Olivia de Havilland (1916-2020)

by Nathaniel R

We have long dreaded this day coming so it's with heavy hearts that we share that the iconic Olivia de Havilland has passed away. We have celebrated her several times here at The Film Experience, most notably in 2016 with a multi-film retrospective for her Centennial. Having been a true screen immortal for the past (gulp) 80 years, it was hard to picture this woman as an actual mortal. Pictures of her happily bicycling in Paris in her centenarian years were popular around the web but all things eventually end. The Oscar winner, who had just celebrated her 104th birthday on July 1st, died peacefully yesterday in her Parisian home...

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Comment Party: Best Actress, 1991

by Nathaniel R

Remember Bette's dream project "For the Boys"?

We've probably done TOO much 1991 before this next Smackdown! Apologies for those of you without a particular affinity for that year but you've only got one more day of this to get through. We thought it might be fun to briefly discuss the Best Actress race of that year before the Supporting Actress Smackdown event tomorrow.

OSCAR NOMINEES

• Geena Davis, Thelma & Louise
• Laura Dern, Rambling Rose
• Jodie Foster, Silence of the Lambs ★ 
• Bette Midler, For the Boys
• Susan Sarandon, Thelma & Louise

If I remember the year correctly this lineup was basically a done deal ahead of time but for the fifth slot...

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Comment Party: Best Actress, 1930s

Who is your favourite from each year in the 1930s? My current votes go like so though there are always more films to see so one must always reserve the right to change one's mind.

• 1930 Norma Shearer, The Divorcee
• 1931 Marie Dressler, Min & Bill
• 1932 Marlene Dietrich, Blonde Venus
• 1933 Greta Garbo, Queen Christina
• 1934 Claudette Colbert, It Happened One Night
• 1935 Katharine Hepburn, Alice Adams
• 1936 Carole Lombard, My Man Godfrey
• 1937 Irene Dunne, The Awful Truth
• 1938 Bette Davis, Jezebel
• 1939 Vivien Leigh, Gone With the Wind (though I'll admit to being somewhat torn because Dark Victory is my favourite pre 1950s Bette Davis performance)

The biggest question marks before the Emmy nominations

By Abe Fried-Tanzer

We’re less than two weeks from the Emmy nominations announcement, and voting has officially closed. We have plenty of information now, including who’s on the ballot and how many nominees there will be in each category. Before we unveil our final predictions next week, let’s address some of the major unknowns and how they could play out across the board.

Just how well will frontrunners Succession and Schitt’s Creek do? Most prognosticators expect that these two shows could win the top prizes, with nominations at least  are guaranteed. But, looking to last year, neither actually performed all that well in other categories...

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Almost There: Liv Ullmann in "Scenes from a Marriage"

by Cláudio Alves

I confess that, when I first came up with the idea for this week's Almost There write-up, I didn't expect its subject to be so weirdly topical. First up, there's the actual raison d'être for the piece, which is the Criterion Channel's new "Marriage Stories" collection, in which Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage is featured. Then there's the whole Hamilton kerfuffle, which caused controversy over the Academy's definition of what is and isn't cinema or what should and shouldn't be eligible for the Oscars (two importantly different questions). This is relevant because the ineligibility of Bergman's film caused a major ruckus back in 1974 and even prompted a couple of notorious open letters (another topical subject, unfortunately). Finally, we have the recent news that the television cut of Scenes from a Marriage is going to be remade by HBO with Michelle Williams and Oscar Isaac in the leading roles. 

We'll return to some of those matters later on, but, for now, let's concentrate on Liv Ullmann's masterful performance as Marianne in Scenes from a Marriage…

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