1972: Soaked in Booze with "The Ruling Class"

TFE will be periodically looking back at the 1972 film year before we hit the Supporting Actress Smackdown at month's end. Here's Anna from Defiant Success

Adapted from the play of the same name by Peter Barnes (who also serves the film’s writer), Peter Medak’s The Ruling Class establishes its bizarre nature early on. The plot kicks off after Ralph Gurney, the 13th Earl of Gurney (Harry Andrews) accidentally hangs himself while performing autoerotic asphyxiation. Upon his death, his only surviving son Jack (Peter O’Toole) becomes the 14th Earl of Gurney. One problem with this new arrangement: Jack firmly believes that he’s Jesus Christ...

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The Next Best Actor Race

by Nathaniel R

Pacino & DeNiro together for the fourth time in "The Irishman"

A month ago we started brainstorming about Best Actress 2019 so before the April Foolish Oscar Predictions are announced let's brainstorm about possibilities in the male acting categories. It looks thin to us thus far, reminding us that we'd be happiest with 4 female acting categories instead. That said, it's hard to keep track of everything in every stage of production so we hope you'll share anything you're exciting about that we may have missed or any hunches you have about upcoming films.

These are neither value judgments (since so few films have been screened) nor predictions (that's in April) but merely a listing of performances that are on the way...

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Nathaniel's Ballot: Best Actor / Supporting Actor

'It's not redundant to still be handing out awards after the Oscars as long as the awards themselves aren't the same!' This is what I tell myself as I wrap up the Film Bitch Awards two weeks later than is proper! There's just 3 categories to go now (so we'll be done by next weekend) before we can hold the world's fastest awards ceremony. It involves a behind-the-scenes slapping of gold, silver, and bronze visual designations onto three of the nominees in each category.

Today, we're talking about the men...

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Ranking the Oscar Clips

by Ben Miller

Of all the decisions the Academy Awards producers/directors must make, the Oscar clip decisions are surely the most covetous -- who among us wouldn't want to chose? They're fairly crucial, too.  I ranked all the clips last year, and Nathaniel was nice enough to let me do it again.  The clips preceding each of the categories ranged from brilliant to “what the hell was that?”  Let’s rank them 20-1…

Cringe-worthy

I sometimes wish I'd never been born at aaaaaaallllllll 🎵

20. Viggo Mortensen, Green Book
19. Rami Malek, Bohemian Rhapsody

Woo boy.  I would personally defend the work of both of these performances, but the snippets shown on Sunday did not lend any firepower to those arguments.  Viggo gets to wax on like an idiot about not knowing the difference between Russian and German before laying on some casual racism. Malek has plenty of good moments in the Queen biopic, but a simple shot of him lipsyncing reads like an Oscar producer’s opinion on the performance itself seeping through.

Not Doing Anyone Any Favors...

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Great Acceptance Speeches: Dustin Hoffman, "Kramer vs. Kramer"

We asked Team Experience to share their favourite Oscar acceptance speeches as we countdown to Hollywood's High Holy Night. Here's Ben Miller...

Dustin Hoffman had an incredible run of films at the start of his career.  After breaking through with The Graduate in 1967, he followed that with the legendary Midnight Cowboy, and steadily continued on with Little Big Man, Straw Dogs, Papillion, Lenny, All the President’s Men and Marathon Man.  When 1979 rolled around, he was 42 years old and already had three Best Actor nominations under his belt.

Hoffman was no fan of the Academy at the time.  In the midst of his 70’s run, Hoffman called the Oscars a garish and embarrassing evening.  He even drew the ire of Frank Sinatra during the 1975 ceremony.  Despite that, the Academy didn’t mind all that much as they nominated him again in 79 for Kramer vs. Kramer, and this time they gave him the award...

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