Soundtracking: Amazing Grace

by Chris Feil

In the year and change since Aretha Franklin has passed, it feels as if she never left, much as it often does when an artist’s legacy feels as eternal as hers. It’s not just that the Aretha songbook has remained as omnipresent in our culture as ever, but her place remained as cemented this year with the successful release of Amazing Grace. The concert doc captures the live recording of Franklin’s highest selling album of the same name, her first that was fully in the gospel genre that fostered her otherworldly gift. But perhaps what made the film feel even more special in the months after her death isn’t just the opportunity to witness her at peak powers, but also to see fragments of a more personal side revealed.

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116 days til Oscar

Though Manhattan is a wonderful place to be a movie lover -- there is ALWAYS something to see between the first run multiplexes and the rep theaters -- it's also filled with the ghosts of movie theaters past. The Paris closed down just about a month ago and the Ziegfeld died in... well, we'll always be mourning the Ziegfeld.  It was Moulin Rouge! and Chicago premiered in the early Aughts, and seeing the movie musical return to prominence in two consecutive years in a massive old school movie palace was heaven. It's also the site of the first time we saw Michelle Pfeiffer in the pflesh. Needless to say it was part of our soul. 

Speaking of old movie houses. On this 116th day before the 92nd Oscars we randomly found that there was once a grand movie theater on 116th street and 7th avenue (not so far from where we live) called The RKO Regent...

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Top Ten: Greatest Supporting Actors of the Decade Who Weren't Oscar Nominated

A truth. Year after year, Best Supporting Actor is the category with which we have the most disagreement with Oscar. Before our hearts are broken anew this impending season we wanted to celebrate the decade that's nearly behind us. We tend to view it Best Supporting Actor as the category wherein the Academy acting branch is at their absolute laziest each year, though we've never quite figured out why so much of their laziness funnels into this category ("whoever's in a best picture! YOU")

Today, for fun, a grumpy what-coulda-been list celebrating ten performances that rank among the best supporting work this decade...

10 BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR PERFORMANCES OF THE '10s
THAT WERE NOT OSCAR NOMINATED

10 Tracy Letts, Lady Bird
Oscar nominees he was superior to that year: All but Willem Dafoe in The Florida Project

Want to buy him all the "World's Greatest Dad" mugs for this performance. This kind of warm performance easily finds a home in Supporting Actress but "Supportive" fathers are a no go for voters for reasons we've never been able to ascertain apart from basic toxic masculinity... and that being supportive is just not considered an interesting or valuable thing in a male role... 

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Love & Anarchy: Lina Wertmüller's unruly tragedy

The Governors Awards (Honorary Oscars) will be held on October 27th, 2019 with director Lina Wertmüller, actress Geena Davis, director David Lynch, and actor Wes Studi celebrated. We'll be discussing each of them before then.

by Cláudio Alves

Lina Wertmüller's films always feature great faces. They're not classically beautiful, but rather interesting to look at, like the visages sculpted by shadow in Caravaggio's paintings. In Love & Anarchy, Giancarlo Giannini is a storm of freckles, his green eyes lighthouses guiding us through the waves into his soul. Contrastingly, Mariangela Melato is a spectacle of powdered pallor, a vampiric Jean Harlow or perhaps a tarted-up marble statue, gorgeous and obscene in equal measure...

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"Bombshell" screens shaking up Best Actress

by Eric Blume

Potentially great news just arrived for the undernourished Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress races:  Jay Roach’s Bombshell had its first screening in LA on Sunday night, and the word out of the gate seems overwhelmingly positive.

Reviews for the film are embargoed for another eight weeks or so, but various sources online are saying Charlize Theron’s “transformational” performance as Fox News personality Megyn Kelly is explosive and catapults her into the top of the Best Actress race...

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