Did you Know? Shortcuts to an Oscar Pt. 2

September 30, 2015 admin 0

  1991    Anthony Hopkins played a cannibal in The Silence of the Lambs. I suppose you could class cannibalism as some kind of affliction or disease. It certainly isn’t normal behaviour. Hopkins only appeared on screen for 24 minutes 52 seconds, the second shortest time ever for an actor to […]

Did You Know? Shortcuts to an Oscar PT 1.

September 28, 2015 admin 0

  Since Academy Awards have been introduced there have been, by my count, 32 Best Actor or Best Actress Oscars won by players portraying someone with a medical condition or an affliction. No wonder actors go after these roles with a vengeance. They know that a strong performance will almost […]

Stolen Oscars? Pt 4.

September 26, 2015 admin 2

  Part 4 of ‘Stolen Oscars?’ focuses on 8 Supporting Actors and just 2 Supporting Actresses. 1944    Barry Fitzgerald in Going My Way Fitzgerald got his Oscar for virtually being himself. In fact, all his movie roles were very similar. In this picture he played an Irish priest, Father […]

Stolen Oscars? Pt. 3

September 24, 2015 admin 26

  Part 3 of ‘Stolen Oscars?’ looks at some of the individual Academy Award winners who, for want of a better word, purloined their statuettes. I shall start with the Best Actor category. 1930/1             Lionel Barrymore for A Free Soul I haven’t actually seen any of the other nominated performances […]

Stolen Oscars? Pt. 2

September 22, 2015 admin 6

  The second part of ‘Stolen Oscars?’ commences with 1981. In part one I looked at 10 Oscar-winning movies that, in my opinion, were unworthy. Here are eight more: 1981    Chariots of Fire Chariots of Fire was not a bad movie, but it was a long way from a great […]

‘Stolen Oscars?’ Pt. 1

September 20, 2015 admin 10

  Down the decades there have been a number of, shall we say, dubious Oscar-winners who have collected the statuette at the expense of more worthy contenders. Sometimes this is due to studio manipulation of nominations. A classic example of this happened in 1972 when Paramount chose to nominate only […]

Did you know? Points of interest Pt.11

September 18, 2015 admin 0

  Renee Zellweger prepared for her role in Bridget Jones’ Diary (2001) by gaining 25lbs in weight and then obtaining a job in a London office under an alias, so she could study English accents. Nobody at the firm recognised her. On her desk she kept a photograph of her […]

Did you know? Points of interest. Pt 10

September 16, 2015 admin 2

  In 2010 Daniel Craig did something unique. He agreed to appear as James Bond before an estimated billion and a half television viewers in a sequence, opposite Queen Elizabeth II, as part of the Opening Ceremony for the London Olympics that year. ‘She was great’, he said. ‘A really […]

Did you know? Points of interest. Pt. 9

September 13, 2015 admin 0

    It is generally believed that Stephen Sondheim only agreed to the musically limited Madonna singing his songs in Dick Tracy (1990) because he owed a favour to Warren Beatty who directed and starred in it whilst becoming intimately involved with Madonna during the shoot. Sean Young was to […]