies, shot in Spain. It's beautiful and fun."

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