By Alan Hurst Trying to take 87 years of Oscar winning songs and pick the best is ultimately a futile task. I started the process by making a Spotify mix of every Oscar winning tune, but I admittedly lost the interest to listen once I got to the tail end of the 1990s. My own…
By John H. Foote For just the second time in history a woman has been awarded the Best Director Award from the Directors Guild of America as Best Director. The winner is Chloé Zhao for Nomadland. Previously the only woman to win the prize had been Kathryn Bigelow in 2009 for The Hurt Locker. Bigelow…
By John H. Foote Yuh-Jung Youn. Remember that name. Why? She just might win an Oscar in a few weeks for Minari. Diversity riled last night at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (SAG), taped last Thursday, announced and broadcast last night. Suffice to say there were some jaw dropping moments. For the first time in…
By John H. Foote Amy Adams has been a frequent nominee for Best Actress yet has just as many times been a shocking omission – Enchanted (2007) and Arrival (2016) the most bizarre of the performances passed over. In the past it was often a challenge to find five female performances to nominate, though in…
By John H. Foote In honor of the great Delroy Lindo, one in a very long line of actors snubbed cruelly (this year) for his sterling performance in Da Five Bloods, I went back through the last 20 years and chose ONE to TWO snubbed actors who deserved to be there for their performance. Knowing…
By John H. Foote No pre-amble, just into it. Once again the Academy Award nominations are filled with an array of snubs of actors and actresses, ignored films, directors and achievements. Without further ado, here we go. And yes, for some of these, I am furiously pissed. DA FIVE BLOODS – Long discussed as one…
By John H. Foote No Spike Lee or Da Five Bloods, no Tom Hanks or News of the World, no Best Picture for Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom. The big news of the nominations for me are who and what was NOT nominated. And Netflix, expected to dominate the Best Picture race ended up with just…
By John H. Foote And now the ladies! Did they win because of the sheer genius of their performance, or because they were “due” or for sentimental reasons, or they represented the flavour of the moment? As with the Best Actor choices, posted last week, the correct answer is all of the above when the…
By John H. Foote Da Five Bloods, Spike Lee’s fine haunting film for Netflix about four veterans returning to Vietnam years after the war, is among the year’s very best films, and among the best films Lee has ever made. It began streaming on Netflix in May of last year to excellent reviews, and it…
By John H. Foote Should they have won or was another actor more worthy? Was their performance truly for the ages, as an Academy Award winning performance should be, or a win to atone for losing a deserving award earlier in their career? Did they somehow become the flavour of the month during their film’s…