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10 DAY UNTIL OSCAR! Random Oscar Trivia This Morning...
Today is the 91st birthday of George Kennedy. In addition to getting to spend a lot of shirtless sweaty hours with Paul Newman (mmm) in Cool Hand Luke, he's the oldest living Best Supporting Actor winner. But who, you ask, are the others? (Just humor me and ask okay?)
Okay, okay. I'll tell you!
The Five Oldest Living Best Supporting Actor Oscar Winners after the jump...
Team Experience is celebrating Valentines Day with favorite love scenes. Here's Lynn Lee on an 80s classic
Great Moments in Screen Kisses #20, Julian Sands and Helena Bonham CarterEveryone who loves this film remembers The Kiss. It’s the moment proper Edwardian girl Lucy Honeychurch (a very young Helena Bonham-Carter), vacationing in Italy, discovers romantic passion for the first time. She doesn’t know it yet, but the odd free-thinking young man she’s only recently met (Julian Sands) is her soulmate. He knows it, though.
Besides being (literally) storybook-romantic—a sun-drenched poppy field in Italy! lush soprano aria in the background!—the kiss is also wreathed in comedy, as the film cuts back and forth between Lucy, wending her way uncertainly towards George, and her fussy chaperone Charlotte (Maggie Smith) bonding with another fellow tourist, a hacky romance novelist (Judi Dench), over scandalous love stories before she starts to worry about Lucy. Meanwhile, the Italian driver who led Lucy to George looks on in amusement at what he has wrought. He knows what’s up, his own public display of affection having been previously smacked down by these uptight Brits. But the Kiss will not be denied.
It’s also the kiss that keeps on giving for the rest of the movie. Its memory haunts Lucy during her utter failure of a first kiss with her fiancé, Cecil (Daniel Day-Lewis, vying for comic MVP with Maggie Smith), in England. It reappears again at a critical and exquisitely awkward moment as a passage in a terrible romance novel, penned by none other than Charlotte’s novelist friend, that the clueless Cecil just happens to read out loud to none other than Lucy and George. The tension that was simmering since George’s reentry into Lucy’s life then comes to full boil, precipitating a chain of events that eventually forces out in the open what Lucy’s been denying for too long: she and George belong together.
We should probably start covering that. It seems like a boring topic but we jazz up your public service announcements. I'll close my eyes and play with the control bar and wherever I freeze the movie I'll share the image.This weekend is your last chance to watch these films for free for who knows how long. Since there are Oscar titles in the mix, perhaps you can fill some holes in your Oscar lists of Things To See or Rewatch.
Ready? In chronological order of their film year, seven films leaving Netflix on February 1st...
TERMS OF ENDEARMENT (1983)
EMMA: I've got some good news. I'm unofficially pregnant. I mean I haven't got the tests back but I'm never late.
AURORA: [Pause] Well... No, I don't understand."
Look how crazy young Jeff Daniels is! Shirley Maclaine is so hilarious and complicated in this movie -- that long pause with cascading rejection of possible responses under frozen 'I don't understand' face. She's going to lose out since she doesn't want to think of herself as a grandmother. A well deserved Best Actress win, with Shirley obviously relieved about it "this show has been as long as my career."
Oscar Note: I know we've asked this before but how long before we get another girlie Best Picture winner it's been FOR-EV-ER. Terms of Endearment was nominated for 11 Oscars (an astounding amount for a contemporary-set film), winning 5.
Last week we enjoyed the eloquent musings of one Stephen Sondheim and quibbled over whether Todd Haynes’s intentionally queasy and dizzying take on “I’m Still Here” was worth including in James Lapine’s documentary on the Broadway composer. This week we’re taking a break from our regular programming and going back in time to celebrate one of HBO’s earliest Oscar victories.
As you may or may not know, films produced by HBO have won over 20 Oscars. Last year alone, HBO dominated both documentary categories with Citizenfour and Crisis Hotline: Veterans Press 1 emerging victorious in their respective categories. And so, let us travel back to March 1990 when Robert Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Common Threads: Stories from the Quilt (discussed here) won the Best Documentary Oscar. [More...]
Thursday, February 18, 2016 at 9:15AM 
