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The 90th Academy Awards celebrating the 2017 film year will be held on March 4th, 2018, just 344 days from now. Only two previous ceremonies have been held on March 4th with those Oscars going to The Great Ziegfeld (1936) and Mrs Miniver (1942). Hmmm. Does this mean we'll get a showbiz biopic set during WW II as Best Picture next season?
Useless Oscar Trivia of the Day! March 25th, today, shares with March 29th (coming right up) the distinction of being the date on which the most Oscar nights have been held. Both dates have seen five Oscar nights so if you were born on either of those dates please know that your birthday is also a special anniversary for many movies, creatives, and actors and for some of you THE ACTUAL special day. Consider...
Gone With the Wind is not remotely the longest movie to ever win an Oscar (O.J. Made in America just beat previously record holder in that regard, Russia's foreign film winner War & Peace, by pretending to be a "movie" when it was actually a TV miniseries). But Gone With the Wind remains, at 3 hrs & 58 minutes, the longest Best Picture winner. We published the list of running times of the Best Picture winners a few years back but since then the Academy has naturally added a few movies to this list so it was time to update.
The last three winners have all, thankfully, been comparatively succinct in their storytelling and all of them under the "average" in length for a Best Picture. Can we hope that running times will come back down again since they've been growing over the years? Moonlight, our latest champ, is the 15th shortest film to ever win Best Picture. You can pack a lot of greatness into 111 minutes as we hope future filmmakers will realize when they study Barry Jenkins amazing movie in film schools.
Here are all 90 Best Picture winners from longest to shortest. The new entries in bold...
On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...
1892 One of Old Hollywood's most undersung but talented 1930s directors Gregory La Cava is born. Classics include Stage Door and My Man Godfrey 1913 Famed abolitionist and American hero Harriet Tubman dies of pneumonia. So glad she's getting biopic treatment soon. And twice over! 1938 The 10th annual Oscars are held with The Life of Emile Zzzzzola winning Best Picture and Louise Rainer taking her consecutive Best Actress prize but the most enduring anecdote was of course the theft of Alice Brady's Oscar for In Old Chicago. 1958 Sharon Stone is born in Pennysylvania
The 1959 Golden Globes (and more) are after the jump...
Tom & Lorenzo Janelle Monáe owns everything and wore it all out last night Vulture theories on why Moonlight won AV Club "Why does Nicole Kidman clap like that and will she stop it please?" LOL
Deadline Iran and France praise Asghar Farhadi's Oscar win The Hill the State department does too but then quickly deletes the tweet Out Michael Musto on queer moments from the broadcast and Brokeback payback Vanity Fair fashion transformations from the Oscars to the after parties
Oscar Snafus HuffPo This is interesting. Turns out HuffPo posted an article BEFORE the Oscars about what would happen if the wrong winner was read out on Oscar night and the procedure that would follow. Not everything lines up with what happened Sunday Slate reviews the tape to illustrated what happened when during the Best Picture mix-up which is what I said I wanted done but knew I didn't have the strength to do (in this piece on the Oscar's own dream ballet) Variety the other snafu at the Oscars during "In Memorium". Whod'a thunk that The Piano (1993) woud resurface in a huge gaffe kind of way with Oscar mixing up its producer Jan Chapman and its Costume Designer Janet Patterson?
Exit Trivia Thanks to THR's Scott Feinberg for uncovering this. The La La Land / Moonlight envelope fiasco was the second time in history that this happened. The first was for the 1963 Oscars when eventual Best Picture winner Tom Jones was named as the Best Original Score winner. But the winner was actually Andre Previn for Irma La Douce. Sammy Davis Jr handled it well, you must admit.
In related news that proposed upcoming Sammy Davis Jr biopic could be so great. The career, cast of characters, and context in which it happened is so rich for storytelling. Let's hope they cast, write, and direct it well.
Tim here. Somewhat overlooked in all the furor over the rightfully furor-inducing parts of the Oscars on Sunday, a little bit of history was quietly made.
When the four-member team from Hacksaw Ridge took to the stage of the Kodak Theater to accept the award for Best Sound Mixing, the worst losing drought in the history of the Academy Awards ended. Kevin O'Connell received his first nomination in that category in 1983, for the subdued domestic drama Terms of Endearment, which perhaps unsurprisingly lost to The Right Stuff. 33 years and 21 nominations later, in a career including 209 films to his credit as a mixer, he finally picked up his very first statue on Sunday. You may remember him as the guy who thanked his late mom for helping him to get his first job in the industry, and who asked as thanks only that he'd mention her one day as he accepted an Oscar.
Whatever feelings one might have about the film, it's hard not to be excited on O'Connell's behalf...
Saturday, March 25, 2017 at 10:00AM 
