Showbiz History: Cheers, The Wizard of Oz, Beach Rats

10 random things that happened on this day, August 25th, in showbiz history...

1885 Silent film master G.W. Pabst (Pandora's Box) born in Germany. 

1918 Today is the Centennial of composer Leonard Bernstein. We've been posting a three part West Side Story tribute that I hope you will all read and comment on! Part 3 later today, apologies for the 24 hour delay. (Oh, and check out today's Google Doodle in his honor)

←1939 The Wizard of Oz arrives in movie theaters. Though popular in its initial release, the 9th highest grossing film of its year and a Best Picture nominee, the budget was high enough that MGM recorded a loss of $1 million...

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I Have Altered The Auteur, Pray I Do Not Alter It Further

by Salim Garami

What's good? This is opening weekend for Solo: A Star Wars Story, a Disney/Lucasfilm production that saw a bit of behind-the-scenes drama. It's hardly the first production of the space opera franchise to be so contentious: Rogue One had Tony Gilroy take over post-production in lieu of director Gareth Edwards and the still in-production Star Wars Episode IX interrupted its development when Colin Trevorrow stepped down as director to J.J. Abrams, returning from Star Wars: The Force Awakens.

After the jump, more on Solo and five films that had survived such a director change to a decent reception after the jump...

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Soundtracking: The Best Oscar Winning Original Songs

by Chris Feil

While Soundtracking aims to look at the depth and relationship between movies and their music, one of this series’ minor ambitions is to defend the purpose of Oscar’s much maligned Original Song category. Complain about some of the weak nominees in recent years and you are (alone yet) not alone. But this category has a rich history of classics and film-defining tracks, some of which you may not know have their origins in the cinema. Case in point: holiday staple of hot takes "Baby It's Cold Outside" won the Oscar in 1949 for Neptune's Daughter.

While this year’s nominees run from the unfortunate to the immaculate, I’d also offer that Oscar’s Original Song is currently in an upswing in quality. It has also faced some underwhelming periods (take a look at the 50s) and may never return to its 70s-80s level of radio rotation, but Original Songs remain as essential as the films themselves. So to showcase the category, I’ve ranked the best of the Original Song winners! If your favorite didn’t make the list, consider that a reminder of how much you actually cherish the category...

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RPDR S8.1 Donut Come For Me!

We're days late arriving to the conversation about RuPaul's Drag Race Season 8 but donut come for me (heh). There are only so many hours in the day. Watching the "Meet the Queens" teaser I predicted Bob, Kim Chi and Laila for the top three (in a betting pool) and then Laila landed in the bottom two the very first episode. Whoops! There goes a tenner.

Kim Chi, who describes herself as an anime character, did a Cowardly Lion homage (there are always movie references!). More after the jump if you're so inclined... 

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Beauty vs Beast: Man Made Woman

Jason from MNPP here, hoping y'all have by now nursed your Oscar hangovers from last week, whether literal or figurative, and are feeling at least somewhat happy about what won (or maybe what didn't win - no judgment here) this year. I go into the show as cynical as a storm cloud every year but there was a long stretch in the middle of the show, as Mad Max swept up everything in sight like one of its desert twisters, where I was making many happy noises, and that's as good as it ever gets.

But my happiest noise of all issued forth (kind of an ecstatic coo, you might call it) at the night's biggest surprise, which our friend Manuel gave good love to right after the show -- Ex Machina's out-of-nowhere win for Best Special Effects over a crowd of popular behemoths. Those gears glowing and shimmering inside Ava's mid-section were low-key, gorgeous movie magic, and there's one image in the film (of a robot's self-abuse) that I won't be forgetting any time soon.

That said it seems time to finally place the Woman against her Maker here in our "Beauty vs Beast" series; I'd have nominated both of these actors for their performances myself, so this will contest of ours have to suffice...

It's been a couple of weeks since our last edition, which faced off the Witches of Oz in honor of the release of The Witch, but I don't know about you - I still haven't stopped thinking and talking about The Witch. Anyway as for Oz it was a blow-out for her beautiful wickedness herself - The Wicked Witch of the West walked away with over 80% of your vote! Take that, goody-two-shoes Glinda. Said Yavor (sharing the sorts of factoids that make TFE great):

"Nicole Kidman says that watching the WWOTW was what first made her want to act."