Category: Home Viewing with Peter

The 1998 Oscar season was the first one I participated in on the first Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board (UAADB). Discussions about that year still raise hackles on some of the participants who are still around.

New This Week Once in a great while I get a warm feeling about a film that either isn’t on anyone’s radar or worse, has been dismissed out of hand before it even opens. Such was the case with Titanic, which had been getting bad press all year long. Its cost overruns doubled its initial…

New This Week For much of the year, the only films it seems anyone was talking about were Fargo and Flirting With Disaster, which were released in early Spring. It seemed that they would easily be among the year’s Best Picture nominees. Fate was kind to the former, but had different plans for the latter.…

New This Week 1995 was probably the hardest year to handicap in all of Oscar history. The early awards favorite was the critically liked box-office success, Apollo 13, about the problems encountered by the moon-bound mission, and child star turned major film director Ron Howard did in fact win the DGA for Best Director, a…

New This Week Nostalgia was very much evident in 1994’s major Oscar contenders. Three of the five films nominated for Best Picture and all four acting winners were in films set in previous eras. The fourth Best Picture nominee was made in the style of 1940 thrillers and the fifth, though set in contemporary times,…

Peter’s making a big move cross-country. In all the hubbub and time-consumption required for such a move, he will be unable to supply his weekly DVD Report. He will return as soon as everything is settled. Please keep him in your thoughts and wish him luck in his new location!

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Nominated for twelve Academy Awards, and winner of seven, Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List received a total of 72 worldwide awards and 22 additional nominations. The Holocaust drama juxtaposes the awakening conscience of German factory owner Oskar Schindler with that of the conscienceless concentration camp commandant…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. An old-fashioned western with a modern twist led the fractured 1992 Oscar race. Veteran Clint Eastwood’s revenge western, Unforgiven received nine nominations and four wins for Best Picture; Director; Supporting Actor (Gene Hackman) and Editing. Eastwood had also been nominated for Best Actor. The film’s…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The Oscar year 1991 may be the strangest one in the history of the Academy Awards. Box office was down more than 6% percent from the previous year and pundits blamed the year’s mostly somber, depressing films themselves for audience doldrums. Oddly, though, the year’s…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. The new age western, Dances With Wolves, is direction taken over by star Kevin Costner, seemed like a breath of fresh air at the time. In just two years, however, a more traditional western would reclaim the genre and much of 1990’s Oscar winner would…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. With nine Oscar nominations, Bruce Beresford’s film of Alfred Uhry’s off-Broadway smash hit, Driving Miss Daisy went into the 1989 Oscar race with the most nominations, but it failed to receive one for Best Director, usually a bad omen. What it did have, however, were…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Autism was a subject that no one talked about before Rain Man. 60 Minutes devoted a segment to the subject and the film prior to the film’s mid-December release, giving it an importance no other film of 1988 would have. It instantly became the film…

Featured CLICK HEREfor other DVDs featured this week. Three years after David Lean made his last film, the epic was in good hands with Italy’s Bernardo Bertoluccci who made 1987’s The Last Emperor. Bertolucci’s film is about Pu Yi, born to lofty heights, raised behind the great wall of China, forced to abdicate and endure…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Oscar’s Best Picture line-up for 1986 offered the most varied slate in many years. In the running were a war movie; a complex adventure film, a sophisticated contemporary comedy, an even more sophisticated classic comedy and a high tension domestic drama. Leading off the nominations…

New This Week CLICK HEREfor other new releases this week. Is this déjà vu all over again? Just as the Academy had done the year before, in 1985 it gave eleven Oscar nominations each to two films, one of which was awarded seven gold trophies while the other went home empty-handed, tying the record losses…