1962 has to be one of the oddest years in Oscar history in that only two of the five Best Picture nominees and their directors were nominated – Lawrence of Arabia’s David Lean and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Robert Mulligan. But then, they were the two most likely to win anyway. With ten nominations to
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Three films dominated the year-end awards in 1961: West Side Story, Judgment at Nuremberg and La Dolce Vita, with the latter becoming the first serious foreign language contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination since Grand Illusion way back in 1938. Alas, when the nominations were announced, the Italian film had to settle for just
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While DVD companies continue to rush recent releases into the marketplace, classic films become harder and harder to find. While we get a few crumbs here and there – the recent screwball comedy sets, the hits and misses form the Warner archives – there are still way too many classics languishing unreleased on commercial DVD
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1960 was an interesting year at the Oscars. Adult themes were much more in evidence than ever before. Sex was one of the themes, if not the major one in The Apartment; Sons and Lovers; Home From the Hill; Elmer Gantry; Psycho; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Never
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The winners for the 13th Annual Online Film & Television Association Television Awards have been announced. The following link will take you to the winners list which is led by Mad Men and Grey Gardens. http://ofta.oscarguy.com/Awards.html
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1959 was a year of many big films – Ben-Hur; North by Northwest; Some Like It Hot; On the Beach; Imitation of Life; The Diary of Anne Frank; Anatomy of a Murder and The Nun’s Story to name a few with room for only five in Oscar’s Best Picture line-up. Four of them, Ben-Hur; The
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Expectations ran high for The Soloist throughout 2008. Then the film was pulled by Paramount at the last minute and bumped to an April 2009 release date giving the impression there was something wrong with the film. There isn’t. What’s wrong is the proliferation of Oscar prognosticators on the internet who build up expectations for
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1958 was an interesting year at the Oscars. The two films now regarded as the greatest of the year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil were not on Oscar’s short list. Nevertheless some very good films were. Oscar chose to embrace instead, Morton Da Costa’s film of the irrepressible stage hit, Auntie
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It’s been well over a decade since director Henry Selick enthralled audiences with The Nightmare Before Christmas and James and the Giant Peach. He’s back stronger than ever with his most ambitious project to date: Coraline. Coraline is a 3-D stop-motion animated film about a young girl who crawls through a secret door in her
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Big was still in in 1957, but a transposed TV drama a la Marty managed to sneak in amongst the five nominees for Best Picture. Joining The Bridge on the River Kwai; Witness for the Prosecution; Peyton Place and Sayonara in the Best Picture race was Sidney Lumet’s first feature film, Twelve Angry Men based
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If 1955’s Oscar wins for Marty flew in the face of industry moguls, 1956 was right up their alley. All five Best Picture nominees were major productions: Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant; The King and I and The Ten Commandments. The anticipated winner was, of course, Around the World in 80
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When motion picture exhibitors first started tracking the box office draw of movie stars in 1930, the first performer to be crowned No. 1 was not one of Hollywood’s powerful leading men or glamorous leading ladies, but a dowdy old lady with the face of a bulldog, an unlikely has-been with enormous talent and a
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For several years Hollywood had been doing everything it could to entice customers away from their TV sets and into theatres. By 1955, films shot on location in widescreen processes and glorious Technicolor and films with mature themes that wouldn’t play on TV were commonplace. How ironic, then, that a little film shot in 35MM
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The quality of film released in 1954 was extremely high. Even so, the Best Director and Picture Oscar and races seemed open and shut cases for Elia Kazan and On the Waterfront, and indeed the film became the first to sweep the National Board of Review, The New York Film Critics, the Golden Globes and
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Generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, if not the single greatest film of all time, Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, about an elderly Japanese couple making an exhausting railroad journey to visit their faraway children for the last time, met the fate of all of Ozu’s other films in the
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