1970, Day Three: Supporting Actress

Of the five nominees for Best Supporting Actress, four came from Best Picture nominees. The one exception is Lee Grant, nominated for The Landlord, the film's only representative at the Academy Awards. 

The directorial debut from In the Heat of the Night's Oscar-winning editor Hal Ashby, The Landlord is a comedy about a wealthy white boy who buys an apartment building in the predominately black NYC neighborhood of Park Slope with the intention to gut and renovate it, but finds his efforts thwarted by the tenants. Perhaps a wee long, it's still a funny, thoughtful, impactful film. 

Grant was lucky, as any of the film's female ensemble could've been nominated: Pearl Bailey as the shotgun-toting ambassador of the building's residents, Diana Sands as the beautiful downstairs neighbor, Marki Bey as the mixed race dancer who starts to date the landlord, Susan Anspach as the landlord's vaguely liberal sister. Not entirely surprising that the film only garnered one nomination - due to the Academy's relative conservatism, not due to the quality of the film; after all, it took them another 13 years to honor the cinematographer Gordon willis, whose work on The Landlord is...so...good.

The rest, as I say, came from Best Picture-nominated films. Let's talk about all of them:

1970, Day Two: Supporting Actor

Beautifully coiffed, her consonants cleanly crisp, reigning Best Actress winner Maggie Smith rolls out with a lineup of one-and-doners (plus Gene Hackman) before handing off the night's second competitive statuette to her fellow countryman:

John Mills' filmography spans 72 years and over 100 works, including In Which We Serve, This Happy Breed, Great Expectations, Oh! What a Lovely War (Hollmann Awards nominee, in fact!), and PBS's late-90s telecast of Cats. By the time Ryan's Daughter came out, he had been working 38 years, and fathered two successful actresses, Juliet and Hayley (of The Parent Trap and Tiger Bay). His win, though, was no sure thing. 

1970, Day One: A Bunch of Nominees

The year: 1971 (remember, each Academy Awards ceremony is held the year after the one they're honoring). The date: April 15th (funnily enough, 50 years later, the 93rd Academy Awards is scheduled for April 25th, the first time the Oscars have been held in April since The Last Emperor took home Best Picture in 1988). The place: the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion in downtown Los Angeles, currently part of the Music Center and home to the LA Opera (I saw Satyagraha there!).

And the nominees? That's what the next two weeks are all about, as we go into depth on the acting categories, the writing categories, the music categories, Director, and Picture. Today, though, we focus on films not nominated in any of those categories, but elsewhere:

1970: The Capper

These ten, according to the official Reminder Lists, were among the end-of-the-year qualifiers for Oscar consideration. Exceptions are The Wizard of Gore and The Phantom Tollbooth, both of which had unusual releases - the former because of its drive-in/grindhouse target, the latter because it was more or less buried by its studio.

1970: Summertime Cinema

Yesterday took us from January into the spring; today, we look at the films of the summer (excepting Oscar and other awards nominees). Again, I'm going by the qualifying LA releases, except for The Human Condition (that's IMDb info).

1970: The First Five Months

Continuing our look at the films of 1970. The ten films herein were released within the first five months of the year - at least, according to that year's Reminder List for Academy Awards qualification.

1970: The (Non-Oscar) Nominees

Fifty years ago, the films of 1970 came out. Most of them, at least - some made their festival or international debuts one or several years earlier. Point being, we're ending 2020 by going back a full 50 years to the films of 1970. Last week, I posted the 74 films screened. Next week, we begin our look at the 30 Academy Award nominees. This week, the remaining 44.

Let's start with the 14 films that just missed Oscar, films that saw themselves up for Golden Globes, critics prizes, and honors from their respective guilds, but just didn't have the votes in the Academy to make the cut.