Showbiz History: An Unmarried Woman, Oscar Balloting, and Hula Hoops

7 random things that happened on this day, March 5th, in showbiz history...

Best Actor and Best Actress, Victor McLaglen & Bette Davis

1936 The 8th Academy Awards are held honoring the best of 1935. Victor McLaglen (The Informer) and Bette Davis (Dangerous) take the acting Oscars. Mutiny on the Bounty wins Best Picture (and nothing else). That happened three times in the first eight years of Oscar history and has literally never happened since. That same night John Ford wins the first of his four Best Director prizes (the all time record) for The Informer. Curiously only one of his Best Director wins, How Green Was My Valley, came with a companion Best Picture win. (So he's like if you combined Alfonso Cuaron and Ang Lee's records, both of whom have won twice without a companion Best Picture win, and rewrote history -- which we'd sure like to *cough Brokeback* -- to add in 1 random Best Picture win.) The four wins without much help from Best Picture frontrunner status is such a crazy record if you think on it for even half a second. It's hard to imagine that it will ever be broken...

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Links

• The Playlist Tenet pushed back to August. Shouldn't they just push it back to November at this point? What will change in one month's time?
• Variety Zoe Kravitz talks playing Catwoman in The Batman (2021). La Pfeiffer gave her blessing!
• Awards Daily interviews Tim Blake Nelson of Watchmen

After the jump a new Princess Diana movie, Big Mouth changes, new roles for Keke Palmer and Michael Keaton and a Gone With the Wind discussion...

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Dennis Quaid Still Has "The Right Stuff"

by Nathaniel R

Dennis Quaid as "Gordon Cooper" in THE RIGHT STUFF (1983)

Have you noticed how many movie stars are doing audiobooks these days? (I have a friend who keeps raving about Armie Hammer's reading of Call Me By Your Name.) But it's not just current movies with complimentary audiobooks. There's a new audiobook out this week for Tom Wolfe's 1979 nonfiction bestseller "The Right Stuff" about the astronauts of the Mercury Space Program in the 1940s and 1950s. Dennis Quaid is doing the audiobook honors this time and he famously co-starred in that book's Oscar-favored adaptation in 1983.  The Right Stuff (1983) won four craft Oscars in its year (splitting the below-the-line prizes with Ingmar Bergman's Fanny & Alexander) and if you haven't seen it you really should. It's quite good.

Here's a little bit of Dennis's familiar comfy gravel voice reading the book... sadly it's not a scene about his character but a scene involving Fred Ward's character Gus Grissom.

Review: The Emoji Movie

By Sean Donovan

The internet has spent the past few days savagely ripping apart The Emoji Movie, the animated film about sentient emojis and the adventures they have within your smartphone. This is a film made specifically for children of the internet, who might gaze upon this Sony vertical integration monstrosity of app references and infomercials for about a minute before heading back to their own smartphones. It’s tough to review The Emoji Movie, because it’s tough to take its lack of creativity and basic construction seriously when such cynicism and apathy burns off the screen. It singes your eyebrows. No one cared about making this movie; I can’t imagine anyone coming up with a criticism the filmmakers would even protest. The Emoji Movie is the unadulterated heart of capitalism pumping out disinterested beats, an infomercial for WeChat here, a paid ad for CandyCrush there, Sony everywhere you look...

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Link on a Hot Tin Roof

AV Club RIP voice acting legend June Foray
Variety Amazon is moving into being their own distributor now after partnering with other distributors before. They'll try it out with Woody Allen's Wonder Wheel which they seem to have high hopes for.
Screen Crush It's official - Emoji Movie is worst reviewed wide release of the year

/Film a photo tour of the Jim Henson exhibit at the Museum of the Moving Image
Deadline Anne Hathaway circling the Barbie movie that Amy Schumer abandoned
Coming Soon Warner Bros considering "formidable" Oscar campaign for Wonder Woman

off cinema
Variety Jack O'Connell talks about his nude scene in the new revival of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and why he hasn't watched Paul Newman in the film version
Playbill Ellen Greene shares a scrapbook from the original run of Little Shop of Horrors
Chicago Tribune recommended theater shows on a budget in Chi-town
Boy Culture the world's youngest living Madonna fan - a 13 year old violinist!
Exeunt a piece about that 'critics camp' I went to this month by one of the other fellows
NYT terribly sad debacle going on with The Great Comet of 1812 on Broadway. When I first heard about Mandy Patinkin's casting I was thrilled because I haven't yet seen the show and totally love that man. But it seems in order to accomodate him (in the role formerly played by Josh Groban) they were ousting their current leading man Okieriete “Oak” Onaodowan (from Hamilton) earlier than his scheduled final date. The optics look bad even though Broadway shows do these type of celebrity casting changes constantly. Patinkin has now dropped out and Oak won't extend and now the entire cast, which includes several actors of color (the show was previously praised for its diverse casting), could be out of jobs because they might close early due to the public outrage. 

Exit Video
The new Charlie XCX video "Boys" is a sexy blast. So many celebrity cameos including the internet's current boyfriend Riz Ahmed, diver Tom Daley, and a slew of musicians. There is a chainsaw in this video but as Charli states

NO BOYS WERE HARMED IN THE MAKING OF THIS VIDEO 💕