Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1993

The Contenders:

Jim Sheridan: In the Name of the Father
Jane Campion: The Piano
James Ivory: The Remains of the Day
Steven Spielberg: Schindler’s List (winner)
Robert Altman: Short Cuts

Now That's a Hangover!

Films: The Morning After
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

Jane Fonda is one of those actors I have to take on a case-by-case basis. She can be so good with good writing. With a film like Klute or They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, she is the best thing on the screen. Then she does films like Monster-in-Law or Georgia Rule and you wonder which is the real Jane. I’ve always got my guard up a little with her, which leads us to The Morning After, which I found online.

Alexandra Sternbergen, aka Viveca Van Loren (Fonda) wakes up one morning with the hangover she’s grown accustomed to having. She’s a blackout drunk who has pissed away her acting career by climbing into a bottle every night. This morning, though, she has woken up in the apartment of a man she doesn’t know. That might be bad enough, but it’s not the whole story. The man is dead, and since he has a knife sticking out of his chest, it’s clear that this was no heart attack.

Wednesday Horror: Diary of the Dead

Films: Diary of the Dead
Format: DVD from LaSalle Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

So let’s talk for a minute about George Romero. You cannot get away from the fact that Romero was an important filmmaker. If he did nothing after Night of the Living Dead, he’d still be remembered with a great deal of respect. He did a lot more, of course, but despite films like Martin and The Crazies, he’s always going to be remembered as the guy who created zombies as they are known in the modern world. After his initial trilogy, he took a 20-year break from zombies until creating three more films. The middle film of that group, Diary of the Dead, is the one that concerns us today.

Before we dive too heavily into the film itself, I need to say a few things about it. First is that the overall quality of Romero’s zombie films drops off after the initial trilogy. I like the initial three movies quite a bit. Night of the Living Dead is a true genre classic and Dawn of the Dead is arguably better and definitely bloodier. Day of the Dead is better than it’s initial reputation and not nearly as good as its current reputation, but it’s not bad. When we move into the second trilogy, we start with Land of the Dead, which has some interesting ideas, but doesn’t quite reach the strength of the original movies. Diary of the Dead is not nearly as good as Land of the Dead.

Punchy

Film: The Champ
Format: DVD from NetFlix on The New Portable.

I’ve said before that Oscar seems to be obsessed with boxing more than any other sport. While there are sports elements in many an Oscar nominee and Oscar winner, there are three Best Picture winners that have a significant sports element (and despite the football and ping pong elements in Forrest Gump, it’s clearly not a sports movie) and two of them have to do with boxing. So it’s not really that shocking that as I come close to closing out both the Best Picture and Best Director categories, there’s yet another boxing movie to get through. That would be The Champ, from 1931.

As befits its status as an early talkie, we’re going to be diving deeply into melodrama here. It seems like a requirement of most movies of the era to have a massive dollop of melodrama tossed in, likely a hangover from the silent era when everything had to be significantly overacted to resonate on the screen. Also, it’s worth noting that for a movie about boxing, there’s not going to be a huge amount of actual boxing that happens here (and the boxing that does happen is very clearly terrible).

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1929-1930

The Contenders:

All Quiet on the Western Front (winner)
The Big House
Disraeli
The Divorcee
The Love Parade

Wakanda Forever

Film: Black Panther
Format: Market Square Cinema.

So it only took me six weeks or so to get to Black Panther. That’s honestly pretty good for me; this marks the fourth time I’ve been to a theater in the last 27 months. Typically, I wait for the movie to come out on one format or another and watch it then. Still, for what it’s worth T’Challa is my favorite Avenger character and has been for some time.

I realize that that sounds like the sort of claim that might be made by someone looking to score some social justice credibility, but that’s not the case. There was a period where I was a comic book nerd. That lasted for a few years, and included at least part of the time that Marvel Comics produced a book called Marvel Comics Presents. It came out bi-weekly, and contained four 8-page stories, three of which would be serialized over a given number of issues. In issue #13, they started a 25-part Black Panther story called Panther Quest, which was my introduction to the character. So, for nearly a year I followed this story through the character’s pain and heartbreak and dealing with racism and apartheid. Like I said, he became my favorite Avenger-related character pretty quickly.

Business as Unusual

Film: The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz
Format: Internet video on the new internet machine.

With the number of movies I need to watch dropped below100, I’m finding more and more movies that I simply have to watch if I’m going to continue at all. I’ve had a copy of The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz sitting saved on a flashdrive for a couple of years without pulling the trigger. The reason is simple: I always have a little fear of those movies that feel like I’m going to be the only person who has ever seen it. I always find that so frustrating.

Anyway, The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz is evidently the movie that forced Richard Dreyfuss to take the role of Hooper in Jaws. He was apparently so appalled by his performance in this that he figured his career was over and was desperate for any role he could get. I don’t think he’s all that bad in the film, but who am I to judge how someone sees him- or herself? Regardless, the fact that this movie and Jaws were in consecutive years is utterly fascinating to me, because it has caused me to realize something about Dreyfuss that I didn’t know before. The man is surprisingly adaptable to a role.