A brief history of posthumous Oscars

by Cláudio Alves

Before the Oscar nominations were announced, some pundits predicted as many as four posthumous nominations. Obviously, there's Chadwick's Boseman's Best Actor bid for Ma Rainey's Black Bottom. His feverish take on August Wilson's Levee was indeed nominated and, at this point in the awards season, feels bound for victory. The other potential posthumous honors, those that didn't effectively happen, were Jack Fincher (Mank) in Best Original Screenplay, Chadwick Boseman again in Supporting Actor (Da 5 Bloods), and Michael Wolf Snyder (Nomadland) in Best Sound. With that in mind, it's easy to wonder how common it is for AMPAS to honor artists who have already passed.

For trivia purposes, here's a list of all posthumous Oscar nominations divided by category. Only competitive prizes were included, so no honorary awards...

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Showbiz History: Ellen Burstyn's big month and Corey Stoll appreciation

8 random things that happened on this day, March 14th, in history...

1885 The Mikado, Gilbert & Sullivan's beloved comic opera, premieres in London. The Oscar winning film Topsy Turvy (1999) depicts its production in exquisite detail. Topsy-Turvy was a very late entry in the 1999 Oscar race and threw a lot of categories out of whack -- proving a formidable competitor to design heavy films like The Talented Mr Ripley and Sleepy Hollow. In the end it won Costume Design and Makeup and received nominations for Screenplay and Production Design. 1999 was a damn good film year, even if the actual Best Picture list was a sorry sorry slate... 

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Remembering Howard Ashman

by Cláudio Alves

On the morning of February 19th, 1992, the nominations for the 64th Academy Awards were announced. As always, the last category to be revealed was that of Best Picture and, just as Best Director lineup had done, it brought with it a historical event. Disney's Beauty and the Beast became the first animated feature to be nominated for the Best Picture Oscar, a momentous achievement that was applauded by the audience of journalists. It was the only Best Picture nominee to receive such jubilant cheer and it's easy to see why. While some had predicted the cartoon's glorious haul of nominations, the long-lasting prejudices of AMPAS against animation made its success seem impossible. Thankfully, even the Academy can get over itself from time to time, and honor truly deserving cinema. Beauty and the Beast is certainly deserving, being a masterpiece of American animation, as well as one of Disney's crown jewels.

Unfortunately, not everyone involved with its triumph was able to bask in the glory of the Oscar nominations. One of the men most responsible for the wonder of Beauty and the Beast was long gone by the time of the announcement…

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Today's 5: Frances Ha, Howard Ashman, Mr Dietrich...

Humpday for all your office drones. Need a distraction? Quick boost? Here are 5 anniversaries and a suggestion as to how to honor each. Try 'em out and see if they make the day go faster.

May 17th History

2013 Frances Ha finally opens in theaters after an excruciating wait from its rave reviews at festivals the fall prior. It was everything we hoped for and then some and did well in our annual awards right here. 

In its honor today: dance and leap run like Frances, especially when you're on the way to the ATM...

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Revisiting Beauty and the Beast (1991) - Rank the songs!

By Lynn Lee

With the live-action remake of Disney’s Beauty and the Beast just around the corner, what better time to revisit the original animated masterpiece and its endlessly hummable songs?  If you saw the movie when it came out in 1991 and happened to be a bookish, musical theater-loving little girl (or boy) at the time, odds are you got the soundtrack and learned it by heart.  (I plead guilty on all counts.) 

While I have no idea what happened to my copy, every beat and lyric – by Alan Menken and the late Howard Ashman, respectively – are still firmly etched into my memory.  I never saw the Broadway musical, which restored a song that had been scrapped from the movie (“Human Again”) and added several new songs by Menken and lyricist Tim Rice, but reportedly the new movie isn’t including any of the latter.  Instead it’s adding four newly new songs by Mencken and Rice.  However, fear not, fellow original Disney B&B enthusiasts: it appears that all of the Mencken-Ashman songs from the 1991 movie will be in the mix.  As Cogsworth would say, “If it’s not ba-roque, why fix it?” 

We’ll have to wait to debate the merits of the new songs but we can discuss how the original ones stack up against each other.  With the caveat that this feels a bit like picking one’s favorite kid, here’s my ranking from lowest to highest...

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