Someone pitch a "Beulah" Miniseries. Hear me out.

Imitation of Life (1934) starred Claudette Colbert and Louise Beavers who went into the pancake business

On this day in 1902 Louise Beavers born in Cincinatti. Though she was never as famous as the similarly cast Hattie McDaniel she also had her own big film moments in the studio system including the original Imitation of Life in which Claudette Colbert got wildly rich off of her recipe while she Beavers struggled with her light-skinned daughter. FREE PITCH IDEA FOR WRITERS OF COLOR: Don't you think a prestige miniseries on Black Hollywood throughout the years would be fascinating?

More on Louise Beavers and other "on this day" items after the jump...

Click to read more ...

Pfandom: "Falling in Love Again" and "...Dragon Queen"

Pfeiffer instantly sentimentalized, with a halo no less, in her first scene in "Falling in Love Again"P F A N D O M  
Michelle Pfeiffer Retrospective. Episode 7 
by Nathaniel R 

There are an infinite number of worse people to grow up to look like than British star Susannah York but somehow it's hard to buy that that's who Michelle Pfeiffer would become. Pfeiffer was still a pre-teen when Susannah York hit her career peak, most notably in a string of erotically charged and sometimes controversial 1960s movies like Tom Jones, The Killing of Sister George, X Y and Zee, and They Shoot Horses Don't They (the latter brought her her only, but well deserved, Oscar nomination). By the time Pfeiffer was hitting the movies and cast to play York as a young girl, York's star was fading. York had recently been reduced to a merely decorative alien maternal presence in Superman (1978) and now a young actress was playing the idealized version of her. Hollywood can be cruel that way.

Click to read more ...

Only one "woke" at a time

by Deborah Lipp

One of Oscar's best moments. Iranian-American engineer Anousheh Ansari accepting on behalf of protesting Asghar Farhadi

If I may use this year’s vernacular, Oscars are woke. Except, well, they can only be woke about one thing at a time. Last year after the Oscars, I wrote about the powerful “spotlight” (see what I did there?) the Oscars brought to the issue of rape and sexual violence. And I’m going to acknowledge, that yes, that was amazing. 

But rape is so last year.

This year was all about diversity and inclusion. Those are wonderful topics, those are topics that matter to me. The diversity was beautiful to see. The powerful immigrant voices—from Iran, Mexico, and Italy, among other nations—moved me. It was important that people of color were not merely supporting characters—even though the winners were in the Supporting categories, they supported other people of color...

Click to read more ...

Asian Actors and the Academy: Triumphs and Snubs

Robert here. On Tuesday British actor Dev Patel became only the third actor of Indian descent to be nominated for an Academy Award. His nomination came amongst a renewed embrace of diversity (which is something to celebrate, but not rest on) after two years of completely white sets of nominees.

The Oscars – and, of course, the film industry at large – have long courted controversy for their issues with diversity, and Asian actors across the board have long been overlooked and undervalued. Often they are cast in flat, stereotyped roles, or as we've been made much more aware of lately, the roles of leading characters of Asian descent are given to white actors. Before Dev there have been several actors of Asian descent whose strong work has garnered them award attention, and even more who were snubbed despite memorable performances.

A brief retrospective is after the jump:

Click to read more ...

The Furniture: Appropriating Chinese Design in "The Shanghai Gesture"

"The Furniture" is our weekly series on Production Design. This week Daniel Walber looks back at one of the Art Direction Oscar nominees of 1942 for its 75th anniversary.

While Josef von Sternberg’s The Shanghai Gesture was still in production, the studio received a letter from T.K. Chang, the Chinese Consul to Los Angeles. Having read the script, he objected to its vicious and absurd portrayal of Shanghai’s underbelly and cautioned the producers to take “consideration of Chinese sentiment.”

Producer Arnold Pressburger defended the film as merely a fantasy. “This imaginary world has no connection with the realistic aspects of today,” he replied. This argument even wound up in the final cut, in the form of an opening title card: “Our story has nothing to do with the present.”

Chang saw right through Pressburger’s nonsense. “Such imaginations always prove to be constructed from the raw material of realities,” he wrote back. He was right. The Shanghai Gesture attempts a menacingly ahistorical flare by appropriating specifically Chinese decor. This is, of course, impossible. But the Oscar-nominated failure of art director Boris Leven (West Side Story) is fascinating...

Click to read more ...