Movies and Memorial

This look back at 1956 is starting a week late because my father passed away. It is completely accurate to say that I would not be where I am today without him. He claimed that the first time I sat up was to get a better look at a movie on TV, and from that moment on he nurtured my passion for film. He had me watch Stripes and Young Frankenstein when I was way too young. He indulged my fascination with the Marx Brothers and Universal Monsters, often doing my makeup for my Halloween costumes referencing same. One Halloween in third grade, he took me to the local theatre to see the Lon Chaney version of The Phantom of the Opera, with live organist, instead of trick-or-treating. As I got older, he'd recommend The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (one of his favorite films of the 21st century) or Wendy & Lucy ("depressing, but real" was his review) or Wind Across the Everglades (as a Floridian, a blast for him and us to see the swamp in untouched color).

When I started this a month or so ago, I did not fully appreciate how much of my past would be part of it. Sure, The Ten Commandments, which my entire family watched annually on ABC, but I hadn't realized how many of these movies I had first seen with him: The Bad Seed, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Ladykillers, Moby Dick...and all before middle school! As a toddler, his mother had a blowup photo of The Creature Walks Among Us - large enough to scare the grandkids. He loved westerns like Stagecoach to Fury, noir like While the City Sleeps, and Bogart vehicles like The Harder They Fall. And I was excited as I watched The Searchers, knowing that once it was over, he'd be out of surgery and I could call him and tell him about how much I loved this classic of one of his favorites, John Wayne. Only 90 seconds were left in the movie when I got The Call.

I can't really dedicate The 1956 Retrospective to my dad - I was already 70% through my screenings when he died, and I know he'd rather talk b-flicks like Earth vs. the Flying Saucers than nominees like Around the World in Eighty Days or Anastasia. But in another sense, he's very much a part of my continuing affair with the movies, even in my laser-focus on the Academy Awards. He didn't like them after the one-two punch of The English Patient winning Best Picture ("boring!") and Kim Basinger winning Best Supporting Actress ("a nothing role!"), but we still watched them. He rooted for Toni Collette just based on her Oscar clip alone. He was with me when Crash won Best Picture ("is it over? can we go to bed?"). He recorded the 2010 ceremony for me when I was scheduled to work during it (I kid you not, it cut off during Best Picture, just as they said, "And the Oscar goes to..."). You could say this is all his fault.

So tomorrow, I'll carry on - watching movies, writing about movies, and telling the Academy where, in their long history, they've done wrong. Starting with Best Original Screenplay - The Bold and the Brave, Julie, The Ladykillers, The Red Balloon, and La Strada.


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The Bicentennial Best Picture

The moment you've all been waiting for. Well, the moment you would have been waiting for 40 years ago. Before we see who the Academy honors as the Best Picture of 2016 tonight, let's take a trip back to 1977, and the Best Picture of 1976:

The nominees, after the jump.

The Bicentennial Actor

With two nominations here, Network becomes the rare film to get five acting nods (Mrs. Miniver, All About Eve, From Here to Eternity, On the Waterfront, Tom Jones, Bonnie and Clyde are the others). Sylvester Stallone is the first since Charlie Chaplin to be up for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay without a co-writer! Giancarlo Giannini is only the third male actor ever nominated for a foreign language performance - funnily enough, the second was fellow nominee Robert De Niro (The Godfather: Part II). And all three were in Italian!

Oh, and of course, Peter Finch becomes the first posthumous acting winner:

The nominees after the jump.

The Bicentennial Production Design

Can we just give a standing ovation to the 1976 Academy for giving the award to a contemporary movie?

They had a Western, a period drama about the theatre, a period drama about the Golden Age of Hollywood, a sci-fi flick. And instead of all that, they went for the movie about newsrooms and living rooms and government offices, all from events that took place just 2-4 years previously. It does not happen often. Even this current Oscar year, the closest we'll get is La La Land, the design of which is a fantasy idea of Hollywood.

Anyway. The 1976 nominees after the jump.

The Bicentennial Original Screenplay

Spoiler alert: I love Paddy Chayefsky. I love that he was the first screenwriter to win three Academy Awards. I love that he wrote in multiple genres, in every format possible, that he was stylized yet human, serious and hilarious. The Hospital - not a fan, regrettably. But this win was well-earned!

Paddy was up against his fellow Americans and two European films - France's Cousin cousin, and Italy's Seven Beauties. A different time indeed - from 1945-1980, a 35-year period, 38 foreign language films were nominated for Best Original Screenplay! That's at least one a year, and then some. After that, though, it starts to get more scarce - a Life is Beautiful here, a Barbarian Invasions there - until A Separation becomes the most recent foreign language nominee in this category...and that was already five years ago.

(It should be noted - 2006 was an unusual year, with the multilingual Babel, the Japanese-language Letters from Iwo Jima, and the Spanish-language Pan's Labyrinth all in competition. Another outlier, considering recent history, is 2002, where Y Tu Mamá También was nominated, and Talk to Her won.)

What will the future bring? Maybe more like this year's Oscars, where foreign writers are nominated for English-language works, such as The Lobster's Greek filmmakers Yorgos Lanthimos and Efthimis Filippou. But I do hope that, eventually, we can get back to an international lineup.

And now, the nominees of 1976.

The Bicentennial Supporting Actor

Our journey through the 1976 Oscars continues. We've talked Adapted Screenplay, Cinematography, Original Dramatic Score, and Supporting Actress. Now we're back to acting...with the Best Supporting Actor nominees.

If we look at the other awards ceremonies that we now call The Precursors, we see that, then as now, this race was over from the start. Oh sure - Marathon Man's Laurence Olivier won the Golden Globe for his role as the Nazi who comes out of seclusion for the sake of diamonds, but they're always a little perverse, aren't they? BAFTA had different qualifying dates for Network and Rocky, and so neither film was nominated at that event until a year later - and even then, the former's Ned Beatty and the latter's Burgess Meredith and Burt Young were left out in the cold.

No, friends, only one nominee in this category was also nominated for the BAFTA Award and Golden Globe, and had already won the National Board of Review and New York Film Critics Circle awards. And that man wound up winning the Oscar:

And as if all that weren't enough, Jason Robards wound up winning the year after, too, for Julia! But we'll get to that when we cover 1977. Until then, a closer look at this year's nominees

The Bicentennial Cinematography

It's all-star lineup of Cinematographers for 1976, with three former winners and two previous nominees - and many of them faced off against each other before.

Just the year before, in fact, Haskell Wexler's co-DP'ing of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest faced off against Robert Surtees' solo work on The Hindenburg. Both had won previously, but they both settled for bridesmaid status - John Alcott's work for Barry Lyndon went home with the Oscar. Surtees already had three to his name, and Wexler already had one. Soon to be two:

In 1973, Surtees was once again up for the award, this time for Best Picture Oscar Winner The Sting. His competition? The Sting's only real rival for the Big Prize, The Exorcist, photographed by Mr. Owen Roizman. They lost to Sven Nykvist's Cries and Whispers, which made it the second time they'd both competed and lost - in 1971, Roizman was up for the first time in his career for The French Connection, while Surtees had a two-for-one special in The Last Picture and Summer of '42. The Oscar went to Oswald Morris for Fiddler on the Roof.

Ernest Laszlo met none of these men on the battlefield when he won for Ship of Fools. And indeed, he didn't meet them the year after, either: his Fantastic Voyage work was nominated in the Color category, while Wexler's winning work for Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? won in the Black-and-White category. By the following ceremony, there was no separation, so that the black-and-white In Cold Blood competed with Surtees' work on both Doctor Dolittle and The Graduate, as well as first-time nominee Richard H. Kline for Camelot.

What I'm saying is, some categories tend to have the same names batted around. It's probably why the Class of 2016 is such a breath of fresh air - Rodrigo Prieto is the one previous nominee of the bunch, and his only other nomination was 11 years ago.

The nominees and rankings of 1976, after the jump.

The Bicentennial Supporting Actress

So begins our descent into the madness of 1976...with the best category in almost every Oscar year, Best Supporting Actress.

Rare as it is now, there were times in the past when a supporting actress category was undeniably full of actual supporting actresses, no debate about it. Nowadays, people can't decide what category Viola Davis belongs in (I have my opinion, but I confess it's a borderline case) - or they give the prize to the damn lead of the movie - or have the audacity to say, "But they were only in the minutes of the movie!", as though a supporting role should take up half the runtime. Wasn't always the case. Time was, when you only had to show up for six minutes to make this happen:

Beatrice Straight's Network performance, as the wronged wife of  is the shortest win in Academy history. The bulk of it is one scene, where she reacts to husband William Holden leaving her for Faye Dunaway. But one look and there's no arguing that she earned her place on the ballot.

The other nominees this year weren't much longer. Jane Alexander, as someone who could make the connection between the Watergate break-in and All the President's Men, has two scenes and a total of 5 minutes and 40 seconds. Lee Grant gets twelve minutes for the almost three-hour Voyage of the Damned, as one of many Jews bound away from Nazi Germany towards Cuba. Jodie Foster's iconic teenage prostitute in Taxi Driver barely passes the 15-minute mark; Piper Laurie's fanatically religious matriarch is the closest to a co-lead as we get, taking up 20 minutes of Carrie.

Yes, these were true supporting performances, and in such disparate films. Voyage is an all-star disaster movie with a social conscious (and a terrible bore), All the President's Men, Network and Taxi Driver are bleak depictions of America Now, and Carrie is a female-focused horror movie. Not too many of those getting Oscar traction, now are there?

(Personally, too, I think Talia Shire should have been campaigned as Supporting for Rocky, and part of me believes she could have won the category and given the movie its only acting triumph. We'll never know for sure)

The nominees after the jump...

Mom and Dad: Spirits of '76

As usual in my retrospectives, I will go through the nominees in 13 different Oscar categories. That's nothing new. But something has changed: my parents will be joining in the fun, ranking the movies, and sometimes adding their own commentary.

I think this was 3 or 4 years ago?

Mom and Dad are celebrating 38 years of marriage this May, and have been together since high school. The story of how they met is a legendary one in my family: he was on the wrestling team, Mom saw him during practice, and without even knowing his name, announced to her mother that she saw the boy she was going to marry. Sometimes, you know. Both are retired: Dad was a firefighter, Mom worked at a Jewish pre-school.

They had four children together, including me, the youngest and only boy. My father, too, is an only son, born in Puerto Rico to German immigrants, with two older sisters and one younger one. My mother was born in Pensacola, FL, on her older brother's birthday; she is also the third of four kids, and grew up all over the place.

From Dad, I got my sense of humor; from Mom, my practicality. From both, my love of movies and books and music, as they were always in steady supply growing up. I once watched A Clockwork Orange after they forbade it; when they found out, instead of punishment or a scolding, we discussed its merits. While other parents may hope for their children to choose a practical career path, mine not only defended my majoring in film - it was their idea in the first place. Mom occasionally sends me texts - or, more often, handwritten letters - that include her reviews of the cinema's latest offerings, while Dad and I discuss older films he caught on TV or On Demand. And their tastes run the gamut from The Man Who Shot to Liberty Valance to The Other Guys to Trail of the Screaming Forehead.

So it was only natural that I wanted to learn about their own experience with the movies, especially in regards to their youth. And what better year to ask them about than 1976?

The Year is 1976...

It's February! That means three things!

Hit the jump to find out just exactly what...