Actors Turned Producers @ the Oscars

by Cláudio Alves

We've already posted about many records broken with this year's Oscar nominations, but one particular achievement remained unmentioned. With her double nominations for Nomadland – for Best Picture and Best Actress – Frances McDormand became the first woman to earn an acting and a Best Picture nomination for the same project. This comes after a decade when this feat became incredibly common for male performers. Historically, ever since the 1950s, when AMPAs started to list producers with Best Picture nods, instead of merely the studios' name, actors have been producing their movies and earning added honors for those efforts. Still, it was only in the late 60s that someone scored the elusive double citation by the Academy…

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Showbiz History: An epic Oscar battle + Brad Pitt

6 random things that happened on this day, December 18th, in showbiz history

1941 Thirteen year-old Shirley Temple, her contract bought out from Twentieth Century Fox after two 1940 flops, attempts her first "comeback" (though she'd only been gone from screens for a single year) with MGM in a film called Kathleen about a poor little rich girl. It also flopped. A few more hits were in her future but the writing was on the wall (she'd retire, for good, from movies by the age of 21)...

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Horror Actressing: Gwyneth Paltrow in "Se7en"

by Jason Adams

The glimmers of hope that shine through the dank squalor of David Fincher's serial-killer masterpiece Se7en, which is turning 25 today, are so few and far between that we find ourselves clinging to them like life-rafts bobbing down a turbulent sewage drain. One of the library's security guards says, "We got culture coming out of our ass," and then they do, as the gentle strings of Johann Sebastian Bach's "Air Suite No. 3 In D Major" fill the golden-hued dungeon where Detective William Somerset (Morgan Freeman) does his dark research. Similarly Brad Pitt's Detective Mills finds some peace at home playing with his beautiful lively puppies, all locked into a small room lined with newspapers where the dogs do their own important business. Happiness looks like it smells bad!

This nameless city is torrential rain and moldy wallpaper most of the time -- when it's not simply carved-up bodies rising to the surface -- and so Gwyneth Paltrow, ever-chic and resolutely blonde as sunshine, she stands out the first second we see her, coming as she does nuzzled up against Brad Pitt's wall of themselves golden abs. Now this, this right here...

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Links: Madonna's Biopic, "Fast Times" Read, Pattinson's Return, and "Popeye" Remaster

• CNN Madonna will direct the biopic she's been teasing about her own life. She's co-writing it with the brilliant Diablo Cody (Juno, Young Adult). It'll be interesting to see if Madonna can pull this off. She used to have such a great sense of humor about herself and that would come in handy here. No word yet about casting though the internet rumor mill has us convinced they're looking at Julia Garner (Ozark)
• Awards Daily Delroy Lindo will be submitted as a Lead to the Oscars for Da Five Bloods
• Theater Mania It took her long enough! Broadway star Laura Benanti is finally releasing her first album (next month)

Tatlany Maslany, Fast Times, Popeye and more after the jump...

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Emmy Category Review: Guest Actor in a Comedy

By Juan Carlos Ojano

Three men from Saturday Night Live, a “regular” guest actor in a Comedy Series frontrunner, a lead in an anthology series episode, and a comedy veteran receiving a posthumous nomination. These are the men nominated in this category. SNL has had at least two nominees in this category since 2013, peaking last year with four of the seven slots. Their last winner was in 2017. Meanwhile, performances from Comedy Series have bagged the last two wins. 

Let’s consider each nominee...

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