8 Days Until Oscar. Do "Moonlight" or "Arrival" have Oscar twins from the past?

With 8 days to go until Hollywood's High Holy Night let's compare our two pictures with 8 nominations each this year, Denis Villeneuve's thinky sci-fi drama and Barry Jenkins' ravishing memory/identity drama. While both films might come up empty handed on Oscar night they each have a reasonable shot at one or two statues -- Moonlight could theoretically win Supporting Actor and/or Adapted Screenplay and Arrival's best Oscar shot is probably in one or both of the Sound categories unless it surprises with Adapted Screenplay itself in what could arguably be a five way race if Moonlight is not as strong as pundits suspect there.

ARRIVAL	MOONLIGHT
Their 8 Nominations
Picture	Picture
Director	Director
	Supporting Actress
	Supporting Actor
Adapted Screenplay	Adapted Screenplay
Cinematography	Cinematography
Production Design
Film Editing	Film Editing
	Original Score
Sound Mixing
Sound Editing

In the categories where they're competing which film do you prefer?

For extra fun, though, let's find out if the either of these films have any exact Oscar doppelgangers from the past shall we?

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Laura Dern Week: Rambling Rose (1991)

by Jason Adams

When it came time to choose a performance to honor here for Laura Dern Week I was a bit flummoxed - how does one on narrow it down? She's one of my favorite actresses, maybe the most favorite. So I did what any (semi)sane person in such circumstances would do: I made our host Nathaniel choose for me. I gave him two choices - I am pro-choice! One was my favorite performance of hers as Ruth in Alexander Payne's brutal abortion comedy Citizen Ruth, which I've written about a million times. And there was the one I said I had never seen before. Nathaniel went for freshness...

... but I realized ten minutes into 1991's Rambling Rose that I had actually seen it before. And I hadn't liked it! I'd blocked out the whole damn thing, actually. But a funny thing happened this time around - I found myself charmed.

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Laura Dern Week: "Smooth Talk" and "Mask"

Surprise -- It's Laura Dern Week!

With HBO's event miniseries Big Little Lies arriving in less than two weeks (February 19th - wooo) and with Laura Dern's 50th birthday happening even sooner (this Friday!) Team Experience will be celebrating the freakishly expressive Laura Dern, aka "The Face," every afternoon this week.

Though some of her earliest revelatory performances are not as readily available as they should be (none are streaming) let's talk about a few of them with an emphasis on Mask (1985) after the jump...

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On This Day in History: 1988 & 1994's Opposing Best Pic Lineups!

Feeling festive today but not quite ready for Christmas? Celebrate one of these anniversaries!

1805 Joseph Smith Jr, founder of the Mormon Church is born in Vermont. Here's a very random piece of trivia: Outside of the very early movie Brigham Young (1940) about his successor with Vincent Price in the Joseph Smith role, the only actually famous actor to ever play him is Dean Cain of Lois & Clark fame in a movie called September Dawn (2007)? It's kind of hard to draw a line connecting Vincent Price and Dean Cain otherwise, right?
1867 Madame CJ Walker, cosmetics mogul and the first black female millionaire in America, is born in Louisiana. Where's her biopic, Hollywood? History has more than just Great White Man stories.
1887 Underappreciated director John Cromwell who guided Bette Davis's breakthrough role in Of Human Bondage , and the all female wonders of Caged was born in Ohio. One more Bette related anniversary after the jump...

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Why Amy Adams May Have to Sit This Oscar Year Out...

The news of Amy Adams winning the NBR delighted many and also stirred up the usual "The Film Experience hates her!" complaints in the commentary. We do not. Being frustrated by an actor's ubiquity and dullness at one particular annual event is not the same as hating them or their work. Amy Adams is a very fine actress. She has given many delightful performances, two of which would have even made non-controversial Oscar wins had she managed to actually nab the statue (Junebug or The Fighter).

Amy Adams (5), Albert Finney (5), and Glenn Close (6) are the living actors with the most Oscar nominations who have never won.

And it's true that she's quite amazing in Arrival, serving as the audience vessel to in two simultaneous and important ways that the movie couldn't succeed without: she's awestruck by what she's watching (she's our eyes and surely our facial expressions in the dark); apart from that awe she's emotionally and intellectually engaged with the events in order to grapple with them and suss out meaning which is what the audience is always doing when they're watching grand films that demands that they pay attention with both their heart and their mind.

But for all of that I don't think she's making the Oscar lineup and here's why...

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