The Honoraries: Samuel L Jackson in 'Black Snake Moan'

We're celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career.

by Ben Miller

Craig Brewer’s Black Snake Moan is a hard sell on paper and an even harder sell in execution.  Jackson’s Lazarus finds half-naked and half-dead sex addict Rae (Christina Ricci) on the side of the road.  He takes her back to his house to nurse her back to health.  In order to cure her sex addiction, Lazarus chains Rae to his radiator. Luckily for Brewer and the film, Jackson fully invests in the provocative material, delivering a fiery performance of angry righteousness, and one of the best star turns of his career...

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The Honoraries: Liv Ullmann in "Face to Face"

We're celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career.

by Juan Carlos Ojano

Liv Ullmann garnered her second and final (to date) nomination for her role as Dr. Jenny Isaksson in Face to Face, her seventh collaboration with Ingmar Bergman. Last included in the Oscar conversation in 1974 but was hampered by the eligibility issues of Scenes from a Marriage, Ullmann came back in the awards race roaring, with Best Actress wins from NYFCC, LAFCA, and NBR while getting nominations from the BAFTA and the Globes. While Faye Dunaway was the expected winner for Network, Ullmann undoubtedly gave one of her best performances (in a career filled with them) in this film.

TW: Sexual violence/rape...

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The Honoraries: Liv Ullmann in "Shame"

We're celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their career. 

by Eric Blume

Ingmar Bergman’s 1968 film Shame features one of Liv Ullmann’s greatest performances.  This was the third collaboration between the two artists, and the film is the middle portion of Bergman’s unofficial “Island Trilogy” that started with The Hour of the Wolf and concluded with The Passion of Anna.  Ullmann’s face is like the face of the film: beauty going blankly sour…

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The Honoraries: Liv Ullmann in "Persona"

We're celebrating each of the upcoming Honorary Oscar winners with a few pieces on their careers.

by Cláudio Alves

Sometimes, a film is so great that it robs you of words, leaves you speechless, struck dumb with awe. It's been a bit over two years since I've started writing for The Film Experience and, in that time, it's been a privilege to write about some of the best works of cinema I've ever seen. Ingmar Bergman's Persona tops them all and, when facing its wonder, it's hard to articulate anything. Perhaps no other film has been as tirelessly examined in the history of criticism, making it impossible to bring anything new to the discussion. And yet, it remains mysterious, as beguilingly unknowable as when it premiered in 1966. To try and write about it is a maddening exercise.

Even so, a celebration of Liv Ullmann wouldn't be complete without mentioning the first work in the artistic collaboration that forged her legend, that's at the center of her legacy…

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The Honoraries: Danny Glover as Producer

by Cláudio Alves

Danny Glover's cameo in BAMAKO

Despite his fantastic career as an actor, Danny Glover isn't receiving an Honorary Oscar to recognize that work. Instead, AMPAS is honoring him with the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award as a way of celebrating his lifelong actions as a community activist, fighting for worldwide justice, and other such efforts. If anything, those values are more imminently evident in Glover's filmography as a producer rather than as an actor. Since the early 90s, after becoming a box-office star, the American thespian started leveraging his success to try and make specific projects happen. Charles Burnett's To Sleep with Anger marked Glover's first experience as a producer, and the funding was mainly secured through his participation in Lethal Weapon 2. From then on, Danny Glover has been a strong supporter of underrepresented filmmakers, helping them make their cinematic dreams come true… 

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