26 days til Oscar. (From Here to the 26th Annual Oscars Eternity)

by Nathaniel R

With but 26 days left until Hollywood's High Holy Night, it's time to get cracking on film year wrap-up everything so expect a few more Oscar chart revisions very soon plus the Film Bitch Awards and such. But until then, let your minds drift back to the dirty sexy 26th annual Oscars when Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, and Monty Clift all got filthy for From Here to Eternity (1953) which took Best Picture and seven other Oscars but none for the three leading actors.

The Best Picture nominees were...

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The 25 Youngest Men Ever Nominated for Best Actor

by Nathaniel R

Timothée Chalamet photographed by Craig McDean for Interview magazine

With the fine coming of age romantic drama Call Me By Your Name now in limited release, audiences can join critics in swooning over the revelatory work of Timothée Chalamet's as the preternaturally sophisticated but hormonally confused Elio. He won the Gotham Awards "Breakthrough" award last night. Should his incredible performance earn him an Academy nomination for Best Leading Actor, he will be the third youngest man to ever receive that honor (he turns 22 the day after Christmas)...

Only Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper were younger in their Oscar races and both happened in Oscar's first dozen years (!) when the Academy's habits and fetishes and aversions were still being sorted out. They quickly turned against really young actors. While many women have won Best Actress in their 20s, it's only happened once for a man. The youngest leading male winner is currently Adrien Brody who won his Oscar for The Pianist (2002) just three weeks before he turned 30.

But who are the youngest male leads ever nominated? Read on for the dewiest 25. Tell us how many you've seen and who is your favorite...

YOUNGEST LEAD ACTOR NOMINEES

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56 Days 'til Oscar Nominations. Let's talk 1956

by Nathaniel R

1956 is not, from our vantage point, a particularly lauded year in cinema but it's an Oscar field we tend to think of regularly for various reasons including but not limited to:

-Camp value (Ten Commandments, Bad Seed)
-Musicals (The King and I, High Society)
-Strange snubs (The Searchers received zero nominations despite Oscar's obsession with John Ford)
-Delayed foreign grandeur (La Strada and Seven Samurai, 1954 films both, were up for Oscars)
-not one but two kaiju movies (Godzilla and Rhodan)...and more.

What's your favorite movie of 1956? I don't think I've seen enough to feel comfortable with a full top ten but here are the five I like best currently (with much more to see) after the jump...

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"Sunset Boulevard" Rumors... Again.

by Nathaniel R

She's baaaa-aaack. It's AS IF WE NEVER SAID GOODBYE

You may have heard that plans are afoot (again) to bring Andrew Lloyd Webber's Sunset Boulevard musical to the big screen. It will be a Paramount Pictures production. For giggles, I was attempting to find an old article from the last time rumors spread that Glenn Close was going to transfer her Tony success to the big screen and republish it nearly intact "As If We Never Said Goodbye" to this rumor (haha. I'm here all week.) Alas, the article hid itself though I remember writing it. But what year to even search for such a thing? This rumor is perennial...

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Susan Hayward in "I'll Cry Tomorrow"

SUSAN HAYWARD CENTENNIAL WEEK

"this story was filmed on location... inside a woman's soul!"
-I'll Cry Tomorrow's tagline.

by Eric Blume

I’ll Cry Tomorrow, a biopic of singer Lillian Roth, won Susan Hayward the fourth of her five Oscar nominations, in 1955.  The film starts with a young Lillian and her stage mother, played by Jo Van Fleet. Ten minutes in, though, Hayward gets a true star entrance belting out “Sing You Sinners” in a lengthy number with only four cuts.

It’s a fun introduction, partially because you try to place yourself in 1955, when part of the excitement (one guesses) was hearing Hayward sing for the first time, and it’s quite a boisterous number. Then Hayward was known mostly as a tragedienne (Hollywood star variety), it must have been a blast for audiences to see Hayward let loose (Hollywood star style) in a big production number where she gets to snarl and dance (Hollywood star style, as the musicality doesn’t come easily to her)... 

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