"Won and done." The curse of finally winning an Oscar

by Baby Clyde

I recently watched Susan Hayward all but demanding voters hand her the Best Actress Oscar in-movie during 1958's I Want To Live. It got me to thinking about her fellow Academy favourites, whose eventual triumphs were also their Oscar swan song.

If an actor who achieves multiple acting nominations is going to win it’s usually early on. It’s common to bag the statue and then spend the rest of your career chasing another. Bette Davis won on her first 2 attempts and then suffered 8 consecutive losses. Spencer Tracy won on attempts 2 and 3 and then spent the next 30 years and 6 nominations waiting for his name to be called again. Sometimes a veteran actor with multiple nods will finally get the prize and continue on in Oscar good books, like Paul Newman who won on nomination 7 and scored two more in following decades. But a surprisingly high amount of winners who have been made to wait find that their greatest triumph is also their last. 

If you win on your 5th nomination (or later) odds are high that you won't be invited back. Consider...

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The many faces of Hannibal Lecter

by Cláudio Alves

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…

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The New Classics: First Reformed

Michael Cusumano here with the most recent film I've yet to induct into this series. Despite its newness, it's one of the titles I'm most confident will earn the label of classic in the course of time.

Can you pinpoint the moment someone crosses the line between faith and fanaticism? Is it even possible to fully define the boundaries between the two? Most reasonable people would agree it’s around the moment someone commits an act of violence in the name of God, but an individual crosses that boundary internally long before he straps on a suicide vest. 

That elusive moment of radicalization exists somewhere in the vast gray silences of Paul Schrader’s First Reformed. It passes by so quietly that it is possible to be late into the film and have no inkling of the wild-eyed zealot Ethan Hawke’s Reverend Toller will become in the film’s shocking final movement...

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Alec Guinness: Performing obsession

by Cláudio Alves

David Lean's film career is a rather peculiar thing. Before he ever sat on the director's chair, Lean was an editor whose resumé included collaborations with such lofty names of British cinema as Powell and Pressburger. It was during World War II that he started working as a director, adapting several Noël Coward plays and Charles Dickens novels. His early work was a cinema of über-Britishness, one that both celebrated, ravaged, and autopsied the idea of what it was to be British, taking an especially hard look at the effects of the war on society. 

It's strange to consider that this master of the chamber drama, a director of modest style, would go on to become synonymous with the sprawling epics of the 1960s. Apart from some missteps, he'd be as wonderful doing these monstrously big movies as he was doing the small ones, but there's a clear dissonance of approach fragmenting the man's filmography. If there's a transitional piece to be found, a stylistic and thematic bridge, that explains how the humble adapter of prestige literature became the epic maker, it's 1957's The Bridge on the River Kwai… 

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Almost There: Sidney Poitier in "In the Heat of the Night"

by Cláudio Alves

Last week, we took a look at the cast of A Raisin in the Sun for the Almost There pieces. Among that quartet of fabulous performances, Sidney Poitier's Walter Younger stood out as the most overwhelming one, so full of energy that the claustrophobic set seemed incapable of containing him. This week, we're again exploring the filmography of the first Black man to win the Best Actor Oscar, giving him a solo opportunity to shine. You could actually do an entire miniseries about the many times Poitier might have come close to an Oscar nomination and failed:  A Raisin in the Sun, Edge of the City, Porgy and Bess, A Patch of Blue.

Today, however, we'll be looking at Poitier's 1967 Oscar bid, when the actor starred in three hits, two of which went on to be nominated for Best Picture. Of them, Norman Jewison's In the Heat of the Night went on to win the big award and features what is probably the best performance of Poitier's career…

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