My Oscar Predictions: 2009

Adapted Screenplay: PRECIOUS
Original Screenplay: HURT LOCKER
Animated Film: UP
Supporting Actress: Monique ~ Precious
Supporting Actor: Christopher Waltz ~ Inglorious Basterds
Actress: Sandra Bullock ~ The Blind Side
Actor: Jeff Bridges ~ Crazy Heart
Director: James Cameron
Film: Avatar

But who do I want to win??
Film: Avatar
Director: Quentin Tarentino
Actor: Colin Firth
Actress: Meryl Streep
Supp. Actor: Christopher Plummer
Supp Actress: Vera Farmiga

Just a few more days...

Avatar - Best Picture Nomination - 2009 Oscars

I wasn't sure how I would feel about this film. I saw the trailers and I thought, wow, that looks really good. However, I am not science fiction aficionado, so the interest was not that strong.

Now that I have seen the movie, I can tell you that I was very pleasantly shocked. This move was fantastic. it has everything, drama, romance, science fiction, mystery and just good old fashioned movie power. Watching this film I can imagine now what people thought in the theaters in 1939 when they first saw Gone With the Wind. Or how one left the theater after seeing Casablanca or All About Eve, or even James Cameron, other epic film, Titanic. Avatar has replaced a film in my top ten favorites.

Beautifully written, the story is a classic love story set in a world much like a Utopia, until the humans arrive. The craftsmanship of the computer generated images are a far cry from Scorpion King. They are spectacular. James Cameron has made cinematic history again. You will soon forget you are in a make believe world it is so good. Fine attention to details, not to mention perfect sound effects.

If I could say one bad thing about this film would be the human world was void of any character, except for Giovanni Ribisi, who was perfectly cast.

So, will this film win Best Picture? Not sure, It should, but then I haven't seen Hurt Locker yet, which has the odds on favorite. Regardless this film will surely became a classic.

Inglourious Basterds -2009 Best Picture Nominee

I am a huge fan of Quentin Tarantino, and Brad Pitt. However this movie left me wanting more. It was good, don't get me wrong, very good actually but it seemed as though something was missing, or maybe it was me.

The story was great, written by Quentin. Brad was at his finest. Fun, irreverent and classic. Christopher Waltz was simply amazing. Eli Roth is just a hottie. The film at first had me confused, as do most of Tarantino's films, but that is the magic of them. Was this going to be a deep war epic, (not likely) or a dark comedy (closer to the truth). What is was; was classic Tarantino, so it was both of those things and more. All of that wrapped up in almost three hours, and I still felt that he left something out and I wanted more.

Tarantino has stated this is his masterpiece, I would have to agree. This was expertly written, expertly cast and just an expert piece of film-making. After working on getting this story onto film for ten years, it should have been a masterpiece. His best work since Jackie Brown. The cinematography was good, the score was excellent, the acting was above par. Overall I would give this a solid A. Will it win the Oscar for Best picture? Unfortunately there are way too many films nominated (I hate the new 10 nomination thing...it takes away from the importance of the Oscar and being an Oscar nominated film) Many of the films nominated are not in the same league with this film, and if it was a different year, it may have walked away with the golden boy. Sorry Quentin, not this year.

Vivien Leigh as Blanche DuBois, 1951 Best Actress

She won two Best Actress Academy Awards for playing "southern belles": Scarlett O'Hara in Gone with the Wind (1939) and Blanche DuBois in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951), a role she had also played on stage in London's West End.

She was a prolific stage performer, frequently in collaboration with her husband, Laurence Olivier, who directed her in several of her roles. During her 30-year stage career, she played parts that ranged from the heroines of Noël Coward and George Bernard Shaw comedies to classic Shakespearean characters such as Ophelia, Cleopatra, Juliet and Lady Macbeth.

Leigh sought the role of Blanche DuBois in the West End stage production of Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire, and was cast after Williams and the play's producer Irene Mayer Selznick saw her in the The School for Scandal and Antigone, and Olivier was contracted to direct. Containing a rape scene and references to promiscuity and homosexuality, the play was destined to be controversial, and the media discussion about its suitability added to Leigh's anxiety, but she believed strongly in the importance of the work.

When the West End production of Streetcar opened in October 1949, J. B. Priestley denounced the play and Leigh's performance, and the critic Kenneth Tynan commented that Leigh was badly miscast because British actors were "too well-bred to emote effectively on stage". Olivier and Leigh were chagrined that part of the commercial success of the play lay in audience members attending to see what they believed would be a salacious and sensationalist story, rather than the Greek tragedy that they envisioned, but the play also had strong supporters,among them Noël Coward who described Leigh as "magnificent."

After 326 performances, Leigh finished her run. However, she was soon engaged for the film version. Her irreverent and often bawdy sense of humour allowed her to establish a rapport with her co-star Marlon Brando, but she had difficulty with the director Elia Kazan, who did not hold her in high regard as an actress. He later commented that "she had a small talent", but as work progressed, he became "full of admiration" for "the greatest determination to excel of any actress I've known. She'd have crawled over broken glass if she thought it would help her performance." Leigh found the role gruelling and commented to the Los Angeles Times, "I had nine months in the theatre of Blanche DuBois. Now she's in command of me." Olivier accompanied her to Hollywood where he was to co-star in William Wyler's Carrie.

The film won glowing reviews for her, and she won a second Academy Award for Best Actress, a BAFTA Award and a New York Film Critics Circle Award for Best Actress. Tennessee Williams commented that Leigh brought to the role "everything that I intended, and much that I had never dreamed of", but in later years, Leigh would say that playing Blanche DuBois "tipped me over into madness."

Lauded for her beauty, Leigh felt that it sometimes prevented her from being taken seriously as an actress, but ill health proved to be her greatest obstacle. Affected by bipolar disorder for most of her adult life, she gained a reputation for being difficult to work with, and her career went through periods of decline. She was further weakened by recurrent bouts of chronic tuberculosis, with which she was first diagnosed in the mid-1940s. She and Olivier divorced in 1960, and Leigh worked sporadically in film and theatre until her death from tuberculosis, in 1967.

Humphrey Bogart ~ 1951 Best Actor

After trying various jobs, Bogart began acting in 1921 and became a regular in Broadway productions in the 1920s and 1930s. When the stock market crash of 1929 reduced the demand for plays, Bogart turned to film. His first great success was as Duke Mantee in The Petrified Forest (1936), and this led to a period of typecasting as a gangster in B-movies. His breakthrough came in 1941, with High Sierra (1941) and The Maltese Falcon (1941). The next year, his performance as Rick Blaine in Casablanca (1942) raised him to the peak of his profession and at the same time, cemented his trademark film persona, that of the hard-boiled cynic who ultimately shows his noble side. Other successes followed, including To Have and Have Not (1944), The Big Sleep (1946), Dark Passage (1947), and Key Largo (1948), with his wife Lauren Bacall; The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948); The African Queen (1951), for which he won his only Academy Award; Sabrina (1954), and The Caine Mutiny (1954). During a film career of almost thirty years, he appeared in 75 feature films.

Bogart starred with Katharine Hepburn in the movie The African Queen in 1951, again directed by his friend John Huston. The novel was overlooked and left undeveloped for fifteen years until producer Sam Spiegel and Huston bought the rights. Spiegel sent Katharine Hepburn the book and she suggested Bogart for the male lead, firmly believing that “he was the only man who could have played that part”. Huston's love of adventure, a chance to work with Hepburn, and Bogart's earlier successes with Huston convinced Bogart to leave the comfortable confines of Hollywood for a difficult shoot on location in the Belgian Congo in Africa. Bogart was to get 30 percent of the profits and Hepburn 10 percent, plus a relatively small salary for both. The stars met up in London and announced the happy prospect of working together.

Bacall came for the duration (over four months), leaving their young child behind, but the Bogarts started the trip with a junket through Europe, including a visit with Pope Pius XII. Later, the glamor would be gone and she would make herself useful as a cook, nurse, and clothes washer, for which Bogart praised her, “I don’t know what we’d have done without her. She Luxed my undies in darkest Africa”. Just about everyone in the cast came down with dysentery except Bogart and John Huston, who subsisted on canned food and alcohol. Bogart explained: "All I ate was baked beans, canned asparagus and Scotch whisky. Whenever a fly bit Huston or me, it dropped dead." The teetotaling Hepburn, in and out of character, fared worse in the difficult conditions, losing weight, and at one time, getting very ill. Bogart resisted Huston's insistence on using real leeches in a key scene where Bogart has to drag the boat through a shallow marsh, until reasonable fakes were employed. In the end, the crew overcame illness, soldier ant invasions, leaking boats, poor food, attacking hippos, bad water filters, fierce heat, isolation, and a boat fire to complete a memorable film.

The African Queen was the first Technicolor film in which Bogart appeared. Remarkably, he appeared in relatively few color films during the rest of his career, which continued for another five years. (His other color films included The Caine Mutiny, The Barefoot Contessa, We're No Angels, and The Left Hand of God.)

The role of Charlie Allnutt won Bogart his only Academy Award for Best Actor in a Leading Role in 1951. Bogart considered his performance to be the best of his film career. He had vowed to friends that if he won, his speech would break the convention of thanking everyone in sight. He advised Claire Trevor when she had been nominated for Key Largo to “just say you did all yourself and don’t thank anyone”. But when Bogart won the Academy Award, which he truly coveted despite his well-advertised disdain for Hollywood, he said “It's a long way from the Belgian Congo to the stage of this theatre. It's nicer to be here. Thank you very much…No one does it alone. As in tennis, you need a good opponent or partner to bring out the best in you. John and Katie helped me to be where I am now”. Despite the thrilling win and the recognition, Bogart later commented, “The way to survive an Oscar is never to try to win another one...too many stars…win it and then figure they have to top themselves...they become afraid to take chances. The result: A lot of dull performances in dull pictures”.


At the time of his death from cancer in 1957, Bogart was one of the most respected figures in American cinema. Since his death, his persona and film performances have been considered as having a lasting impact and have led to him being described as a cultural icon. In 1997, 40 years after his death, Entertainment Weekly magazine named him the number one movie legend of all time. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked him the Greatest Male Star of All Time.

An American in Paris ~ Best Picture 1951

The single film which came out with the largest number of honors in 1951 was An American in Paris, which received six Oscars, including Best Picture. However, A Place in the Sun received six academy awards, including best director, and A Streetcar Named Desire took four of them for itself, including three of the acting awards. Oddly enough, the only nominee from that film that did not win was Marlon Brando, whose performance as Stanley Kowalski is now considered one of the most influential in movie history.

However, the Best Picture of 1951 was, An American in Paris a MGM musical film inspired by the 1928 orchestral composition by George Gershwin. Starring Gene Kelly, Leslie Caron, and Oscar Levant, the film is set in Paris, and was directed by Vincente Minnelli from a script by Alan Jay Lerner. The music is by George Gershwin, with lyrics by his brother Ira, with additional music by Saul Chaplin, the music director.

The story of the film is interspersed with show-stopping dance numbers choreographed by Gene Kelly and set to Gershwin tunes. Songs and music include "I Got Rhythm," "I'll Build A Stairway to Paradise," "'S Wonderful," and "Our Love is Here to Stay". The climax is "The American in Paris" ballet, an 18 minute dance featuring Kelly and Caron set to Gershwin's An American in Paris. The ballet alone cost more than $500,000, a staggering sum at the time.

The Bridge on the River Kwai ~ Best Picture 1957

One of the most-loved war movies of all time opens in a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp in Burma in 1943, where a battle of wills rages between camp commander Colonel Saito (Sessue Hayakawa) and newly arrived British colonel Nicholson (Alec Guinness). Saito insists that Nicholson order his men to build a bridge over the river Kwai, which will be used to transport Japanese munitions. Nicholson refuses, despite all the various "persuasive" devices at Saito's disposal. Finally, Nicholson agrees, not so much to cooperate with his captor as to provide a morale-boosting project for the military engineers under his command. The colonel will prove that, by building a better bridge than Saito's men could build, the British soldier is a superior being even when under the thumb of the enemy. As the bridge goes up, Nicholson becomes obsessed with completing it to perfection, eventually losing sight of the fact that it will benefit the Japanese. Meanwhile, American POW Shears (William Holden, in a role originally slated for Cary Grant), having escaped from the camp, agrees to save himself from a court martial by leading a group of British soldiers back to the camp to destroy Nicholson's bridge. Upon his return, Shears realizes that Nicholson's mania to complete his project has driven him mad.

Filmed in Ceylon, Bridge on the River Kwai won seven Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director for the legendary British filmmaker David Lean, and Best Actor for Guinness. It also won Best Screenplay for Pierre Boulle, the author of the novel on which the film was based and who could not speak English; the actual writers were blacklisted writers Carl Foreman and Michael Wilson, who were given their Oscars at the ceremonies in 1985. Wilson did not live to see this; Foreman died the day after it was announced. When the film was restored, their names were added to the credits.