By John H. Foote Admittedly I breathed a huge sigh of relief when Kristen Stewart was nominated for Best Actress for her haunting performance as Princess Diana in Spencer, a performance actually better than the film it is in, one that elevates the film to a greater level. After emerging from film festivals in Venice…
By John H. Foote After winning the Academy Award for Best Director and Best picture for his masterpiece One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), Milos Forman had his pick of projects as everyone wanted to be in the Forman business. For his follow up film to the five-time Oscar winning One Flew Over the…
By John H. Foote How is it after becoming the first woman to win both the Academy Award as Best Director and the Directors Guild of America as Best Director of 2009 that Kathryn Bigelow could surpass that achievement with her stunning film Zero Dark Thirty (2012) and NOT be Oscar nominated for Best Director?…
By John H. Foote Every year there are inevitable snubs among the Academy Award nominations, which I suppose is inevitable given there are just five nominees for each category other than Best Picture, which has 10. I remember gasping out loud when Amy Adams was ignored for her magical work in Arrival (2017), an absolute…
By John H. Foote Spider Man: No Way Home swung into theatres just before Christmas and altered the entire Oscar landscape with rave reviews, the kind of adulation resulting in Best Picture attention. No one was more surprised than me, because this is the umpteenth version of Spider Man we have had, the first that…
By John H. Foote Dustin Hoffman has always been at his finest when the character he is portraying has an edge to him, a meanness that sets him apart from the rest of humanity. He twice has won Academy Awards for Best Actor, but never has he won for his finest work, which was Tootsie…
By John H. Foote Watching this film for the first time, I remember thinking as Lange moved into the frame, “I am watching pure carnality”, so great was her sexual power. As Cora, the very dangerous young woman stuck in a dead-end marriage to a loud, brash immigrant who owns a diner in the Depression…
By John H. Foote The nominees for Best Actress in a Leading role for film in 2018 were Meryl Streep in The Post, Frances McDormand in 3 Billboards Outside of Ebbing, Missouri, Saoirse Ronan in Lady Bird, Margot Robbie in I, Tonya, and Sally Hawkins in The Shape of Water. So who gets bumped? Seriously,…
By John H. Foote Dern was among the finest and most prolific actors of his generation, but early in the eighties, seemed to disappear. He gave some of the most compelling performances in the seventies, none finer than his work here as Michael J. Lander, a former Vietnam veteran being used by the Black September…
By John H. Foote The Directors Guild of America announced their nominations for Best Director of 2021 Thursday, with few surprises, and two record setters. Steven Spielberg received his 12th nomination for West Side Story, continuing to run up his numbers making him the most nominated filmmaker in the history of the Guild. He has…