Random Leftover Thoughts from Oscar Night...

by Nathaniel R

Yes, I'm trying to stave off the annual Post Oscar Depression. It's a real thing even if the medical community doesn't yet recognize it. So herewith some random final screengrabs from Oscar night and accompanying thoughts on topics we haven't totally covered yet over the past 3 days of Oscar reactions, recapping, post-mortem. (I promise we'll quit with Oscar 2016 by tonight and move on to other topics for those of you who've already moved on)

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Happy New Year: "The Apartment" (1960)

by Chris Feil

The week between Christmas and New Year’s can be a disorienting time - an inescapable amount of parties, reflections on the closing year, and hope for the one to come. For the more somber sort, it’s the feeling of being alone in a series of crowded rooms you can’t escape. New Year’s Eve is simply the worst holiday - like “Auld Lang Syne” it proposes joy and companionship, but always comes up feeling solemn.

Such is the emotional terrain of Billy Wilder’s classic romance The Apartment, a very best Best Picture winner. In its indifferent, wintery New York City, it’s easy to feel isolated and cast aside when everyone else goes on about their lives - but the very thing that sets you apart is what will make you feel less alone when you see it reflected in another person. The film is all the more romantic for being a love story for the melancholy, its soaring hope all the more hard won and transformative.

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Wild Oats Poster & Trailer

by Manuel Betancourt

Shirley MacLaine and Jessica Lange are in a movie together. It's called Wild Oats and it was directed by Andy Tennant of Fools Rush In and Sweet Home Alabama fame. You can see why this news is vexing. We should be thrilled about seeing MacLaine and Lange together (in a comedy no less!) but it might not be a great addition to this growing "Old dames having a ball!" genre that's become a staple of late. 

The film, which follows the two Oscar winning actresses "newly rich" (given a banking error in one's husband's insurance policy), "newly single" (see above), and "forever young" (they're timeless, these glittering movie stars) looks to be a tad more Hello My Name is Doris than I'll See You In My Dreams, with a whiff of The Exotic Marigold Hotel. Oh, and did I mention it co-stars Demi Moore? 

You can check out the trailer for Wild Oats, which I'm still processing, below. Does it look like a film you'd change the channel for? Perhaps. But I admit that the "Have you ever seen The Graduate?" line had me smirking to myself, and few things are as entertaining as seeing actresses you love having a good time on screen.

HMWYBS: "The Turning Point"

Bancroft & Maclaine reminisce in The Turning PointBest Shot 1977 Party. Chapter 2
The Turning Point (1977)
Directed by: Herbert Ross
Cinematography by: Robert Surtees

When The Turning Point is remembered today, on the rare occasion that you hear it name-checked, it is nearly always in connection to its status as Oscar's all time loser (11 nominations without a win). That "achievement" was later shared when Steven Spielberg's The Color Purple (1985) met the same Oscar fate, entering the competition as a very big ticket and coming away empty-handed. It's surely no coincidence that both films are women's pictures. Oscar has grown increasingly wary of films about and for women over their 88 year history; that's not a mark on the films themselves but a stain on film culture and the Oscars. 1977 was in some significant ways, the very last Oscar year to be dominated by women. The sole "boys" movie up for the top prize was Star Wars, which perhaps also not coincidentally became the film which most Hollywood films aspired to be thereafter. Yes, 80% of the Best Picture nominees in 1977 were actually about women. Can you imagine it?!? That's a huge percentage which has, alas, not happened again in the 39 years since. Most Best Picture years since have been the reverse of those numbers, when in a more sane world it'd be about 50/50 since, you know, that's actually how the human race breaks down. 

Bronze. I think this is trying to be the film's signature image, but there are two many climaxes preceding it and following it to quite pull it off.

But now we're straying into Oscar stats when what we really want to talk about is this ballet melodrama and its gauzy prettiness. Worthy of 11 Oscar nominations? Surely not but that's not because of its subject, its genre, or its cast of accomplished women... 

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Beauty vs Beast: Cillian Time

Howdy and Happy Monday, folks, Jason from MNPP here with your "Beauty vs Beast" for the week - this time around we're wishing the great and still somehow under-rated Cillian Murphy a happy 40th birthday! He hits the milestone on Wednesday, and we couldn't be happier to watch him age - his smooth-skinned preternatural prettiness was kind of too much to look at once upon a time. Time has made him seem more human, less alien and terrifying, which on the one hand is a loss, but I think that he's a great enough actor that it's one he can overcome with ease.

Anyway in his honor we're stepping back to a role that, contrary to everything I just said, showed him at his most human and his most terrifying all at once, with Wes Craven's terrifically entertaining 2005 thriller Red Eye. Cillian Murphy plays Jackson Rippner (yes really!), the viscious cat to Rachel McAdams' determined little mouse Lisa, and they Tom-n-Jerry each other all over an airplane. S'good times!

PREVIOUSLY We put on our best brave face to face off the mother-daughter team of Terms of Endearment, and in the end it was "Big Momma" MacLaine who stuck her head through the sunroof to victory, taking about 64% of the vote. Said Suzanne:

"Aurora is winning because Shirley MacLaine is one of the great screen actresses but somehow doesn't seem to get enough credit. Also because I voted for her on each of my electronic devices."