Beauty Break: International Cat Day
by Nathaniel R
Since today is a day to honor our beloved feline friends, let's share pics of celebrities with cats. Not celebrities in Cats. That would be tragic. This photo gallery is the opposite...
The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
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by Nathaniel R
Since today is a day to honor our beloved feline friends, let's share pics of celebrities with cats. Not celebrities in Cats. That would be tragic. This photo gallery is the opposite...
1991's The Silence of the Lambs won five Academy Awards, including Best Picture, thus becoming the only horror movie to ever conquer that much-coveted prize. Still, overall, the film seems to owe more to the crime thriller, the police procedural and investigative manhunt than it does to the horror genre. However, one element plunges it right into the depths of cinematic nightmares. It's a character so malevolent that it often feels larger than life, like a primordial evil closer to the divine than to the human. We're talking about the monster that tops the AFI's greatest movie villains list, the role that earned Anthony Hopkins his Oscar and made us never look at Fava beans the same way ever again – Hannibal 'The Cannibal' Lecter…
by Jason Adams
When I think back on Jodie Foster's Oscar-winning turn playing Clarice Starling in The Silence of the Lambs in 1991 I tend to think of a overwhelmed young woman -- Demme is constantly framing Foster as the smallest person in the room -- but one who musters up unimaginable courage. She pushes deeper into that blacked-out basement as another young woman and an injured dog shriek from the bottom of a blood-streaked pit. And I tend to think of that same small and overwhelmed young woman standing in room after room after room of big dope-faced men staring down at her, eyes narrowed, disbelieving.
What I don't particularly tend to think of first is Clarice Starling smiling. And yet she does... Often and broadly!
For a bit of 'number of the day' silliness, let's talk about the #5 in relation to Oscar. Obviously the best correlation is that the traditional Oscar category is 5 nominees wide and has been for most of Oscar's history once they settled into their routines with various exceptions of categories which resisted being that large for reasons both understandable and nonsensical. Best Makeup FINALLY became a five wide category this very season (long overdue). Of this year's five-wide categories only one is made up entirely of first time nominees: Best Animated Short! Other five related nonsense after the jump...
by Nathaniel R
Tie a yellow ribbon round the ol' Oscar ceremony this year. There are a lot of "welcome back" nominations at the 92nd Academy Awards since the nominations skewed towards senior actors as it occassionally does. Seven previous winners are in play again -- Bates, Theron, Zellweger, Pacino, Pesci, Hanks, and Sir Anthony Hopkins... all of whom have been missing in Oscar action anywhere from 15 to 29 years! Surprisingly none of them are close to the all time record for “longest gap between nominations”.
Still, two decades is a big long stretch of time since most actors of either gender have all of their Oscar activity in a relatively condensed period of time; when you’re hot, you’re hot. Gaps over 20 years are uncommon. Even Lee Grant and Ingrid Bergman, famously blacklisted or exiled for a spell before returning triumphantly to Oscar’s good graces, didn’t have to wait that long. So herewith a list of the only actors who returned to the mix after a 20 year absence.
The 25 Longest Gaps Between Oscar Nominations (for Actors)