Nun vs Monster! Give our '65 conversation a listen.

by Nathaniel R

Who do you suppose was in second place for the Best Supporting Actress Oscar in 1965? We suspect Shelley Winters won in a landslide for her monster mom but perhaps Peggy Wood's Mother Superior was the runner up since The Sound of Music was so massive. What'cha think? We've noticed on the Smackdown posts that y'all don't really comment about the conversation of the podcast itself but just the write-up / blurb portion. We hope you're listening. The panelists (mwah) were super fun and lively. Here is the podcast again embedded below for your pleasure.

Podcast: 1 hour and 15 minutes
00.01 - Introductions: Spencer Garrett, Kayleigh Donaldson, Baby Clyde, Kevin Jacobsen, and Terence Johnson
06:30 - Othello , Laurence Olivier's "blackface", minstrelsy in that era, Dame Maggie Smith in her youth and today, and the documentary Tea with the Dames
27:00 - Shelley Winters in A Patch of Blue -- some people hate the performance, some love it. The movie is more complex than you've heard and an example of the shifting of the 1960s towards more adult themes
38:30 - Natalie Wood's failed Oscar bid for Inside Daisy Clover. A trainwreck of a movie or a fascinating timepiece or both? But it really needed to be a musical. More new Hollywood vs Old Hollywood issues
54:00 - The Sound of Music. Supremely rewatchable. We talk about musical dubbing, our favourite musical numbers, and Julie Andrews Oscar run. Why didn't they nominate Eleanor Parker? 
1:10:00 - Goodbyes and the re-casting game!

listen on iTunes or download right here

Smackdown 1965

The genius of "The Umbrellas of Cherbourg" ending

by Cláudio Alves

Back in the 1960s, unlike now, a film could be recognized in the Best Foreign Language Film category one year and still compete for the other Oscars the next. Such a strange fate befell Jacques Demy's The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an intoxicating love letter to the classic Hollywood musical by one of the most inventive auteurs of the Nouvelle Vague. In 1964, the picture was a nominee for Best Foreign Language Film and would go on to conquer four other nods in 1965, the year of our next Supporting Actress Smackdown.

While it's easy to resent the Academy for not fully embracing the flick (it won nothing), the citations it received, for Demy's script and Michel Legrand's music, were fully deserved...

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1965: Eleanor Parker in "The Sound of Music"

Each month before the Smackdown, Nick Taylor chooses three performances to highlight that weren't Oscar-nominated...

 “And Eleanor Parker as The Baroness” reads the final casting credit of the opening credits of The Sound of Music. Hers is also the only name that appears by itself, positioning the character and the actress as events the film wants you to eagerly anticipate. Hard enough when you're the other woman in a love triangle, especially as a non-singing role in a three-hour musical. Yet Parker, boasting one of the most exciting, chameleonic personas in American cinema, lives up to the hype over fifty years later, emerging with the film's most multifaceted performance.

Baroness Elsa von Schraeder won’t appear until roughly an hour into The Sound of Music, by which time we’ve already watched the indomitably energetic Maria (Julie Andrews) enter the Von Trapp family at the direction of her Abbess, instructing her to work as a governess to see if it’ll suit her better than being a nun...

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Mickey @ 100: "Babes in Arms"

by Camila Henriques

As we continue our centennial tribute to Mickey Rooney, it’s time to talk Babes in Arms. For a long time the 1939 musical was remembered mostly because of the pairing of Rooney and real life BFF Judy Garland, but the conversation has shifted to a necessary bumpier road, since the movie is just one of many examples of that era to feature performances in blackface (including the two leads).

The film’s place in Mickey’s career is not to be diminished: he received an Oscar nom for Best Actor at the age of 19 (the second youngest ever nominated) . The year before he had been awarded a Juvenile Oscar (Judy won the same honor the following year, as she had this hit and that other 1939 film).

A vaudevillian kid just like his co-star, Rooney was already a veteran when Babes… came around, with his Andy Hardy journey already begun...

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We're puzzled by the Dear Evan Hansen casting...

by Nathaniel R

They could play sisters!

Have you heard the news that Julianne Moore will be play Heidi, the awards-ready role of Evan Hansen's stressed out single mom in the feature adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen? Normally we'd applaud our beloved Julianne getting a juicy part but we find this puzzling given her lack of musical experience. You see there are two mom characters in the melodramatic high school set musical, Heidi and Cynthia, whose children become entangled. The show opens with a duet between them "Anybody Have a Map?" but Cynthia's role recedes thereafter and she never gets a solo while Heidi gets the 11th hour showstopper "So Big / So Small".

Here's the weird part...

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