My Oscar Completism Project: An Introduction

by Cláudio Alves

Sadly, my Best Actress journey may never be complete as THE BARKER, starring Betty Compson, only exists in the UCLA archive.

Are you an Oscar completist? I'm trying to be, having already seen all the winners in the big five categories and making my way through the rest. However, this year, I'll focus more on the acting races and the nominees that didn't get the gold. After talking with some friends, I realized I'm only 133 films away from having watched every performance ever nominated for an acting Academy Award, from 1928 to 2024. So, that shall be my challenge until December 31st, to check those titles and, hopefully, share my journey with you. This won't be a regularly scheduled series but something more erratic, bound to unravel in fits and starts, free-wheeling to the very end. What matters is that deadline and writing about everything I see until then. To start things off, I decided to take a sample of each category…

Click to read more ...

Remembering Deborah Kerr in "Edward, My Son"

by Cláudio Alves

This week, I was a guest on The Lone Acting Nominees podcast. Every episode, the show considers a different film whose only Oscar nomination was for one of the four acting categories, going over the individual performance, the picture overall, and the awards season they found themselves within. For my first appearance, Gordon McNulty and I talked about George Cukor's Edward, My Son, a stage-to-screen adaptation from 1949 that earned Deborah Kerr her first Academy Award nomination. Of course, as we all know, she lost to Olivia de Havilland in The Heiress in what was to be one of six defeats in the race for gold. Not that Kerr's record-setting losses are widely mourned. She was never recognized for her best and riskier works, her Oscar sextet making for a terrible introduction to her talent. Still, you have to admire Kerr's big swings in Edward, My Son…

Click to read more ...

Almost There: Barbara Stanwyck in "The Lady Eve"

by Cláudio Alves

Since its inception, the Academy has shown a certain reluctance to awarding great acting within the comedy genre. It often feels that the sillier the role, the less likely it is to win plaudits for the performer who fleshes it out on screen. That's not to say that comedy is wholly absent from the acting races – it's just rarer, more prone to reductive judgment and dismissal. Considering all this, the recent SAG results feel even more miraculous. They point us toward a scenario where a wild genre riff might win over half of the acting prizes. So with that mind, a comedic episode of "Almost There".

Let's reflect upon an achievement that might be justly named the pinnacle of screen comedy – Barbara Stanwyck's stunning turn in 1941's The Lady Eve…

Click to read more ...

Judy Garland @ 100: "Babes on Broadway"

Team Experience is revisiting a dozen Judy Garland movies for her Centennial. Here's Nathaniel R...

A behind the scenes shot of Judy's first scene in "Babes on Broadway". She's a fountain of tears in the scene but laughing between takes.

History has a way of shifting truth from facts to a more universally agreed upon fiction. Though The Wizard of Oz is now the movie most associated with Judy Garland, it was not as universally beloved in 1939 when it first premiered. Though it was ostensibly "a hit," the sixth highest grosser of Hollywood's most mythic year, it also carried the whiff of failure since its large budget prevented initial profits. Metro-Goldwyn-Mayor got a much much bigger immediate return on their Garland investment through her other 1939 musical. Babes in Arms (1939) opened just two months after Oz and proved a slightly bigger hit (again "at the time"). The Wizard of Oz proved that Judy could carry a massive picture all on her own but as follow up, the studio didn't get ambitious but reverted to the easier sell -- more "Mickey & Judy!'; Andy Hardy Meets Debutante (1940), Strike Up the Band (1940), Life Begins for Andy Hardy (1941) and today's topic Babes on Broadway (1942) followed... 

Click to read more ...

Almost There: Ida Lupino in 'The Hard Way'

by Cláudio Alves

Last week in the Almost There series, we took a look at Cher's performance in Robert Altman's Come Back to the 5 & Dime Jimmy Dean, Jimmy Dean. That film's part of a new Criterion Channel collection in celebration of Mother's Day. Beyond that program, the channel is bursting at the seams with enticing new offerings. So much so that we'll choose all of our May subjects from the streamer. Today we're talking Ida Lupino, whose career is featured in a selection of 13 movies spanning from 1935 to 1956. Though she was a popular Hollywood actress and even found success as a director, the British-born thespian was never nominated for an Oscar.

She got relatively close a couple of times, though. Regarding the Best Actress Academy Award, Ida Lupino's best bet was surely 1943's The Hard Way…

Click to read more ...