The Film Experience™ was created by Nathaniel R. All material herein is written by our team. (This site is not for profit but for an expression of love for cinema & adjacent artforms.)
Tuesday's revisit to the essential and apparently sorely underseen Queen Margot (1994) and the comments thereafter had me thinking about favorite films from 1994. This website wasn't around back then of course (I think the internet was just in listserv mode at that point?) but I was already making lists. So what would I have nominated had our Film Bitch Awards been around back then? What would you have nominated had you had an Oscar ballot?
The answers (fluid as they are should rewatching ever occur) are after the jump...
Did you hear that the now 18 year old True Grit and Pitch Perfect 2 star has released a single? With "Love Myself" she becomes the first Oscar nominee to launch a music career since... um... wait, wait, it'll come to me.
Bruce Willis, Brie Larson, and Linday Lohan tried it years ago but they weren't Oscar nominees. Eddie Murphy and Kim Basinger did it briefly in the 80s but that was long before Oscar paid them any mind. Russell Crowe did it before becoming a movie star and kept on doing it. Jamie Foxx started recording years before the musical biopic Oscar win in Ray. Jared Leto abandoned the movies for quite a long time to be a rock star but that was also before Oscar love. Most recently Scarlett Johansson started a recording career but Oscar has yet to notice her. (sigh). Post Oscar Examples will come to me after we get back to our topic.
Anyway... Hailee has gone for an "I Touch Myself"/"She Bop" style single what with that Self-Service tank in the video for "Love Myself"
Hey, you'd turn yourself on, too, if you were Oscar-nominated for your debut film. Do tell us what you think of the video in the comments, won't you? (You may also recall that Hailee was the star of my choice for "best shot" from Taylor Swift's Bad Blood video)
Previous Actors To Launch Music Careers After Their Oscar Nominations I'd love this to be a comprehensive list but I'm sure I missed someone. Help if you can...
2000s
Minnie Driver's latest album "Ask Me To Dance" Toni Collette. Oscar nominated for The Sixth Sense (1999). Released one album "Beautiful Awkward Pictures" in 2006. You can also hear her great pipes on the Original Broadway Cast Album of Michael John Lachiusa's "Wild Party" Minnie Driver. Oscar nominated for Good Will Hunting (1997). Released her debut album "Everything I've Got in My Pocket" in 2004. Beautiful voice. She's since released two more albums. Juliette Lewis. Oscar nominated for Cape Fear (1991). Juliette and the Licks released their debut album in 2004 with their first hit "You're Speaking My Language" - damn that track was goood. She's since released three more albums. I miss her music. I listened to "Uh Huh" so much in 2010!
1980s
Isabelle Adjani. First Oscar nominated for The Story of Adele H. (1975). After a Cannes win for 2 roles and two Cesars for best actress in the early 80s she released her only album "Pull Marine" in 1983. Supposedly Luc Besson directed the only music video but it doesn't seem to exist on YouTube. *sniffle*
1970s
Bette Davis. Oscared twice over in the 1930s, she continued to rack up nominations through 1962's Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?. She's a bit of a black sheep in this list though because she wasn't trying to start a recording career with her only album. She was nearing 70 years of age when producers asked her and she cut the album "Miss Bette Davis" which includes a few movie songs she's already sung onscreen.
1960s
Patty Duke. She won the supporting actress Oscar at 16 for her co-lead role in The Miracle Worker (1962). Afterwords she got her own television show, recorded albums and had two top forty hits.
1950s
Sal Mineo. First Oscar nominated for Rebel Without a Cause (1955). Released one pop album in 1957 at the heighth of his teen idol fame, from which he even had a top ten single. After that it was all acting again and another nomination for Exodus (1960).
Part 2: 39 Minutes 00:01 Mare Winningham and Georgia’s Screenplay 08:45 Oliver Stone’s excesses -- extremely split opinions on Nixon 19:15 Off-Oscar: Other performances we loved from 1995 and another round of Emma Thompson and Sense & Sensibility 30:00 Best Original Song ??? 33:40 Final Thoughts, recommendations and takeaways
I can't let Dick Tracy go quite yet! All that discussion and no tremulous ode to Stephen Sondheim's brilliant song score? It won't stand! Every moment when Breathless Mahoney (Madonna) and 88 Keys (Mandy Patinkin) are in frame together is gold.
(Eagle-eyed early 90s obsessiveness will know that Mandy Patinkin also pops up briefly in a celebrity-filled party scene in the Madonna documentary "Truth or Dare")
BEST ORIGINAL MOVIE SONGS OF THE 1990s Beautiful Song Craft and/or Cheesy Epic Ballads For the Wins * Oscar nominee ** Oscar winner
"Wise Up" -Magnolia (Aimee Mann) technically this song first showed up on the Jerry Maguire soundtrack which is why it wasn't eligible for the Oscars for Magnolia but let's make an exception
"Sooner or Later"** - Dick Tracy (Stephen Sondheim)
"Gangsta's Paradise" - Dangerous Minds (Coolio) deemed ineligible by Oscar due to sampling -- people were obsessed with the scary new "is this songwriting?" world of sampling back then. What to make of it?
"Stay" - Reality Bites (Lisa Loeb)
"Be Our Guest" - Beauty & The Beast (Alan Menken & Howard Ashman)
"More" - Dick Tracy (Stephen Sondheim)
"You Must Love Me"** - Evita (Andrew Lloyd Webber & Tim Rice)
"God Help the Outcasts" - Hunchback of Notre Dame (Alan Menken)
Thursday, May 19, 2016 at 1:00PM 
