The Post was the last major film released in 2017 and the last 2017 Best Picture Oscar nominee released on Blu-ray and standard DVD.

Advance word on the film was that it would be one of Steven Spielberg’s most prestigious in the vein of Schindler’s List, Saving Private Ryan, and Lincoln and that Meryl Streep as Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham and Tom Hanks as editor Ben Bradlee, along with the film and Spielberg, would be year-end awards magnets. Sure enough, after the film was screened for awards bodies, but before it was released to theatres, the National Board of Review awarded it Best Picture, Actor, and Actress and the Golden Globes nominated it for Best Picture, Actor, Actress, and Director. Other awards groups nominated various combinations of those prestigious categories as well. Then the film was released to mixed reviews and when the Oscar nominations came out, it was nominated for just two awards, albeit important ones – Best Picture and Actress. So, what happened?

There are those who say the film, which should have been in the Academy’s wheelhouse, may have appealed to old-time members but not to the young and hip. Then there are those who say it was too close in theme and style to Spotlight, which won just two years earlier because the Academy would not want to repeat itself that soon. While there may be some truth to both arguments, the crux of the matter is that the film just isn’t that good.

The biggest argument against The Post is that it is no All the President’s Men, the definitive film about the Washington Post in the Nixon era. That film, which takes place three years after the events depicted in The Post is both a newspaper story and a suspense film in which the events of the Watergate break-in and the ensuing downfall of the Nixon government are played out in such a manner that even though you know the outcome, you sit wide-eyed at the revelations as they slowly come out. In The Post there is no such suspense. We know the Washington Post published the Pentagon Papers. What we are left with is a character study of a circumspect wealthy woman who finds her voice in her mid-fifties. By all accounts Katharine Graham was a nice lady, but except for finally giving the OK to publish the Pentagon Papers, nothing of her life depicted in the film is otherwise remotely interesting. On top of that, Streep is just not believable as the somewhat socially awkward Graham in the film’s early scenes.

Streep in her early career was compared to Bette Davis because of her versatility from Kramer vs. Kramer to Sophie’s Choice to A Cry in the Dark. Fair enough. In her later career she was compared to Katharine Hepburn because of her ability to rack up Oscar nominations for late-career performances. This is where I part company with the consensus. Hepburn easily merited seven late career nominations for The African Queen, Summertime, The Rainmaker, Long Day’s Journey into Night, Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, The Lion in Winter, and On Golden Pond. Streep’s last four nominations for August: Osage County, Into the Woods, Florence Foster Jenkins, and The Post are real headscratchers for me. Now, not only is she being compared to Davis and Hepburn, but to Ethel Barrymore as well.

Barrymore, of course, spent most of her career on stage, becoming a movie star at the age of 65 and promptly winning an Oscar as Cary Grant’s poverty-stricken mother in None but the Lonely Heart, followed by additional nominations for The Spiral Staircase, The Paradine Case, and Pinky, in all of which she played frail old ladies. Her more recognizable screen persona was as a formidable old lady with a wry sense of humor as displayed in such films as The Farmer’s Daughter and Just for You. One of those formidable old lady roles was as a newspaper publisher who has a close working relationship with her tough-minded editor, played by Humphrey Bogart, in 1952’s Deadline – U.S.A. . Barrymore and Bogart were the Graham and Bradlee of twenty years earlier and far more believable than Streep and Hanks at portraying them. Too bad they couldn’t have been frozen in time and brought back to film The Post. Then we might have had something.

When Leo McCarey won his Oscar for 1937’s The Awful Truth, he famously said “thanks, but you gave it to me for the wrong picture.” He was referring, of course, to Make Way for Tomorrow released earlier in the same year. Both films were great, but Make Way for Tomorrow, which landed on numerous list of ten best films of the year, was a box-office flop whereas The Awful Truth was a box-office smash, cementing Irene Dunne’s reputation as a comedienne as well as a fine dramatic actress, and re-inventing Cary Grant in the mold in which he would appear for the remainder of his career.

Criterion, which earlier gave us a splendid Blu-ray of Make Way for Tomorrow, has now given us an equally fine one of The Awful Truth. The sparkling 4K restoration makes it a sight for sore eyes, and while the extras on the careers of Grant and McCarey are nothing we haven’t seen or heard before, the 1978 audio interview with Dunne in her 80th year is certainly a rarity. Also included is an informative booklet on McCarey’s career and the making of The Awful Truth by Molly Haskell.

The Awful Truth was the third film version of a 1922 Broadway play, previously filmed in 1925 with Agnes Ayres and Warner Baxter and in 1929 with Ina Claire (the original Broadway star) and Henry Daniell. The 1925 version survives and is persevered in the UCLA Film Library. The 1929 version is presumed lost. Neither, however, have anywhere near the reputation of McCarey’s film with its improvised bits and pieces including all the musical sequences and the famed hat and the dog sequence with Grant and Asta, the dog from The Thin Man as Mr. Smith, the dog Dunne and Grant share custody of after their divorce. Screwball comedy reached its zenith with this sequence and this film.

Warner Archive has given us another glorious Blu-ray upgrade with Cole Porter’s Les Girls, the 1957 musical that was the composer’s last.

Although classified as a musical, director George Cukor was correct in describing it not as a musical, but as a comedy with music. Seven of the twelve songs Porter wrote for it were not used in the film. Of the five which were used, only “Ca c’est l’amour” became a hit outside of the film, which was also Gene Kelly’s last MGM musical.

Kelly is good, but he is easily outclassed here by the three women who share the title roles, Mitzi Gaynor, Kay Kendall, and Taina Elg. Kendall, already unknowingly suffering from the leukemia that would take her life three years later, is especially good in her best and best-known screen role. A charming interview with Taina Elg is imported from the 2003 DVD release of the film.

This week’s new releases include the Region 1 debuts of Paddington 2 and Film Stars Don’t Die in Liverpool.