Cláudio's Best Shot Pick: The Last Picture Show (1971)

The next episode of our series, 'Hit Me With Your Best Shot,' arrives tonight. It's focused on Peter Bogdanovich's The Last Picture Show. You still have time to participate! Here's Cláudio's entry.

Bogdanovich drops the audience inside a cold domestic scene early in The Last Picture Show. In the Farrow household, resentments and disappointments permeate the air, each individual stuck in their little bubble of dissatisfied placidity. Together yet alone, the Farrows' silence is a nervous thing, like a fly's wilting buzz as it suffocates in insecticide. Perchance to disrupt the muted disquiet, the matriarch enters her daughter's room and sparks a conversation. She tries to advise the younger woman, so she doesn't make the same mistakes her mother did. Mistakes like staying in their small Texan town, dying from boredom like the fly dies from bug spray.

"Everything's flat and empty here. There's nothing to do." – says Ellen Burstyn's Lois, her words reverberating through the film's most potent images…

Click to read more ...

Oscar Trivia: Ranking the His & Hers Supporting Oscar Wins

Moreno & Chakiris winning for WEST SIDE STORYby Nathaniel R

Only 8 times in the 92 year history of the Academy Awards have both Supporting trophies gone to the same movie. We were thinking about this factoid recently given that 1957 is the topic of next week's Smackdown (get those votes in). 1957's Sayonara wins for Miyoki Umeshi and Red Buttons (who played newlyweds) marked the third instance of both supporting trophies going to the same movie in just a seven year span. Given that that specific type of Oscar pairing has only happened five times more in the next sixty-two years of history, it's clear that "his & hers" was definitely more of a 1950s voter mindset than it is now.

[Tangent: Lead 'His & Hers' statues happen with about the same frequency but are mostly bunched up in the late 70s for some reason]

Let's rank what came before with double supporting wins in a highly unscientific fusion of the performances...

Click to read more ...