The Lone Acting Nominee vs Best Picture Stars

by Cláudio Alves

In the battle of Aunt Gladys against Best Picture stars, the witch won!

I don’t know about you, but I love Oscar trivia, the more meaningless, niche, and utterly useless for prediction purposes, the better. Indeed, matters of stats and precedent feel better invoked in post-Oscar talk than in the middle of the season, when folks sometimes hold on to these analyses as if they were unshakable rules. Every year, Academy Award history gains new records, new precursor combos that failed or succeeded, and age-old assumptions that were never examined until they were proven wrong. So, let’s roll with it and enjoy the silliness of our collective Oscar obsession. Tonight, I’d like to return to the matter of Amy Madigan’s Best Supporting Actress win.

Hers is a remarkable achievement for a number of reasons, spanning from genre bias to the sheer quality of the performance at hand. Still, even odder is the fact that the Weapons witch was a lone acting nominee facing off against a lineup of women starring in Best Picture nominees. And though we live in an era when the Academy tends to privilege the movies listed in their top race in almost every other category, Madigan came out victorious. This particular scenario has only happened three times before…

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Oscar Horrors: Patty McCormack is "The Bad Seed"

Boo! It's the "Oscar Horrors" finale with abstew

With her blonde pigtails, pinafore dress, spotless Mary Janes, and armed with an elegant curtsy, little 8-year-old Rhoda Penmark is hardly the most intimidating figure. But beneath that childish visage lies the heart of a cold-blooded killer! One that shocked audiences in the 1950s. The Bad Seed preyed on the idea that evil wasn't some devil or mythical monster, but that it lived next door in the most unassuming of places. And worst of all, that evil was a hereditary trait that could be passed on, with no control over your assigned nature. The evil child has now become a staple of the horror genre, from the towheaded Children of the Corn to the twins from The Shining, but one of the first to make her mark (literally - watch out for those deadly shoes!) was bad seed, Rhoda Penmark, brought to life by Best Supporting Actress nominee, Patty McCormack.

I was about Rhoda's age when I first saw The Bad Seed at my friend Vicky's house...

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The Furniture: Feasts of Flesh in Pan's Labyrinth

"The Furniture" our weekly series on Production Design. Here's Daniel Walber

Pan’s Labyrinth, like most of Guillermo del Toro’s films, is busy with visual imagination. There are monsters and fairies, though it’s not always certain which is which. There are dramatic colors and haunted shadows, which push even the more terrestrial sequences toward the fantastical. And there are little flourishes, not all of them thanks to the digital effects team.

In fact, physicality is among the film’s greatest strengths. Sets were built for both Ofelia’s dream world and the all-too-real Spanish Civil War narrative that frames them. Del Toro doesn’t rely on either digital backgrounds or pre-existing locations. Instead, he leans on the uncanny power of tangible design, like these Harryhausen-like models that stand in for an underground kingdom.

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Oscar Horrors: The Makeup of "Bram Stoker's Dracula" (1992)

Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening we look back on a horror-connected nomination until Halloween. Here's Chris Feil on Bram Stoker's Dracula's makeup...

Bram Stoker's Dracula is as drenched in blood as it is in design excess. Nearly 25 years on, the film is surely one of Francis Ford Coppola's strangest in his filmography. Opulent while utilizing practical effects, the film is smartly-made eye candy that flashes both its brain and budget. Imagine a lavish and gruesome horror film for adults being dropped on today's audiences during the holiday/awards months - stranger yet, imagine it being a hit and nabbing some Oscars too, including for it's makeup design.

Part of the film's goal is establishing a vision somewhat closer to that gothic romance of Bram Stoker's original novel, including that of the titular monster...

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Oscar Horrors: The Uninvited

Boo! It's "Oscar Horrors". Each evening we look back on a horror-connected nomination until Halloween. Here's Tim Brayton on a '40s ghost story...

The Uninvited (1944)  is a rarity among 1940s horror films twice over. For one thing, it's one of the vanishingly tiny number of genre films from that decade to receive Oscar attention, nabbing a Best Cinematography nomination – which is why we're here now, of course. For the other, it's one of the almost-as-tiny number of American horror films of its generation that actually commits to the paranormal. For years, stretching back into the 1930s, almost any time you saw a Hollywood film set in a haunted house, it was an easy bet that by the end of the last reel, you'd find out it was just an elaborate ruse by jewel thieves or some other damn thing. Not so for The Uninvited! Its ghost is real, and presents a genuine danger.

The film's readiness to tell an old-fashioned ghost story without apology or restraint is undoubtedly connected to the recognition given to Charles Lang's deeply shadow-soaked cinematography. 

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