This post is part of the 31 Days of Oscar Blogathon, hosted by Paula’s Cinema Club, Outspoken & Freckled, and Once Upon A Screen. Check out all the posts here! Women have been a part of the film industry since the very beginning, yet looking at the list of Oscar nominees throughout history can feel a little… monolithic. Women make …
The Hollywood Reporter reports that all three of Judy Garland’s children—Liza Minnelli, Lorna Luft, and Joseph Luft—will be on hand at this year’s Oscar ceremony to pay tribute to their late mother, on the 75th anniversary of her iconic performance in The Wizard of Oz.
Hollywood loves a good behind-the-scenes tale, so it’s fitting that the Oscars have rewarded a number of actors for playing… well, actors. Though it may seem like an obvious and easy role given their own career, portraying an actor on screen offers a unique set of challenges for thespians. Not only do they need to make the audience believe their character as a real person, as all actors do, but they must do this while calling attention to their acting process, by virtue of their character’s profession. It can be a challenging task to keep their acting relatively invisible, and some actors have managed great success in this realm.
The reasoning behind the short lifespans of some of Oscar’s retired categories is obvious: Best Title Writing, for instance, required films to actually have written intertitles; Best Assistant Director, while a noble effort to reward the hardworking crew, probably wasn’t a sexy enough award for a black-tie gala; and the need for a Best Engineering …
The Oscars are one of Hollywood’s greatest traditions, but they’re also one of the more inherently divisive. In any situation where you’re attempting to name a singular, unequivocal “Best” in a subjective category—not just a collection of “Very Goods” or “Great Efforts”—you’re going to draw some criticism. That’s partly because movies aren’t math problem sets: there’s not a single right way to do things, nor a single right answer upon which to arrive, and in reality, one person’s interpretation of a film can be entirely different than what someone else sees. And so, those films and filmmakers that do win Oscars necessarily have to appeal to votes based on the quality of the film, as well as appealing to the sense of populism they need to secure the majority of votes.
And that’s maybe why the Academy’s notorious, career-spanning snub of Alfred Hitchcock—one of film history’s most enduringly entertaining AND well-respected filmmakers—is especially perplexing.