75 days until Oscar nominations...

The upcoming Oscar ceremony is their 90th but guess who's having their 75th birthday this year? Oscar's bad seed step-sister The Golden Globes, that's who! We kid. We love the Globes, bad seed reference aside, in all their adorably flawed glory. What should we do to celebrate the Globes 75th birthday this year?!?

To honor their impending anniversary ceremony, here are 10 random times that the Globes were smarter than Oscar:

• 2010 The Social Network, Best Picture (The King's Speech won the Oscar)
• 2005 Brokeback Mountain, Best Picture (Crash won the Oscar)
• 1996-1999 Their choices for Best Supporting Actor always preferrable to Oscars! 
• 1995 Sense & Sensibility, Best Picture (Braveheart won the Oscar)
• 1984 Kim Basinger was nominated for The Natural instead of Glenn Close at the Oscars for the same movie (Close is a better actress, sure, but Basinger is way better in The Natural)
• 1980s They recognized that Cher was a brilliant actress long before Oscar (three nominations and a win even before Moonstruck!)
• 1967 Edith Evans, Best Actress for The Whisperers (Kate Hepburn won her second of four Oscars for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner)
• 1962 Angela Lansbury, Best Supporting Actress The Manchurian Candidate (Category frauding Patty Duke took the Oscar for lovely work in The Miracle Worker)
• 1960 Janet Leigh, Best Supporting Actress Psycho (Shirley Jones won the Oscar for Elmer Gantry)
• 1959 Marilyn Monroe won the Comedy Best Actress Globe for Some Like It Hot (she was not Oscar nominated)

Can you think of any others?

Beauty Break: Happy National Pumpkin Day!

Norma Jean (aka Marilyn before fame) in a pumpkin patch in the 40s

To celebrate this day, more beautiful people with pumpkins after the jump...

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NYFF: Arthur Miller: Writer

By Manuel Betancourt

There may not be a more towering figure of the American stage than Arthur Miller. From A View from the Bridge and Death of a Salesman to The Crucible and The Price, his plays remain some of the most performed / discussed / dissected dramas of the twentieth century. Capturing men (for they were so often men) caught adrift in an ever-changing world, Miller’s protagonists laid bare the most insidious aspects of American society. 12 years after his death, Arthur Miller: Writer (a riff on what he once said he hoped his obituary would read like), comes to offer a humanizing portrait of the New York City-born dramatist. That it comes courtesy of his daughter, Rebecca (yes, Mrs Day-Lewis, The Meyerowitz Stories’ bit part player, and Maggie’s Plan helmer) means that there’s a level of access and intimacy that we may not otherwise have gotten... 

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Three Questions in the News

by Murtada 

As Carrie Bradshaw would say, some of today's movie news got us thinking. The news offered more perplexion than usual. We'll present you with the questions and maybe you can help with the answers. Or just join in the bewilderment:

How many franchises can one actor be in?
You’d think being Superman would be enough. But no Henry cavill is joining Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible 6. No details about who he’s playing. Simon Pegg, and Rebecca Ferguson are expected to be back for the new adventure.  Jeremy Renner is not.

Who is starring in Jennifer Kent’s follow up to The Babadook? We know who Sam Claflin is, as we’ve seen him in a few films including The Hunger Games. But he’s not the lead, the new film titled The Nightingale is set in Tasmania in the 1820s, and follows a young Irish female convict whose family is murdered by a British soldier. With the help of an Aboriginal tracker, she heads for the wilderness in hope of exacting revenge. Have you heard of Aisling Franciosi? Well she nabbed the coveted lead role. Digging into her IMDB we found out that she played Lyanna Stark in Game of Thrones, you know in that famous flashback scene. She was also in Ken Loach’s Jimmy’s Hall (2014). Can’t say we remember either performance, but we are very excited to see whatever Kent chooses to show us.

And finally buried in a news item announcing Andrew Dominick's new film; War Party which is billed as an action-adventure movie about Navy SEALs that will star Tom Hardy, is this nugget about his long gestating Marilyn Monroe project, Blonde:

he has been trying to get his Marilyn Monroe movie Blonde off the ground [], but has struggled to find a leading lady everyone can agree on

Hmmm. The names that have been publicly shared so far were Naomi Watts in the first iteration and then a few years later Jessica Chastain. We wonder who else was up for playing Marilyn and was deemed not appropriate?

On This Day: Globes for two goddesses. Plus a non-jolly green giant

On this day in history as it relates to showbiz...

1892  One of Old Hollywood's most undersung but talented 1930s directors Gregory La Cava is born. Classics include Stage Door and My Man Godfrey
1913 Famed abolitionist and American hero Harriet Tubman dies of pneumonia. So glad she's getting biopic treatment soon. And twice over!
1938 The 10th annual Oscars are held with The Life of Emile Zzzzzola winning Best Picture and Louise Rainer taking her consecutive Best Actress prize but the most enduring anecdote was of course the theft of Alice Brady's Oscar for In Old Chicago.
1958 Sharon Stone is born in Pennysylvania

The 1959 Golden Globes (and more) are after the jump...

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