"Wicked" and "A Complete Unknown" are hits with SAG

by Cláudio Alves

The Screen Actors Guild couldn't resist Jonathan Bailey in WICKED. Could you?

The "guilds week" continues with SAG revealing their nominations and shaking up the Oscar race. Wicked is today's biggest champion, scoring in five categories, including a surprise Best Supporting Actor nomination for Jonathan Bailey. A Complete Unknown also got a major boost, as did The Last Showgirl, while The Brutalist and Sing Sing underperformed. The Screen Actors Guild has a more populist taste than almost any of the major awards-giving organizations, including AMPAS, so expect some discrepancies between these and the Oscar lineups. Still, when it comes to winning, it's difficult, though not impossible, to take home Hollywood's most coveted trophy without a SAG nod to match.

Find the complete nomination lists for both film and TV after the jump…

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Jessica Lange: 75th Birthday and "Men Don't Leave"

by Eric Blume

One of our great screen icons, Jessica Lange, celebrates a big birthday this weekend:  75 years, and thankfully still going strong.  Lange is one of only 24 actors to win the Triple Crown of Acting (she has 2 Oscars, 3 Emmys, and 1 Tony).

Lange is a personal favorite actor of mine, and I’ve written about her on the site numerous times, so I thought for her three-quarter-century mark, I’d hold a moment for one of her less-heralded, lesser-known performances, a bit of a departure from her usual delivery:  her soft, lightly comic, and sweetly sad performance in Paul Brickman’s 1990 film Men Don’t Leave...

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Review: A quartet of actresses grace "The Miracle Club"

by Matt St Clair

Thaddeus O’Sullivan’s The Miracle Club is the latest entry in the multiverse involving pictures where elderly, award-winning actress legends unite Avengers-style for an adventure. However, compared to previous entries in the unofficial multiverse like Book Club, 80 for Brady, and Poms, The Miracle Club is a more profound effort. There are moments of humor to be found in this story about friends coming together for a potentially “last” trip to fulfill an unrealized dream or goal but The Miracle Club leans heavily on the dramatic side.

Set in 1960s Ireland, Oscar winners Kathy Bates and Dame Maggie Smith play Eileen and Lily, two close-knit friends from the working-class village of Ballygar...

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That Shakespeare + Gods & Monsters conversation

We received word from readers that the Apple Podcast/iTunes service has suddenly gone glitchy with The Film Experience so we wanted to let you know that you can also listen on Stitcher or on Spotify if you haven't yet given the conversation a go. One more round of applause please for writer/director/showrunner Leslye Headland (Russian Doll, The Acolyte), actor Mitch Silpa (Bridesmaids, The Heat), DJ Rob Campion (Cooler Than Ecto), writer Jenelle Riley (Variety), and animator/illustrator Dashiell Silva. 

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Conversation Index (74 minutes)

00:01 - Introduction of the Smackdown Panel and the 1998 Nominees
04:00 - Primary Colors. What works (Kathy Bates) and what doesn't, and how it plays in today's much different political climate.
15:41 - A detour to the 2020 Oscar race and "Da Butt"
17:00 - Hilary and Jackie's odd structure, sadness porn, and tortured artists
28:30 - A detour to The English Patient (1996) and the Weinstein/Miramax industrial complex
34:45 - Shakespeare in Love "a rom-com for theater nerds". Why Judi Dench deserved the Oscar.
50:20 - The disastrous miscalculations of Little Voice, and Brenda Blethyn, hot off of Secrets & Lies
59:30 - Gods and Monsters, hampered by its budget, and maybe even its Oscar winning screenplay. Beautiful performances!
1:12:28 - Wrap-up / Goodbyes.

And in case you missed our 1998 "extras" we revisited Velvet Goldmine, High Art, Beloved, Central Station, The Prince of Egypt, A Bug's Life, The Truman Show, Hollywood's onslaught of blonde ingenues, and the pop culture hits that year. 

Smackdown '98: Kathy, Brenda, Dame Judi, Rachel, and Lynn

Welcome back to the Supporting Actress Smackdown. Each month we pick an Oscar vintage to explore through the lens of actressing at the edges. This episode takes us back to 1998. 

THE NOMINEES  A politically savvy lesbian, a bawdy working-class mother, a theater-loving Queen, a failed musician / devoted sister, and a homophobic immigrant housekeeper in Hollywood walk into the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion...

For the 1998 film year, the Academy invited one new actress (Rachel Griffiths) to their Supporting club while offering a second nomination to four respected women of a certain age (Dame Judi Dench, Brenda Blethyn, Lynn Redgraves) only one of whom (Kathy Bates) had already won.

THE PANELISTS Here to talk about these performances and films are (in alpha order) DJ Rob Champion, Writer/Director Leslye Headland, Journalist and playwright Jenelle Riley, Actor/writer Mitch Silpa, Illustrator Dashiell Silva and, as ever, your host Nathaniel R. Let's begin...

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