By John H. Foote And to be clear, it is not always because I did not care for the performance, but more often than not that there were better performances that lost! So often the industry decides that an actor is “due”, it is “their time for an Oscar” and come hell or high water…
By John H. Foote With two Academy Awards three years apart, one might think Jodie foster has had enough in terms of accolades. My attitude has always been if they are deserving, nominate them, award them, who cares if they have two or 20, give them what they deserve. Foster was first nominated for her…
By John H. Foote Imagine having to portray an animated character come to life. I cannot imagine, yet that was the challenge put forth to Amy Adams as Princess Giselle in Enchanted, a perfectly delightful Disney film. The film opens with animation, and we encounter Giselle as she waits for her “one true love” Edward…
By John H. Foote Pauline Kael, that brilliant, venerable film critic of The New Yorker, stated that Travolta’s performance in Blow Out was as great as anything given by young Marlon Brando in the fifties, he was that extraordinary a talent. After exploding into films with Saturday Night Fever (1977), which came after a supporting…
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…