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11 Days Until Oscar -- Big Double-Honors Trivia!

11 is the magic number today and 11 comes with big and appropriately twinned A list Oscar trivia.

the great Fay Bainter was the first actor double-nominated in a single year

11 is the number of actors who have been double nominated for lead & supporting within the same year! Pretty cool, right? Details and adjacent trivia starring Lange, Bergman, Blanchett, De Niro, SigWeavie, and more after the jump...

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20 Days til Oscar. Beyond Meryl...

Everyone knows that Meryl Streep is Oscar's all time acting nomination queen. This year the queen received her 20th nomination, this time for playing the worst opera singer Florence Foster Jenkins. But Streep's astonishing numbers get a little less intimidating if you break them up into supporting and lead categories. So let's do that to place Streep in a slightly different context in the history of Oscar'ed actresses.

I begged for this Crayola set as a child. pic.twitter.com/uB5CDBkXup

— Louis Virtel (@louisvirtel) February 3, 2017

We'll ignore wins in this particular exercize. Streep isn't #1 in the supporting sweepstakes, but she remains #1 by a very comfortable margin for leading actresses. More details after the jump...

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The Furniture: The Lady with the Van Paints a Crime Scene Into a Home

"The Furniture" is our new design series. Here's Daniel Walber...

The Lady in the Van begins with a bloody hit-and-run accident. The title van-driving lady, played by Maggie Smith, collides with a young man and leaves him for dead. On the lam, bound by necessity to a vehicle that may also be a murder weapon, she finds her way to a quiet neighborhood full of artists and bourgeois intellectuals.

Then it turns into a delightful comedy about the social anxieties of Alan Bennett.

It’s a bit abrupt, to be honest. And it may take a fair while to warm up to the neurotic, Adaptation.-style doppelgangers that represent the split personalities of the playwright protagonist. The vans themselves, though, quite effectively capture a much more gradual transition, one that charts Mary/Margaret’s arc with care. What begins as an all-in-one murder weapon and crime scene becomes a home. [More...]

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Say What? Maggie & Vanessa

(How did I miss this photo last month?) Amuse us by adding a caption or dialogue to this photo of Dame Maggie Smith and Vanessa Redgrave taken a short time ago.