The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
As I was constructing the new Best Picture charts -- yes, they're finally up. Have a looksie -- it occurred to me that I was foolishly betting against a lot of regular Oscar players. Why couldn't I find room for, say, George Clooney (Monuments Men), Joel Coen & Ethan Coen (Inside Llewyn Davis), and Martin Scorsese (Wolf of Wall Street), for example? The answer came in three parts.
Silver Linings Playbook + The Fighter ÷ 1970s = American Hustle
By now you've undoubtedly heard that AMPAS has opted to bypass the February Winter Olympics in 2014 not by attacking the Globes & SAG in their comfy January berths but by waiting it out patiently until March. Sunday, March 2nd 2014 to be precise.
ESSENTIAL TRIVIA: Only one Oscar ceremony has ever been held on a March 2nd. That night the Oscar went to... Casablanca (1942) so that's good company for the upcoming winner to be in.
March is of course the most common month for Oscars to be held (with April and February taking silver and bronze). The most common night for the Oscars to be held is a tie between March 25th (From Here to Eternity, Amadeus, Dances With Wolves, Braveheart and Gladiator) and March 29th (All About Eve, Cuckoo's Nest, Chariots of Fire, Rain Man, Unforgiven) ...so if you were born on either of those days, Oscar loves you most u cute liddle adorable golden-baby!
March 2nd is a week later as shows go for his year but so are the nominations (January 16th, 2014). Which means that the 2013 Oscar race will be nearly exactly like the one we just experienced in terms of timing. What we probably won't see is all the OMG-WTF-IS-HAPPENING drama because those kind of curveballs we were thrown (Bigelow & Affleck, Les Miz's ecstatic premiere to sharp drop, Lincoln's weird frontrunner to "anything but!" trajectory, Ang Lee's second Oscar without a noisy campaign, etc...) are mighty rare.
All of which is a long way of saying that once again the time period between Nominations and Hollywood's High Holy Night will be much longer than anyone can deal with*. I've updated the embeddable widget should you love the countdown to nominations as much as I...
but if you'd already had it on your page you know that I change it each year so that the countdown never ends.
It can't because the Oscars are eternal!
P.S. Somewhat curiously they've also announced the Oscar ceremoney date for 2015 as if to remind all of us that they have no intention of returning to March in the future. It'll be held on February 22nd, 2015 which is only 698 days from now. Set your watches. (The only other previous February 22nd Oscars went to Slumdog Millionaire. Uh oh)
*I much prefer a long Phase One, short Phase Two but what'cha gonna do?
75th Annual Oscars ~ 10th Anniversary Special On this very day 10 years ago, one of only two posthumous Oscars for the past decade in film was handed out. It went to Conrad Hall for his lensing of Road to Perdition (the other was Heath Ledger's). So here's one from the vaults since we did a Hit Me With Your Best Shot on it just last year. If you click on these shots, deemed best by our 'hit me' club and arranged here in narrative order, you can read more about them and why they were chosen.
It's a strange symmetry that a film as funereal as Road to Perdition would be a member of the Posthumous Oscar wins club. Here's a list of all 13 of them:
Sidney Howard, Adapted Screenplay - Gone With the Wind (1939)
William A Horning, Art Direction - Gigi (1958)
William A Horning, Art Direction - Ben Hurt (1959)
Sam Zimbalist, Best Picture - Ben Hur (1959)
Eric Orborn, Art Direction - Spartacus (1960)
Walt Disney, Animated Short - Winnie the Pooh and the Blustery Day (1968)
Raymond Rasch & Larry Russell, Best Score - Limelight (1972)
Peter Finch, Actor - Network (1976)
Geoffrey Unsworth, Cinematography - Tess (1980)
Howard Ashman, Best Song - "Beauty & the Beast" from Beauty & The Beast (1991)
Thomas Goodwin, Documentary Short - Educating Peter (1992)
Conrad Hall, Cinematography - Road to Perdition (2002)
Heath Ledger, Supporting Actor - The Dark Knight (2008)
Art director William A Horning is the only double posthumous winner though acting legend James Dean and Disney's brilliant comeback-making composer Howard Ashman both received more than one posthumous nomination.
The title is all wrong. It's Everyday's Pet Peeve. I was as thrilled as any Oscar Fanatic when they established a YouTube channel and began to upload plentiful old acceptance speeches from ceremonies past. But why, pray tell, are they non-embeddable? I legitimately wonder what purpose this serves when what's shared on social networks is so determinative of what gets seen, discussed and becomes beloved.
Of course the dread "embedding disabled by request" message is most tiresome and even downright evil when a YouTube channel that uses it is just a fan channel which owns the rights to nothing but still insists that you can't steal what they stole. (This is especially icky when it's exactly the clip you need and want to share.) I won't name account names but my guess is this refusal to share is an older generation problem dating back to mindsets that existed before the internet -- I also existed before the internet but some of us adapted -- when sharing was something your parents told you to do with your friends and siblings but would never have dreamed of telling you to do with complete strangers. This is my guess primarily because the accounts most likely to refuse embedding seem to be the ones that are most devoted to material that predates the internet be it old movies, music, tv or what have you. I think this is terrible for everyone and does a great injustice to the art. If things aren't shareable in the modern sense they're more likely to stay forgotten and relegated to the dustbins of history.
Morgan Fairchild and Robert Hays -- anyone remember them?
This came up today because the latest video the Oscar channel posted was the Costume Design presentation for 1981's "Chariots of Fire" and I wanted to discuss it for about 10 different reasons but then thought "why bother?" since I couldn't embed it with the discussion and didn't have time for screencaps. Pity that. It's not that it's 'must-see' interesting. I shouldn't oversell.
Do you miss Oscar season or are you glad it's over? I'm feeling a little bit of both right now, which is why this image that a reader sent me is so great. It's Glenn Close & Michelle Pfeiffer on Oscar night in 1989, when they both lost for their roles in Dangerous Liaisons (1988). Michelle did take the stage as a presenter that night (alongside Dennis Quaid).
Who knew that the Merquise de Merteuil and Madame Tourvel could exhibit any such tenderness for each other? (Or maybe the Merquise is just looking for the softest spot on Tourvel's neck in which to sink her fangs?)
So the picture got me to thinking about stars who've never won Oscars despite multiple nods. (Of course the most egregiously mistreated stars in Hollywood are the great actors who've never even been nominated... but that's a different list.) For this Tuesday Top Ten, I thought we'd do things a little differently and the rank will be determined not by my opinion but by Oscar's through the number of nominations. I determine the order if stars have the same number of losing nominations.
TOP TEN WORKING FILMS STARS WITH MULTIPLE NOMINATIONS WHO'VE NEVER WON A COMPETITIVE OSCAR
Honorable Mentions: Mickey Rooney, Eleanor Parker, Kirk Douglas (yes, they're all still alive), Jane Alexander, Debra Winger, Diane Ladd and Marsha Mason each won three-to-four nominations but since none of these famous actors are working much or at all in features anymore, I decided to make this a list of top “working” stars instead. As for the bottom third of the top ten list, since there are a lot of stars who’ve earned three nominations without ever winning, I had to make judgement calls as to who to include. So my apologies to: Laura Linney, Joaquin Phoenix and Sigourney Weaver (and others with 3 nominations) who just-missed here.
Johnny Depp, The Dangerous Liaisons girls and more after the jump...
Saturday, May 4, 2013 at 1:00PM 
Silver Linings Playbook + The Fighter ÷ 1970s = American Hustle
