Oscar's Honors... But Where is Mia Farrow?

Glenn here. First things first: let us congratulate the four people selected by the Academy to receive statues at their annual Governer's Awards in November. The names are screen (big and small) and stage legend Angela Lansbury, five-time costume design nominee Piero Tosi, actor and comedian Steve Martin, as well as Angelina Jolie who will be awarded the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award.

I think we can all agree that the first three names listed there are bona fide deserved winners. Lansbury with her nominated screen roles in Gaslight, The Picture of Dorian Gray (which I think made her the first person ever nominated for both their debut and sophomore performances?) and perhaps most famously as the wicked puppet master mother in The Manchurian Candidate, not to mention also appearing as the voice of sweet Mrs. Potts in Beauty and the Beast. She ranked #7 on The Film Experience's poll of women who deserve an Honorary Academy Award so there's one name we can strike off the list. It's hard to argue also with the selection of Steve Martin, and it's especially a breath of fresh air to see the Academy honour another comedian with their honorary award as if to say "Yeah, look, we know!" Such a shame audiences will be denied getting to see these two fabulous icons on stage at the Oscars.

And while his name may not be as familiar, Italian costumer Piero Tosi is no stranger to Oscar. He's been nominated five times including for such famed films as The Leopard, Death in Venice, La Cage aux Folles, and La Traviata. He has not worked since 2009 so it's now or never and we can all applaud the Academy's continued celebration of craftsman in these categories.

However, I'd really like to know what you guys think of the choice of Angelina Jolie. I don't think anybody would begrudge her her success in bringing the plight of refugees to the front page of national magazines and into movie cinemas (Beyond Borders and her directorial debut In the Land of Blood and Honey both did this albeit to questionable success) as well as her many other humanitarian efforts alongside United Nations. Still, by the end of the year, Jolie will be a two-time Academy Award winner. She's only 38 and has plenty - plenty! - of time to win another (whether for acting or directing or whatever other forte she chooses to venture into). What next? George Clooney? Opra... Oh, wait.

Meanwhile, poor ("poor" in a metaphorical sense, obviously) Mia Farrow continues to sit there wondering what on Earth she has to do to get noticed by these people. She could easy be recognised with an honorary Academy Award for her acting (her years alongside Woody Allen as well as Rosemary's Baby attest to that) or for her humanitarian efforts of which there are many. Hell, her goodwill nature is so well known and so strong that she was immortalised on an episode of Laura Dern and Mike White's Enlightened! 

Given her lack of nomination to this day one has to wonder whether people within the Academy view her in a certain unflattering light. Why that'd be so, I have no idea. You'd think the fall out from her marriage to Woody Allen would have made them want to honor her even more, no? I guess not. Of course, I doubt Farrow is too bent out of shape over it: one doesn't commit themselves to activism in the hopes of winning an Oscar. But wouldn't it be nice to see them rewrite multiple wrongs instead of giving Jolie her second statue? And if not Farrow then surely there are still plenty of other worthy people who are Oscarless to this day that have done a lot for charity and the community. 

Nevertheless, congratulations to all the winners. May the brief montage they allow us to see of your ceremony be funny and enlightening and prove that y'all deserve to be on the main stage.

Familiar Faces: Woody Allen's Cast Hierarchy

Several Woody Allen's ago we began a very short lived series called "Familiar Faces" in which I surveyed repeat usages of the same actors in a director's ouevre. The series was short lived because my god do you know how long each post took? Nevertheless, I'd love to revive it if I've ever afforded the budget or time and I thought with Blue Jasmine, Woody Allen's 43rd complete directorial feature, rocking it at the box office the time was ripe to revisit and republish with a few minor adjustments. If you see a half point trust that it's from Play It Again Sam which Woody wrote and starred in but did not direct or New York Stories which he directed only one segment of. One of the key factors in why I don't think Woody Allen films are as strong as they used to be is his weird shift from loyal employer to fickle star-gazer. Nowadways its rare for an actor to return to his filmography. 

Will Cate follow in other muse footsteps or is Blue Jasmine a one-off?

Take Blue Jasmine for example. The only performers with a previous Woody under his belt are Alec Baldwin who had the "pleasure" of playing an ill-defined role in To Rome With Love and (a long time ago) a small role in Alice and Ginger herself Sally Hawkins who previously appeared in Cassandra's Dream

Herewith my findings... from Mia through the Dian(n)es and on to the Scarletts 

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Children of the Link

EW lets you zoom in on details of Spidey's new suit from The Amazing Spider-Man 2
Cinema Blend Oscar winning cinematography Wally Pfister's directorial debut Transcendence is already courting the Chinese audience 
Pajiba "the 12 most awesome sexually confident movie lines" Ha. I couldn't pull any of these off (TMI!) but I love the list
Coming Soon You can now watch the opening and closing credit sequences of Pacific Rim online. Though honestly they look fairly generic despite the hype for the film.
Playbill Theresa Rebeck of Smash-creation fame is trying another series. She's developing a "Bleak House" adaptation for Bravo 

Variety Whoa. Hunky Bollywood superstar Hrithink Roshan recently had brain surgery. Get well soon.
Awards Daily Rising writer/director Ava DuVernay, who made the excellent Middle of Nowhere last year, is taking on Selma, a true-life drama about MLK and the Civil Rights Act
In Contention will Philomena be TWC's secret Oscar weapon this year? I don't know how secret it can be after the reception of several minutes at Cannes but yes, it could be.
Final Girl is about to trace the evolution of the entire Children of the Corn series with a marathon blogging effort on Monday. But she's already surveyed the posters.
Natasha VC a perfect one sentence commentary on Mia Farrow and Philip Roth watching Sharknado together

Team Top Ten: Women Who Deserve An Honorary Oscar

Amir here, to bring you this month’s Team Top Ten on a topic that remains one of our biggest collective pet peeves here at The Film Experience.

Every year when the Academy announces the list of recipients of the Honorary Oscar, we can expect only one thing: they will all be men. Sure, the odd woman wins the award here and there, but consider this: between 1993, when the honor was bestowed upon Deborah Kerr, until 2009, when Lauren Bacall shared the award with two men, not a single woman was deemed worthy of the biggest honor AMPAS has to offer. Apologists can point to the fact that men have run the industry at large since its inception. They would be right; the industry as a whole is equally at fault, if not more, but take a look at the list of women still awaiting their first statue – or *gasp* first nomination – and tell me they don’t deserve better than one golden man every sixteen years. If the drought is as depressingly long this time as it was between Kerr and Bacall, it can be 2025 before we see another lady take home an honorary Oscar!

Deborah Kerr in 1993 and Lauren Bacall in 2009 and a great chasm between them

We know all too well that complaining about the Academy’s decision doesn’t get us anywhere, but since we found recently that they do have a listening ear, we’ve decided to do our part and help them correct this injustice. Let’s give voters the benefit of the doubt and assume that all they really needed all these years was a list of suggestions. So, here is ours: the top ten women who most deserve an honorary Oscar, under the following three criteria: they need to be alive, above the age of 55 and Oscar-less.

 GIVE THESE WOMEN THE HONORARY! 

[tie] 10. Marni Nixon
You may not know what Marni Nixon looks like, but I guarantee you know what she sounds like. If you've seen Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The Secret Garden (1949), The King and I, An Affair to Remember, West Side Story, or My Fair Lady, you have heard Nixon's golden voice coming from the mouths of some of Hollywood's most legendary actresses. As if it isn't hard enough work to try to make your voice sound just like someone else's, in some instances Nixon had to do so in secret, the studios wanting to hide the dubbing from their big stars. Nixon's onscreen credits may number only in the single digits (her role as Sister Sophia in The Sound of Music being the most famous by far), but had she actually performed the roles she dubbed onscreen, she would have had at least two Oscar nominations by now. She's an indelible part of film history, and she never received any onscreen credit for her most famous work. If that isn't cause to give someone an Honorary Oscar, then I don't know what is.
-Daniel Bayer

10 more legends to honor after the jump!  

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Boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into weak adaptations of great books

Hi all, Tim here. Like a lot of you, I’ve been waiting on Baz Luhrmann’s brand-new, all-3D, all-CGI version of The Great Gatsby with a kind of curious dread, on the assumption that the no-doubt overwhelming style and glitz would leave F. Scott Fitzgerald’s excavation of the limits of American ingenuity and self-invention a little bit lost amidst all the eye candy. And this seems to have been exactly the case, sadly.

But let us not come down too hard on Baz. There’s also the possibility that Gatsby simply isn’t a novel that’s meant to be filmed, and as evidence I’d like to call upon the last feature film adaptation, and certainly the best known prior to now. Of course, I mean the 1974 Paramount production starring Robert Redford as Jay Gatsby, Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, and Sam Waterston as Nick Carroway, and a general sense of lifeless ennui as the stimulus-crazed Roaring ‘20s. Other than a fixation on production design and costumes (it won the Oscar for the latter), there’s not much that the ’74 film has in common with Luhrmann’s screamingly excessive vision; if anything a bit more of a willingness to push against the book, rather than to so dutifully illustrate it in the driest way possible, might have benefited it. Movies are not books, after all, and this version of Gatsby badly loses sight of that truth.

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