Shirley Booth, Come Back, Little Sheba

Won: Academy Award - Best Actress • New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actress
Golden Globe Award - Best Actress in a Drama • Cannes Film Festival - Best Actress

1952's slate of Best Actress contenders has gained a bad rap. I had read insinuations that the year is particularly poor on the actressing front, and yet, based on what I've seen so far, I'd conclude that it's largely an imperfect lineup with performances and films that hit a murky gray: be that Susan Hayward's questionably saintlike performance in a run-of-the-mill biopic, Joan Crawford's emoting in a sensationalized B-movie, Bette Davis' wild hysterics in a Sunset-Boulevard-on-bath-salts camp picture, or Julie Harris' pubescent hysterics in a stagey stage-to-film adaptation, this is not a field of contenders that strikes wide-range appeal to the modern masses. That being said, I don't think either are awful, though they do challenge you to conclude otherwise.

This also rings true for Shirley Booth, the victor of this pack: she and her performance in Come Back, Little Sheba are easily more forgotten and receive significantly less share of voice than the likes of fellow winners Judy Holliday, Vivien Leigh, Audrey Hepburn and Grace Kelly. This is in spite of the fact that Booth was a juggernaut during her respective year, picking up nearly every major Best Actress prize available (it should be noted that no other actor that decade, male or female, received prizes from Cannes, the National Board of Review, the New York Film Critics Circle, the Globes and the Academy for a sole performance).

Julie Harris, The Member of the Wedding

You're four minutes in to The Member of the Wedding before Brandon deWilde's John Henry proclaims aloud, "Frankie's crazy!" It's a flippant line, executed quickly and in a humorous, charming manner, and yet it also serves as a forewarning for what's to come for the next hour and a half: Frankie Addams, played by a fiercely dedicated Julie Harris, is batshit insane, and you the viewer are in for a helluva ride.

Joan Crawford, Sudden Fear

The other week, I had a dream in which I was terrorized by Faye Dunaway as Joan Crawford. I remember little about the dream outside of the fact that Faye/Joan was incensed about something and screaming at me about it - her face terrifying, flush with fury.

It goes without saying that the symbolism of "angry Joan Crawford," made possible by Mommie Dearest, has ingratiated itself into, and endured as a component of, Crawford's legacy. Crawford's bitter rivalry with Bette Davis stands as another component of this legacy, recently publicized and manifested by Ryan Murphy's Feud: Bette & Joan. It's safe to say that these properties have helped immortalize Crawford to the collective wisdom as a dramatic public figure, her prowess as a skilled dramatic actress known more so to cinephiles and actressphiles such as myself (and perhaps you, dear reader).

I myself am guilty of forgetting about Crawford's talents as an actress, even though I really ought to know better by now. Sudden Fear, Crawford's last Academy Award-nominated performance, is a palpable reminder that there's much more to the actress beyond the feuds, the grandeur, the tempestuousness, the pettiness.

Bette Davis, The Star

The challenge in digesting a performance like Bette Davis' in The Star lies in the fact that it inherently conflicts with two dimensions of who I am as an individual. A moviegoer with a more modernist, art house-leaning eye might view Davis' performance as a relic of its time, one riddled with such grossly melodramatic narrative devices that it veers into farcical parody. A more lax moviegoer (dare I say, of the homosexual variety) might see Davis' performance as a fun, campy joyride - the film a befitting vehicle for an inherently dramatic diva to showcase all the qualities to which her fandom admires her for.

Susan Hayward, With a Song in My Heart

To watch With a Song in My Heart is to be fed a two-hour tale of an impossibly saintlike (and horribly basic, if you ask me) individual. This ought not come as a surprise to me or you by now, as biopics, especially those of the classical Hollywood variety, are often semi-fictionalized and scrubbed of its subjects' imperfections, revealing little to us about said subjects aside from the fact that they may have had to endure something traumatic once, and/or they may have been faced with a difficult decision they had to make. Jane Froman herself had a heavy hand in the production of With a Song in My Heart, perhaps an acting influence on the film's insignificant narrative weight.

Marlon Brando, Viva Zapata!

Won: Cannes Film Festival - Best Actor

It is only appropriate that the man often credited as being the trailblazing force behind bridging the gap between realism and film acting should also thrill us in his ability to bridge the gap between his own whiteness and other ethnicities. Viva Zapata! would not be the only film in the 1950s to which Marlon Brando attempted to play a character of an entirely different ethnicity from his own, and, based on what I've seen, Brando's Emiliano Zapata isn't nearly as jarring or disagreeable as his Sakini in The Teahouse of August Moon, released four years later. But Brando's interpretation of the Mexican revolutionary straddles the threshold of my own tolerance towards whitewashing - for at what point does it become a little too silly, thereby taking the viewer "out" of the picture?

Alec Guinness, The Lavender Hill Mob

I wasn't fond of The Lavender Hill Mob. In fact, it was a bit of a struggle for me to make my way through the film. I report this feeling queer about my overall sentiment, as though I've misunderstood something - for both the film and its lead performance from Alec Guinness seem to have favorable notices online. And yet, for whatever reason, neither registered for me.

Gary Cooper, High Noon

Won: Academy Award - Best Actor | Golden Globe (Drama) - Best Actor

Years ago, before Oscargasms came to fruition, I was haphazardly watching and reviewing various movies that piqued my interest. One of those films was Wings. For a picture that had very little surprises outside of Buddy Rogers' drunken hallucinogenic bubble episode, one moment that I can usually recall is that of Gary Cooper’s cameo at the half hour mark. We see Cooper waking up from a nap, hair perfectly coiffed, where in typical old-Hollywood fashion, he then smolders his way through his 2 or so minutes of screen time. Moments later, Cooper's character dies in a plane accident while practicing figure eights. While brief, he had about him a radiant energy in those moments that are effortless yet impactful. I ramble on about this because I find it ironic — and fitting — that my journey with Cooper should end at High Noon. For what Cooper delivers in the film is heavily silent, and there is a forcefulness in his presence I’d not felt since that very cameo in Wings.

Kirk Douglas, The Bad and the Beautiful

If there's one thing I've deduced from the few Kirk Douglas performances I've watched so far, it's that he's quite good at playing a dick. In quick succession, Douglas delivered a pompous boxer in Champion, a pompous reporter in Ace in the Hole, and a hard ass detective in Detective Story who's technically a good guy but kind of pompous in the sense that he's riddled with toxic masculinity. As they say, if it ain't broke, don't fix it - and thus we're here to witness Douglas' third rendering of an ambitious tool who backstabs his way to the top, this time in the form of a Hollywood producer.

José Ferrer, Moulin Rouge

Bravado was what made José Ferrer's performance in Cyrano de Bergerac so compelling to me, but not a lick of it is to be found in Moulin Rouge. However, the body disfigurement - and therefore, Oscar-baity "grotesqueness," if you will - is still there, this time child-sized legs on a grown man instead of an aggressively large nose.

Best Picture: The Greatest Show on Earth

Cheers to Five Years

It's been FIVE years since I started this blog. It's amazing that I've kept it running for as long as I have without giving up (though I know that in the last year or so it has seemed as though I've given up on it quite a bit)!

The truth is: work has been eating my life, not in a good way. It's to the point where I want to cherish every minute of my free time by doing absolutely nothing. I know this isn't good. And it has been tricky - being cognizant of the fact that there are passions you want to pursue, passions that are being put in the back burner because you can't quite reconcile the energy to simply do it and get it done.

But, another truth: I've not given up on this blog yet. I may be putting out a severely low volume of posts by the month, but the fact of the matter is, I'm still here, still typing away when I can, still watching movies but not writing as fast as I should (The Greatest Show on Earth and Moulin Rouge are next in the queue), still passionate about film, still daydreaming about watching A Woman Under the Influence some day but frustrated that I can't act on it at this exact moment in time because I'm abiding by a goal and promise I made for myself five years ago. I think about films - past, present, future - every day. Even if I don't write every day - the love I have for the medium endures.

So I hope that you bear with me as I continue to get my shit together. And I hope that you continue to check-in, to read, to comment, to share your thoughts. That's what keeps me going!

Ralph Richardson, The Sound Barrier

Won: New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actor | National Board of Review - Best Actor

Chuck Yeager may have been the first man to exceed the speed of sound in level flight, but if the Brits behind The Sound Barrier had their way, that'd have been an achievement accomplished by a British pilot who had in turn been egged on by an aircraft-obsessed oil magnate.

1952: 25th Academy Awards

Best Actress 1951

Best Actor 1951

Vivien Leigh, A Streetcar Named Desire

Won: Academy Award - Best Actress | New York Film Critics Circle - Best Actress | Venice Film Festival - Volpi Cup, Best Actress

Many actresses have that one powerhouse performance which goes on to define their filmographies. Some produce multiple, truly great performances. Where Vivien Leigh's legacy stands out is through two pieces of performance art which are not only "great," but widely considered as monumental, iconic acting achievements that belong in the upper echelon of Oscar's Best Actress category. No other actress holds this distinction.

With that being said, there's a question I've grappled with: is Leigh the definitive Blanche DuBois?

Marlon Brando, A Streetcar Named Desire

A quick search of "sex symbol" might show you Rudolph Valentino, Ramon Novarro, and Sessue Hayakawa as representations of the term for early Hollywood - their respective iconographies suggestive of men who, while undoubtably handsome, were also noble, chivalrous, clean-cut. The same applies for the likes of a young Cary Grant, Gary Cooper and Clark Gable - these are men who are emblems of an old-fashioned "masculine" ideal - good looking, debonair, a smidge cocksure. Enter Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire - vulgar, villainous, biceps bulging out of his tight, sweaty undershirts - to screw shit up a bit.

Nominations 2017: A Postmortem

This year's batch of nominees marks nine long decades of the Academy Awards. With that in mind, it's interesting to view these nominees in terms of how they represent the incremental changes to Oscar's palette over the years. There are of course, certain preferences of his to which he continues to hold on to tightly, but overall, I'd say that there's much to be pleased with here. So herein lies some of my first impressions to Oscar's Best of 2017:

Final Predictions: 2017

It's Oscar Nominations 2018 y'all!

Montgomery Clift, A Place in the Sun

Montgomery Clift has a face that was meant to be gazed at. As if by the grace of God, his matinee idol looks pull you in, commanding you to pay attention.

The camera knows this. The opening seconds of A Place in the Sun is that of an opening long shot of Monty, his back to us. His turn to the camera is accompanied with a swell in the score, as if we've experienced some sort of dramatic reveal. It then closes in on Monty's face, very close. Too close? This happens on a number of occasions throughout the film, the camera encroaching rather tightly into Monty's personal space and lingering its focus on that mug of his for our collective gaze.