Who will win the Emmy for Supporting Actress in a Drama?

By Spencer Coile 

Like in year’s past, Game of Thrones came back into the Emmy conversation by steamrolling the competition with an historic nomination count of 32. Amidst a plethora of technical categories and despite its middling reception for its eighth and final season, the HBO juggernaut still managed to score a whopping four nominations in the Supporting Actress in a Drama Series race. With The Handmaid’s Tale largely ineligible this Emmy cycle, it felt inevitable that another show would swoop in and dominate this category, a trend that's been growing given the new nomination procedures.

Still, this does not guarantee that the Iron Throne secures an easy victory. With two first-time Emmy nominees outside of Game of Thrones (can you believe Fiona Shaw has never been nominated?!) in scene stealing roles, might this race be more unpredictable than we once thought? 

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Showbiz History: Hound dog Kurt Russell and fishy Fiona Shaw

7 random things that happened on this day (July 10th) in showbiz history

1964 The Beatles release "A Hard Day's Night" their 3rd studio album. Have you seen Yesterday the high concept musical comedy about a world without The Beatles in it? Only the title song from this particular album gets played in Yesterday. 

1981 It was a big weekend for Kurt Russell with two new movies in theaters...

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Queer TIFF: "Vita & Virginia" and "Tell It To the Bees"

Nathaniel R trying to catch up on those festival reviews! 

Herewith two films about married women breaking out of their heteronormative bonds for passionate lesbian affairs. And what I thought were two movies written by famous actresses though, in fact, only one was...

What would Virginia Woolf make of the multiple cinematic attempts to capture her enigmatic persona in two hours flat? Hell, what did the literary icon make of the movies themselves since they were invented in her lifetime? If I'm ever able to interview Woolf expert, actress/writer Dame Eileen Atkins, I plan to ask her. Woolf was most famously played onscreen by Nicole Kidman in The Hours in which Atkins had a small role. Now it's the ever bewitching Elizabeth Debicki's turn in Vita and Virginia, written by Atkins from her play of the same name...

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The Love That Dare Not Axe Murder Its Name

by Jason Adams

In the small city of Fall River, Massachusetts in the year of our lord (somebody's lord, anyway) 1892 the father and step-mother of Lizzie Andrew Borden were found hacked about the head and face with a hatchet until dead - the nursery rhyme says they got forty and forty-one whacks respectively but father got eleven while the late Mrs. Borden got a few more, if not quite twenty. The next eleven months after that moment, until the end of Lizzie's trial in June of 1893, were spent speaking of little else - a well-to-do lady murderess! What a lark!

The case of Lizzie has held a dark fascination ever since, inspiring countless plays and rhymes and episodes of Law & Order: SVU, but it's been an especially Borden-full couple of years now what with Christina Ricci's Lifetime-movie-turned- miniseries-turned-movie and now Craig William Macneill's feature film simply called Lizzie. Out this weekend and starring Chloë Sevigny, Lizzie injects a timely dose of patriarchal oppression and same-sex repression to the mix, theorizing that Lizzie was caught up (not to mention just plain caught) in a love affair with the Borden's maid Bridget (played by Kristen Stewart).

If the life not lived between Lizzie and Bridget represents a road not traveled thanks to the impossible time and place that the women found themselves in, the film Lizzie feels like a venture in the right direction...

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10th Anniversary: The Black Dahlia

David looks back at Brian de Palma's wildest film, ten years on from its release.

The Black Dahlia is a curious artefact. It is likely to be remembered simply by virtue of being in the catalogue of Brian de Palma, even if the film’s quality is negligible compared to his biggest hitters Carrie and The Untouchables. When compared to the other famous James Ellroy adaptation, the Oscar-winning L.A. Confidential (which celebrates its own birthday, its 19th, in just a few days), de Palma’s effort certainly pales. In the career of cinematographer Vilmos Zsigmond (the film’s sole Oscar nominee), it’s likely to be a footnote in the late man’s incredible career, coming after his work with Spielberg, Cimino and Altman. The film’s stars probably took a year at most to write it off as a failure on all their parts.

Yet the film continues to fascinate - to lure you back into its craven web...

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