Top 10: Oscar's All Time Favorite Leading Men

by Nathaniel R

I was shocked to realize that De Niro, Hanks, Penn, and Pacino -- none of them made the top ten!

Okay okay. Since we did Supporting Men and Supporting Women during the summer, I figured we should complete the set. Who are Oscar's 10 favorite leading men? We'll work the ranking like so: Nominations count most, with wins acting like half a nomination to help determine rank. The tiebreaker is the spread of time of nominations which can denote either long term fandom on the Academy's part or shortlived enthusiasms. If there's still a tie at that point, other Oscar statistics (like if they were nominated for producing or supporting or whatnot) break the tie.

Only 20 men throughout film history have scored 5 or more nominations for Best Lead Actor and though this year's currently pulsing competition for Best Actor is chalk full of previous nominees, none of them are regulars to that degree. Here are the ten runners up followed by the all-time top ten list... 

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Happy 50th to "Cool Hand Luke"

Paul Newman's fourth Best Actor nominated star vehicle opened on this day in 1967! In its honor an impromptu list...

BEST SCREEN LUKES

1. Cool Hand Luke  (Paul Newman)
2. Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill) 
3. Luke Pasqualino
4. Luke Cage  (Mike Colter)
5. Luke (Ryan Gosling) from The Place Beyond the Pines 
6. Luke Evans
7. Keye Luke
8. Luke (OT Fagbenie) from "The Handmaid's Tale"
9. Derek Luke
10. Luke Duke (Tom Wopat) from "The Dukes of Hazzard"

(okay, who'd we forget?)

The Furniture: Death by Excess in What a Way to Go!

"The Furniture," by Daniel Walber, is our weekly series on Production Design. You can click on the images to see them in magnified detail.

Any excuse to talk about What a Way to Go! is a good excuse. But the centennial of Ted Haworth is an especially excellent excuse. He was nominated for six Oscars, starting with Marty in 1955. He won for 1957’s Sayonara. Highlights from the rest of his career include Some Like It Hot, The Beguiled, and Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid.

But none of those movies could hold a candle to the astonishing level of creativity on display in What a Way to Go! The epic 1964 comedy of love and loss stars Shirley MacLaine as Louisa May Foster, a many-time widow and heiress.  Each husband, with one particularly tragic exception, begins the marriage as a near-pauper who wants nothing but love. But their passion inevitably leads them on a wild pursuit of wealth, which tends to end in a coffin. It should be noted, of course, that Louisa herself has little interest in cash.

There are far too many brilliant design elements to fit into a single column...

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Best Supporting Actor 1963: Melvyn Douglas in "Hud"

The Film Experience is taking a brief trip to 1963 for the forthcoming Smackdown. That year's supporting Actor winner was Melvyn Douglas in Hud... 

by John Guerin

Paul Newman as Hud makes me forget everything else. All my attention is funneled into those blue-grey eyes, the nucleus of Newman's swaggering energy. Hud emerges from this drowsy Midwestern tapestry like a geyser springing up from a desert. Why look anywhere else? The film hardly forfeits narrative or photographic attention from Hud, but he's not the only performer doing expert work in Martin Ritt’s 1963 masterwork. There's Patricia Neal's Alma, an iconic intersection of Southern exhaustion and eroticism. There's also Melvyn Douglas' Homer, which, to my constant surprise, remains perhaps the films best performance...

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Last Chance Streaming: "The Hustler" and "The Way of the Dragon"

I haven't quite dared to cut the Netflix cord yet, but I get closer every month since I find myself downloading movies more and more from iTunes or streaming on Amazon instead. Since Netflix is systematically erasing all traces of cinema pre 2000 (and even their 2000-2010 collection is tremendously lacking!) as they focus more and more on becoming a TV channel, you have until June 1st to watch the following 20th century films which are leaving the service.

We'll play our little streaming roulette game and screengrab whatever comes up as we bid adieu to the following. Which will you watch before it's hard to find them again?

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