Showbiz History: Ellen Burstyn's big month and Corey Stoll appreciation

8 random things that happened on this day, March 14th, in history...

1885 The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan's beloved comic opera, premieres in London. The Oscar winning film Topsy Turvy (1999) depicts its production in exquisite detail. Topsy-Turvy was a very late entry in the 1999 Oscar race and threw a lot of categories out of whack -- proving a formidable competitor to design heavy films like The Talented Mr Ripley and Sleepy Hollow. In the end it won Costume Design and Makeup and received nominations for Screenplay and Production Design. 1999 was a damn good film year, even if the actual Best Picture list was a sorry sorry slate... 

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The 25 Oldest Nominees of All Time in Best Supporting Actress

by Nathaniel R

Since Claudio was just discussing Ellen Burstyn's estimable Oscar history and the fact that she'd become the oldest acting nominee of all time (in any of the four categories) if the Academy picks her for Pieces of a Woman, we figured it was time for an Oscar list. (Cue talkback: when isn't it time for an Oscar list, Nathaniel?)

Which older women has Oscar gazed at fondly in the Supporting Actress category? Supporting (for both men and women) typically skews older than Lead since Hollywood prefers midtwenties to mid fortysomethings for protagonists. Herewith the women who broke through the wall of ingenues, girlfriends, wives, and mothers, to score Oscar nominations in Best Supporting Actress category later in life... 

25 OLDEST NOMINEES IN BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS 

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Ellen Burstyn's Oscar history

by Cláudio Alves

At 88 years of age, Ellen Burstyn is back on the hunt for gold and she might just become the oldest acting Oscar nominee of all-time for her work in Kornél Mundruczó's Pieces of a Woman. (The record is currently held by Christopher Plummer in All the Money in the World, who had just turned 88 at the time but Burstyn would be just a bit older). Burstyn's film, now streaming on Netflix, concerns Vanessa Kirby's Martha, a woman dealing with the unimaginable pain of having lost her newborn daughter. Burstyn plays the protagonist's mother, a severe matriarch whose disapproval of her daughter's life choices is an incandescent force, blinding in its intensity.

The actress breathes life into this supporting role, illuminating the brittleness, the scars of past woes, and the terror brought upon by the first signs of dementia. It's a showy performance, complete with an Oscar clip-ready monologue that unspools from Burstyn like a torrent of misdirected fervor. As we ponder if AMPAS will grace the thespian with another honor, let's look at her record with the Academy. Ellen Burstyn has been nominated six times and won once… 

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Review: Vanessa Kirby is a tour de force in "Pieces of a Woman"

by Matt St Clair

British thespian Vanessa Kirby has been on a steady rise, having earned an Emmy nomination for playing Princess Margaret on The Crown while kicking action ass in both Mission Impossible: Fallout and Hobbs & Shaw. With Pieces of a Woman, Kirby is finally given a project where she takes center stage and she emerges as the shining star of a picture that’s drenched in darkness due to its distressing subject matter.

The first major sequence in Pieces of a Woman involving Martha's (Kirby) home birth will be a deal-breaker for some viewers...

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Doc Corner: 'Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist'

By Glenn Dunks

We’re back with another film about the making of a classic movie (after last week's Television Event), this time a title that's streaming right now on Shudder. It is Alexandre O. Phillippe doing his thing; a horror behind-the-scenes-doc majestically titled Leap of Faith: William Friedkin on The Exorcist. Artistically speaking, it is probably his best movie yet. (But from me that’s faint praise indeed.)

The problem with a director like Phillippe is that he tends to take incredible works of art and then bleeds them dry. 78/52, his most well-known feature to date, somehow turned the shower sequence of Hitchcock’s Psycho into a routine film school dissertation. He takes iconic horror and performs a very practical (to the point of strict orderliness) dissection. The intellectual passion is there, but that doesn’t necessarily always make for the most scintillating of viewing.

It would have been easy to make a more traditional making-of documentary about The Exorcist. Hell, there’s enough of them out there to prove that. (I would recommend the Exorcist episode of Shudder’s Cursed Films if you want more of the making of style).  What makes Leap of Faith interesting is that Phillippe has done something of the opposite...

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