4 Days til the Smackdown - Meet the Panelists!

The Supporting Actress Smackdown of 1984 is coming your way on Wednesday August 31st with Dame Peggy Ashcroft defending her Oscar from the other side. Will the panel co-sign that Oscar win or throw their votes to Christine Lahti, Lindsay Crouse, or legendary Oscar regulars in the form or either Glenn Close or Geraldine Page. Please remember that readers are the collective sixth panelist so I expect your answers to these questions in the comments (as well as your ballots - details on what to send me here).

MEET THE PANELISTS

Please give a hearty welcome to two first time Smackdowners

NOAH TSIKA
Noah Tsika is the Assistant Professor of Media Studies at Queens College, CUNY. He has also written two books on cinema: Nollywood Stars: Media and Migration in West Africa and the Diaspora and Pink 2.0: Encoding Queer Cinema on the Internet. 
Follow Noah on Twitter 

SHEILA O'MALLEY 
Sheila O'Malley is a regular film critic for Rogerebert.com and other outlets including The Criterion Collection. She wrote the narration (read by Angelina Jolie) for the Gena Rowlands tribute reel played at the 2016 Governors Awards. Her blog is The Sheila Variations.  
Follow Sheila on Twitter. 

...welcome back two regular Smackdowners

JOE REID
Joe Reid never went to film school, unless you count the film school of hard knocks, which he also didn't go to. That hasn't stopped him from writing about movies. He is currently Senior Writer at Decider.com. One day, he'll have written about his love for The Hours, Go, and Mermaids enough that he can finally close his laptop, satisfied that his work is done. 
Follow Joe on Twitter 

NICK DAVIS
Nick Davis writes the reviews and features at the website Nick's Flick Picks.  The site's unpredictable cycles of frenzied activity and long dormancy have to do with his also being an Associate Professor of English and Gender & Sexuality Studies at Northwestern, where his research and teaching mostly concern narrative film in different eras, genres, and countries. 
Follow Nick on Twitter 

And, of course, your host with all his needy questions about your favorites this and that...

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Links: Best Picture Field, Highest Paid Actresses, The Departed on TV?

It's link time which also doubles as news catch up! (Yes, Oscar Chart updates are currently in progress. So more on that and the foreign submissions very soon)

Think Pieces, List Mania, Celebrity
• Movie City News launches another "Gurus of Gold" season where all of us have named our current top 20 "general field" predictions. Yes, I'm updating my charts over the next three days! Manchester by the Sea and Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk are expected leaders
• Gawker Rich Juzwiack says goodbye to one identity through a George Michael lens. It's wonderful
• MNPP Paul Bettany is vacationing in Ibiza
• NYT talks to Kirsten Dunst about life after Fargo and her Emmy nomination
• Mind of a Suspicious Kind Martin Scorsese's Silence is supposedly his longest ever (over 3 hours) but is it actually coming out this year?

• Cinema Enthusiast polled film twitter on their favorite films of 1982. The results are interesting but weird. The Thing at #1? Erm, okay. Star Trek II above Victor/Victoria? NO. I have to admit that I'm quite spotty on early 80s cinema though because I couldn't drive myself to the cinema back then.
• Forbes on the easy-to-predict failure of the new Ben-Hur and how it's a fitting end to this particular summer
• Little White Lies wonders if there still a place for eroticism in cinema while watching shorts in Montreal 
• i09 what went wrong with this summer's blockbusters
• AV Club talks to Clea DuVall about past roles on the eve of her directorial debut with The Intervention
• MNPP Dagmara Dominczyck's Patrick Wilson appreciation social media game
• ...TFE we interviewed her once and she is stunningly gorgeous herself
• Slate that nude Trump statue hitting various cities is not amusing to everyone  
• ...EW including actress/author Amber Tamblyn 

News & Miscellania
• The Guardian more trouble for Birth of a Nation. AFI cancelled screenings and Q&A
• ... icymi TFE previous handwringing about this scandal and film
• Forbes Jennnifer Lawrence & Melissa McCarthy top the annual highest paid actresses list this year. Two actresses outside of Hollywood made the list this year: Deepika Padukone (India) and Fan Bingbing (China). Figures include not just films but endorsement deals and such. The Zeéeeee apparently banked a lot for returning to her signature role in Bridget Jones's Baby since she almost made the list.

• /Film Blade Runner 2 adds Jared Leto to the cast and Jóhan Jóhannsson as composer
• Theater Mania Jennifer Holliday joining the cast of the Broadway revival of Color Purple. I guess they've decided to make Shug Avery the short-term award-winning star draw (they've already been through Jennifer Hudson and Heather Hedley) 
• Screen Daily undervalued British actor Andrew Scott has a lead role. He'll star in the thriller Steel Country 
• Kotaku Ghost in the Shell  supporting cast photos leaked
• Towleroad on Frank Oceans new video Nikes 
• Coming Soon Amazon developing a TV series based on The Departed. Hmmm. Isn't that an odd fit for long term storytelling. It would imply we can never move past the double crossing discovered stage
• Playbill Debbie Reynolds and Carrie Fisher documentary will premiere at the NYFF 
• Film Stage the first image from Euphoria with Alicia Vikander & Eva Green 

Madonna Mania - It's Around This Summer For Some Reason (not complaning)
• Boy Culture on a star studded Truth or Dare screening in NYC...
• People ...Madonna even showed up super briefly!
• Village Voice Michael Musto recalls his up and down relationship to the material girl through their very long contemporaneous careers 

And I'll leave you with the new La La Land trailer. (If you missed our discussion of the first trailer, that's here.) This movie can't open soon enough!

1984: Year of the Heroic Farm Wife

As we look back at 1984, please welcome new contributor John Guerin to talk about a famous Oscar triple...

In 1984, 60% of the Best Actress category was farm wives

In May 1985, after scoring Oscar nominations for playing distressed farmwives in Country and The River, Jessica Lange and Sissy Spacek testified before the U.S. House of Representatives and urged senators to help aid farmers during a devastating agricultural crisis. After a toxic combination of faulty economic policies, mounting debts, high interest rates, and a declining Midwest population, American farmers were experiencing financial hardship unseen since the Great Depression. Both Country and The River offer visions of farm families under such pressures, pitting family and community against unyielding forces of nature and government.

Can you remember the last time an actress testified before Congress after starring in a politically-minded film?

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Swing, Tarzan, Swing! Ch.7: Oscar Loves "Greystoke"

During this summer of the Tarzan reboot we've revisited past films in the long history of Tarzan on film. Four more episodes to go!

Impossible as it may be to move Tarzan away from his ultra-specific origins as a colonial era fantasy, filmmakers have tried over and over again to do exactly that. As we've seen in past installments of our "Swing, Tarzan, Swing!" series, he keeps changing with the times despite his historical baggage. We've seen starkly different depictions of his relationship to Jane from equal partners to Head of the Household suburban conformity. The Lord of the Apes even tried to get bachelor hip with the 1960s at the beginning of the James Bond frenzy. Nearly every Tarzan on television has attempted to place him closer to the actual timeline in which it aired. The new Legend of Tarzan (reviewed) works hard to downplay the racism in the myth, but it's never going completely away given that the story is, at heart, about a white man who becomes king of the jungle and often the savior of Africans in his ongoing adventures.

Tarzan works best when he's allowed to stay in the era to which he belongs. So it was a stroke of inspiration for director Hugh Hudson (fresh off a Best Picture win with Chariots of Fire) to give him the historical epic treatment in Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984) even though the Ape Man doesn't belong to world history any more than, say, Batman, Superman and Spider-Man who were all also tragically orphaned (it's a superhero thing, okay?). 

The marketing was so committed to this "serious" prestige historical treatment that the poster even has a four paragraph synopsis closer to a novel than a movie tagline...

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1984: John Cassavetes' Farewell "Love Streams"

by Bill Curran

The story of an irredeemably chaotic, forever ailed pair of siblings—Robert (John Cassavetes), a louche, bestselling (but never working) author and alcoholic, and Sarah (Gena Rowlands), his troubled, manic sister just divorced and now separated from her daughter—Love Streams doesn’t care much for a Story, capital “S”.  There is no dissolution or sea change in Cassavetes’ swan song*. If one of the chief pleasures of any good narrative is the suggestion of lives lived before and after the story itself, it’s striking to note that, unlike previous Cassavetes works like Faces and A Woman Under the Influence (with their forever altering moments), Love Streams exists on a continuum. We know Robert and Sarah will never really change. And there is a poignant resignation in realizing at the film’s end, as a thunderstorm pounds the windowpanes of Robert’s home and Sarah’s new companion’s car, that we’ve witnessed only a beautiful stepping stone in their zigzagging roads to nowhere.

Instead, the film achieves a dreamlike intensity, moment to moment, by giving free reign to Robert and Sarah’s thoughts and associations...

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