Vintage '81

We're having a little 1981 party for the first week of May so let's give the year some overall context before the Supporting Actress Smackdown hits on the weekend of May 8th. 

The year's two biggest blockbusters competed for Best Picture

Great Big Box Office Hits:
Raiders of the Lost Ark was the year's true behemoth, grossing twice as much as its nearest rival On Golden Pond. The Best Picture winner Chariots of Fire was a sleeper hit and that year's James Bond picture  For Your Eyes Only was also hugely popular (though that's no surprise with 007). But otherwise audiences were mostly drawn to comedies in 1981: Arthur (with Dudley Moore), Stripes (with Bill Murray) The Four Seasons (with Carol Burnett) and Cannonball Run (with Burt Reynolds) were all the rage.

Oscar favourites / theories and other cultural touchstones of 1981 after the jump...

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1981 Retrospective: Jessica Harper in "Pennies From Heaven"

Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor. He's been sharing insightful comments on his reader ballots for years so he now joins the team to talk about Supporting Actresses who weren't nominated to coincide with our upcoming Smackdown events.

The 54th Academy Awards celebrated an insular group for 1981. Only nine films were represented between all four acting categories. If you expand that circle to include the nominations for Picture, Director, and Screenplay it's only a whopping twelve films hogging forty above-the-line slots. Every Supporting Actress nominee (to be discussed soon) had a co-star recognized in a different category. But when you look to performances outside of the nominated shortlist, like Kate Reid in Atlantic City or Karen Allen in Raiders of the Lost Ark, it’s hard not to wonder why things shook out the way they did.  

Or consider Jessica Harper’s perfectly controlled performance in Pennies From Heaven. Adapted from a 1978 British miniseries, Pennies follows song salesman Arthur Parker (Steve Martin, aces as a total cad), who views life through the rose-colored tint of the music he peddles but can’t see the damage he wrecks on others, and whose affair with lovelorn schoolteacher Eileen (Bernadette Peters, winning a Golden Globe for her delicate, nuanced turn) sends both their lives spiraling towards tragedy...

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All hail The Prince of Darkness!

by Cláudio Alves

In the annals of American film history, you'll have difficulty finding a filmmaker as influential as Gordon Willis. He's one of the best cinematographers that's ever lived, a man who almost single-handedly invented the look we most quickly associate with the great cinema of the 70s. Low-lit and underexposed, his pictures were rich in shadow play and gloomy frames, a materialization of the decades' paranoia and moral ambiguities. Because of such a characteristic style, he gained the nickname 'prince of darkness,' though maybe we should have called him the king of cinematographers. Both titles feel correct…

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April Foolish Predix Pt 4: Best Picture Contenders?

We'll finish up our April Foolish' work with the acting categories this week but for now all the other pieces of the prophetic (or not) puzzle are in place. You can see it all at the Prediction Index. We're usually about half right about Best Picture this early on but... which half? And of course this year is wildly different. It's the only time we've ever had a nationwide movie theater shutdown. Georgia plans to reopen movie theaters this month (medical experts think any such reopenings of crowd venues are premature) but most States aren't eager to risk it just yet.

About the current crisis and the Oscars....

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Beauty Break: The work of Allen Daviau (1942-2020)

on the set of Empire of the Sun (1987) with Christian Baleby Nathaniel R

The film industry has lost another major talent to the coronavirus. Five time Oscar nominated cinematographer Allen Daviau has passed away at age 77 from complications from COVID-19. The acclaimed director of photography was born in New Orleans but grew up in Los Angeles so he was close to the movies before making them.

He met Steven Spielberg in the 1960s and worked with him before either of them had ever had a Hollywood gig on the short film Amblin' which Spielberg's production company was later named for.  Though Daviau was never particularly prolific and retired from the cinema in 2004 he left behind beautiful pictures and was honored with a liftetime achievement award from the American Society of Cinematographers in 2007. Let's celebrate that fine eye after the jump with some of his work...

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