Category: Oscar Profile

Born August 1, 1910 in New York, New York to Yiddish comedy star, Bessie Zwerling, Walter Scharf was as much a show business baby as George M. Cohan. He started playing music at an early age, helping his uncle play the piano in theaters for silent films.  At 17, he became one of the orchestrators…

With the recent release of the eligibility list, we’ve found several films on our contenders list that are no longer eligible for the Oscars. Below are some titles we’ll be removing entirely from the list. After that, some shortlisted films that aren’t eligible for other categories. I’ll also highlight the films that were not eligible…

Sorry I’m a bit late on this one, but here it is. There was a lot of hand-wringing in the last couple of years since the inclusion initiatives were started about all the films that would be disqualified. Sure, 56 films not featuring in Best Picture is a large number, but none of the major…

Born February 5, 1948 in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, Tom Wilkinson was the son of urban farmers, Marjorie and Thomas Wilkinson. Economic hardships forced the family to move to Canada for five years when Wilkinson was 11.  Upon their return to England, he attended the University of Kent, graduating with a degree in English and…

Born March 23, 1914 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Nedrick Young was an Oscar winning writer and actor who began his acting career in film and on the New York stage in 1942.  He served overseas with the U.S. Army during World War II. Young made his film debut in 1942’s Bombs Over Burma.  Other pre-1949 films…

Born January 5, 1975 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to a mother of Italian descent and a father of Irish descent, Bradly Cooper’s mother worked for the local NBC TV station, his father was a stockbroker.  He moved to New York after graduating with top honors from Georgetown University in 1997.  Studying drama at the Actors Studio,…

With a plethora of lame Christmas movies available on TV at this time of year, it’s rare to find one that compares favorably to the classics that were produced by Hollywood of old, most of which are still available on DVD and Blu-ray. While no film with Christmas as its main theme has ever won…

Born May 26, 1906 in Mexico City, Mexico, Joseph (Patrick) MacDonald was initially trained as a mining engineer at the University of Southern California. Turning his interest to film work, MacDonald served a lengthy apprenticeship, starting as assistant cameraman at First National in the early 1920s before eventually graduating to first camera operator by the…

Born May 29, 1897 in Brunn, Moravia, Austria-Hungary, now Brno, Czech Republic, Erich Wolfgang Korngold was a child prodigy. The son of a well-known music critic, young Korngold accompanied his father in playing four-handed piano arrangements by the age of five.  By the age of eleven he was appearing before enthusiastic Vienna audiences that included…

Thanksgiving Day is here again.  Time for Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade, gatherings with family and friends, and if time permits, revisiting Thanksgiving Day films. Holidays have been celebrated in films since their inception.  There have been films about virtually all of them.  1942’s Holiday Inn with Bing Crosby and Fred Astaire is in fact a…

Born July 25. 1935 In Evanston, Illinois, the youngest of four children, Barbara Harris was the daughter of a pianist mother and an arborist father who later became a businessman.  She began her stage career as a teenager at the Playwrights Theater in Chicago.  Her fellow players included Paul Sills, Ed Asner, Mike Nichols, and…

JIMMY KIMMEL BACK TO HOST 96TH OSCARS FOR THE FOURTH TIME MOLLY MCNEARNEY RETURNS AS AN EXECUTIVE PRODUCER FOR THE SHOW THE OSCARS SET TO AIR LIVE MARCH 10, 2024, ON ABC LOS ANGELES, CA – Emmy® Award-winning late-night talk show host and producer Jimmy Kimmel will return to host the 96th Oscars®, and Emmy-nominated…

Born March 29, 1908 in New York, New York, to Irish immigrants, his father a hotel worker, his mother a housewife, Arthur O’Connell attended St. John’s High School and College in Brooklyn before making his stage debut in a 1929 production of The Patsy. A travelling vaudevillian for a time, he made his film debut…

Born October 22, 1943 in Paris, France to stage actors Maurice Dorléac (1901-1979) and Renée Simonet (1911-2021), Catherine Dorléac, known professionally as Catherine Deneuve, was the second of three acting sisters.  Older sister Francoise Dorléac (1942-1967) was the bigger star until her tragic death in an automobile accident at the age of 25. Deneuve made…

Born December 12, 1970 in Cario, New York, Jennifer Connelly was the daughter of a clothing manufacturer and his wife.  Her father was of Irish and Norwegian ancestry and her mother was from a Jewish immigrant family. Although born in the Catskills, Connelly grew up in Brooklyn Heights near the Brooklyn Bridge, right across from…