"A Star is Born"... or, will be *after* the Star's baby is born.

Beyoncé announced her pregnancy at MTV's VMAs last night. I switched channels after Gaga's drag king opening number so the news got to me secondhand.

There be film fallout. The fourth feature film version of A Star is Born (2013? 2014?) is now delayed for at least nine months as Beyoncé gestates and welcomes her first child into the world. The musical, meant to be Clint Eastwood's post J Edgar project, had hoped to go before the cameras early in 2012 and with the speed that Eastwood tends to work we would have probably seen it as a Christmas 2012 release.

But now that Beyoncé is pregnant (and considering also that Leonardo DiCaprio has turned down the male lead role), this won't be happening just yet. The Beyoncé/Jay-Z babe will be born first.

Oscar-obsessives should keep a close eye on this one -- the film, not the babe. While the project seems ridiculous on the surface for both "another one?" superfluity and Eastwood + Beyoncé odd-coupledom, A Star is Born is a durable cultural object. It's always a major morphing showcase for the gifts of its leading lady. The first three incarnations resulted in 17 Oscar nominations and 3 Oscars all told including bids for Best Actress for both Janet Gaynor (1937) and Judy Garland (1954) and a Best Original Song Oscar for Barbra Streisand's "Evergreen" (1976).

Will we see Beyoncé as a Best Actress nominee in 2013 or 2014... or will she have to "settle" for a Best Song Oscar?

Your Fav' Sixties & Seventies Ladies

During Summer 2011  -- winding down at last! -- we've been asking TFE readers to choose the most memorable Best Actress nominated film characters. Which film characters have you taken into your hearts and headspace most fully? Who is always popping into mind unbidden? Below are the latest voting results for August's polls covering the 1960s & 1970s (previous results: 1980s and 1991-2010). We used five year intervals for voting and asked readers to choose the 5 most memorable characters from each group of 25 Oscar nominees.

If you're looking for these polls to provide a "face" of an era it looks like Julie Andrews wins the early 60s -- she was thoroughly modern back then! -- and Faye Dunaway takes over from there for a long run at the top (1966-1980) [* indicates that it was an Oscar winning role.]

1961-1965

1. HOLLY GOLIGHTLY (Audrey Hepburn) Breakfast at Tiffany's
2. MARY POPPINS* (Julie Andrews) Mary Poppins
3. [tie] MARIA VON TRAPP (Julie Andrews) The Sound of Music and BABY JANE HUDSON (Bette Davis) Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
4. ANNIE SULLIVAN* (Anne Bancroft) The Miracle Worker

Runners Up: Though the top five were never in question, DEANIE LOOMIS from Splendor in the Grass, ALMA BROWN* from Hud (who also tied) and DIANA SCOTT*, the "sunshine girl" from Darling each had deep pockets of swoony admirers.  The remaining two top ten'ers, further back in voting were MARY TYRONE from Long Day's Journey Into Night, and CESIRA* from Two Women.

Observations: The Julie Andrews characters flip-flopped for the first week of voting until Mary took flight and left Maria behind on the hilltop. Baby Jane tried everything to kick Maria off the mountain: writing letters to daddy, rat dinners, actual kicking; a very tight race that was for third place and in the end they tied. Aside from Audrey's win, there was little consensus.

Geraldine Page finds "pure hard gold" in boytoy Paul Newman in Sweet Bird of Youth

I was disappointed at the lack of substantial votes for Natalie Wood's preggers single gal in Love With the Proper Stranger and Geraldine Page's bitch goddess superstar in Sweet Bird of Youth (though the latter almost cracked the top ten) but voting was all over the place in this round. 

Weakest Showing: No actresses suffered the "no votes" problem in this half decade grouping, but ALMA from Summer and Smoke, JANE FOSSETT from The L Shaped Room and MARGARET HAMMOND from This Sporting Life barely found any favor.

1966-1970

1. MRS ROBINSON (Anne Bancroft) The Graduate
2. MARTHA* (Elizabeth Taylor) Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf
3. BONNIE PARKER (Faye Dunaway) Bonnie & Clyde
4. FANNY BRICE* (Barbra Streisand) Funny Girl
5. [TIE] ELEANOR OF ACQUITAINE* (Katharine Hepburn) The Lion in Winter and MISS JEAN BRODIE* (Maggie Smith), The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie

still in her prime.Runners Up: update. whoops. I misread the chart. Maggie Smith's Oscar winning haughty schoolmarm actually tied with Hepburn's Lion in Winter character in the last couple of days of voting. I had missed that! What a relief, Miss Jean Brodie, still being in her prime!] The remaining four players in the top ten are as follows: GLORIA BEATTY danced as fast as she could for 7th place for They Shoot Horses Don't They? Then with far fewer votes came, JENNIFER CAVALLERI from Love Story, SUSY HENDRIX from Wait Until Dark and CHRISTINA DRAYTON* from Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

Observations: This was the closest the top spot has ever come to a tie with seductive Mrs. Robinson besting drunk Martha by just 2% of votes gathered. In other kindred spirit news, they're both fond of playing "get the guest".

This is also the closest your votes have ever aligned with the Academy's decisions as four of your top five actually winning the gold for their indelible creations and another top ten'er, too. The further back we go the more obvious it is which films are not readily available for home viewing and how much Oscar wins are worth for longevity. It's an easy way to draw people backwards to see old films. But about the availability of some films... I've said it many times but I'll have to keep saying it. Hollywood is a shameful place. It's an industry with gazillions of dollars in profits and far too few of those bucks get funnelled back into the art form to insure that films are preserved and/or available for the public. At the very least an Oscar nomination ought to mean that your film never disappears for good.

Weakest Showing: "Mary Wilson" from Happy Ending received 0% of the votes. The film is not available on DVD. Morgan!'s "Leonie Delt" and "Rosy Ryan" from Ryan's Daughter just barely escaped this fate.

1971-1975

1. SALLY BOWLES* (Liza Minnelli) Cabaret
2. NURSE RATCHED* (Louise Fletcher) One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
3. EVELYN CROSS MULWRAY (Faye Dunaway) Chinatown
4. CHRIS MACNEIL (Ellen Burstyn) The Exorcist
5. ALICE HYATT* (Ellen Burstyn) Alice Doesn't Live Here Anymore

Runners Up: the rest of the top ten in descending order were BREE DANIELS* Klute, MABEL LONGHETTI A Woman Under the Influence, and KATIE MOROSKY The Way We Were, CONSTANCE MILLER McCabe and Mrs Miller and ADELE The Story of Adele H.

Jane Fonda as "Bree" in KluteObservations: This five year period surprised me the most of all the polls in terms of how well various women fared. Ellen Burstyn is a national treasure but I wasn't expecting either of her roles to show up in the top five, let alone both of them! It seems to me that her past star would not shine as bright without that shocking resurrection that was Requiem for a Dream (2000). Let that be a lesson to all actresses. Don't give up when you've crossed the senior citizen mark. An acclaimed golden years performance can restore major luminosity to to your earlier shining successes. Speaking of which, Jane Fonda could use one final hurrah performance herself to remind people of what an irreplaceable actress she is. I was personally very disappointed to see her Klute performance outside the top five (It was a narrow miss but it shocked me. I'd rank it among the ten best actress performances of all time). But the #8 rank for Barbra's famous romantic heroine from The Way We Were was the biggest lower-than-expect shocker and at the very least it suggests that Carrie Bradshaw was definitely not voting on these polls. 

Weakest Showing: Marsha Mason's "Maggie Paul" from Cinderella Liberty received no votes with the little seen these days "Gitl" from Hester Street nearly meeting the same fate.

1976-1980

1. ANNIE HALL* (Diane Keaton) Annie Hall
2. CARRIE WHITE (Sissy Spacek) Carrie
3. DIANA CHRISTENSEN* (Faye Dunaway) Network
4. LORETTA LYNN* (Sissy Spacek) Coal Miner's Daughter
5. NORMA RAE WEBSTER* (Sally Field)

Runners Up: the rest of the top ten in descending order was composed of bad mommy BETH JARRETT from Ordinary People, Goldie Hawn's PRIVATE BENJAMIN, Bette Midler's MARY ROSE FOSTER from The Rose, delusional beige EVE from Interiors and "Yo, ADRIAN" from Rocky just barely knocked Gena Rowland's GLORIA and Ingrid Bergman's CHARLOTTE ANDERGAST of the ring to nab spot #10.

Observations:  I was surprised to see Mary Tyler Moore's legendary Bad Mommy performance in Ordinary People outside the top five but she was just one or two votes shy of making it a three way tie with the two biographical performances ahead of her. 

Marsha... no one is on the line!Weakest Showing: Marsha Mason's "Jenny Maclaine" in Chapter Two received no votes. I thought about voting for this character myself but there were too many other strong options. I used to just love that movie though I have only the dimmest recall of it now so I couldn't say "most memorable!". Mason was a very hot Oscar commodity for a few short years but none of her characters have done well in the polls indicating that her films have either not aged well for one reason or another or people just haven't seen them or, most likely, some combination of both. Is it time for some enterprising young director to take her on as a project: Marsha Mason revival!

This is a lot to process, I know. Any surprises, disappointments or observations you want to share? Have you been inspired to add any of these pictures to your rental queues?

70s "Best Actress Character"

Here we go again. We've been voting on the best Best Actress characters of all time. (Results of the 80s, 90s and 00s if you missed any.) These polls are not meant to represent which actress you would have voted for had you been an Oscar member but which characters are the most indelible in the Academy's history. Which of these fictional or fictionalized ladies from the 1970s take up the most mental real estate for you?

You can choose FIVE characters from each poll. The second poll is further down the page.

Ready Set Go

1971-1975

poll by twiigs.com

But wait there's more!

1976-1980

 

poll by twiigs.com

Happy Voting!

 Please tell your 70s mad friends about the poll. What a decade in cinema that was...

The Rose

may flowers, blooming each afternoon

Just remember.... in the winter... far beneath the bitter snow...

How beautiful is that song? On a scale of 1-10? 11! One of the all time classics.

I don't think we've ever discussed that particular Best Actress race. Sally Field took her first Oscar for Norma Rae "UNION!". But who gets your vote?

• Jill Clayburgh, Starting Over
• Sally Field, Norma Rae
• Jane Fonda, The China Syndrome
• Marsha Mason, Chapter Two
• Bette Midler, The Rose

I've just realized that the reason we've never discussed it here at The Film Experience is that I barely remember these movies (and have never seen Starting Over ... which sounds like a spiritual sequel or straight up remake of An Unmarried Woman). I remember really liking the other four performances when I saw them on VHS (gulp) in the late 80s. I was a huge fan of Chapter Two in particular for a split second but barely remember it now. No one speaks of Marsha Mason anymore...

Network (1976). One Angry Man.

In honor of Sidney Lumet who passed away this weekend, we're re-publishing The Film Experience retrospective on Network from a few years ago. It's new to some of you!

One Angry Man
One thing I suspect about director Sidney Lumet: He liked his drama super-sized, Empire State Building big. No 800 lbs gorillas in the room please, make it King Kong. Give them 16 tons of drama. Lumet wanted grunting, sweating, lunging, screaming, gargantuan desperate drama like the kind you get in Dog Day Afternoon, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead and Serpico. Never mind 12 Angry Men. How about 1 Angry Man, Sidney Lumet, and in the case of Network -- arguably his best film -- one angry fictional man named Howard Beale (Peter Finch). Network eventually gets around to naming Beale the “mad prophet of the airwaves” but it’s also a self descriptive tag. The movie is mad as hell and prophetic, too. Network is Howard Beale and Howard Beale is Network. This impressively large but also miniature film --it's not hard to imagine it as a stage play -- swings wildly from mood to mood like its bipolar madman.

A lot of movies steal from Network but I love the borrowing that Network does right out of the gate, in omniscient detached voiceover.

In his time Howard Beale had been a mandarin of television. The grand old man of news with a hot rating of 16 and a 28 audience share. In 1969 however his fortunes began to decline. He fell to a 22 share. The following year his wife died and he was left a childless widower with an 8 rating and a 12 share.

That calm voiceover, giving numbers as much if not more weight as the man's personal life, has already begun the chilling process of reduction. It's overtly reminiscent of both All About Eve's arch view of the theater world and Sunset Boulevard's ghost-eye view of Hollywood. Network’s target is television. Is it boldly proclaiming itself the final third of the Holy Trinity of Self-Loathing Showbiz Pictures? Whatever the intent, it moves with utter confidence, thereby forcing itself into the godhead. 

We're in the boredom killing business.

It may seem odd to claim that such a black hearted picture is completely entertaining, even enjoyable, but it is. Right from its first shot of four television screens (the one featuring Beale eventually growing to fill the whole screen) the movie surges at you with such electric, articulate force that you have no choice but to go with its current. The prologue of the film then finds Beale (just given his walking papers) with old friend Max Schumacher (William Holden) drinking and laughing maniacally. The chaser to their raucous laughter? A perfect 180˚ cut to Beale seated at the bar quietly announcing “I’m going to kill myself”. The two friends begin to set the movie's plot in motion with improvised plans for live suicides and terrorism on TV. "The Death Hour!" Max proclaims with forced 90 proof glee. Where does all this gallows humor put us before the title credits even begin to appear? 

That puts us in the shithouse. That's where that puts us.

Network is an easy film to quote and its super sculpted and scalding dialogue is undoubtedly the reason why the screenplay (by triple Oscar winner Paddy Chayefsky) is so lauded. It’s the type of talky feature that's jerry-rigged to draw attention to its themes, BIG ideas, diamond hard one liners and showcased monologues. But words aside, the plotting is also tight and strong. I can’t think of a single film that’s more interested in stopping for speeches that also moves with breakneck speed through the twists and turns of its various plots. 

Plot A: Howard Beale threatens to kill himself on air, leading to rubberneck ratings jumps and corporate exploitation of his sudden insanity. As Beale slips deeper into a complete psychotic break, corporate sharks Diana Christensen (Faye Dunaway) and Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) start swimming, devouring the smaller fish at the network like Max Schumacher, as they try to capitalize on Beale's popularity with the public who embraces his catchphrase:

I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!

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