The 38th Academy Awards (1966)
Nominations: 10
Wins: 5
Like my first film I didn’t want to watch this one either. 174 minutes? Old timey people singing in Austria? Sounds like something I’d watch in school. Hmm, would that be for History class? Choir? In my Choir class we watched Drumline. It didn’t win any Oscars, though it did get two MTV Movie Award nominations (Breakthrough Male Performance and Best Kiss).
The 37th Academy Awards (1965)
Nominations: 12
Wins: 8
I’m not sure when the idea of “Oscar-y movies” started to take hold, but my guess would be the 1960s. Or at the very least, the ’60s are the first decade where you can start to see a clear pattern of the types of movies that would be lauded with Oscars. It’s a decade that was (almost infamously) eager to hand out Oscars to two specific genres — the musical and the British period piece. While some of the Best Picture winners from this decade could easily still be regarded as classics (like Lawrence of Arabia or West Side Story), the Academy’s willingness to so fervently reward these genres in retrospect feels like a bit of an overreach. Especially when far more exciting things were going on in international film, whose influence would seep its way into the more brash Hollywood films that were getting Oscars by the decade’s end. Continue reading
The 15th Academy Awards (1943)
Nominations: 8
Wins: 3
My first pick in our Oscar countdown is a film I’ve been putting off for a long time. You know, cause it’s old. Honestly, I’ve never had much interest in seeing this movie. But it’s on the AFI Top 100 Films’s List and as a “film buff”—whatever that means in this day and age—it felt crazy to me that I’d never seen a James Cagney movie. I mean he’s a Hollywood legend! He was in a Looney Tunes toon. All the years I had to put up with boomers saying “You dirty rat!” to me. Now I finally get it. I get Cagney.
The 13th Academy Awards (1941)
Nominations: 11
Wins: 2
Welcome to what could be the beginning of a beautiful tradition here at Mildly Pleased: two whole weeks of posts about Academy Award-nominated movies leading up to Hollywood’s biggest night, which is somehow in late April this year. The first feature I’d like to tell you about is 1940’s Rebecca, the second of producer David O. Selznick’s back-to-back Outstanding Production (Best Picture) wins. A year prior, Selznick had found enormous success with Gone with the Wind, setting the record for most Academy Award nominations (13) and wins (eight) at the time. This time, Rebecca won only one other award, Best Cinematography – Black and White, setting it’s own (still standing) record as the only film to win Best Picture while receiving no Academy Award for acting, directing or writing. Because how could we forget that Green Book won Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor along with the top prize?
Since it’s March 31 and we still haven’t had a single post all month, here’s an obligatory People’s Album entry to keep this from being the first completely postless month. Though don’t worry, word on the street is that we’ll be a little more active on here in the month ahead.
Album: Metallica (The Black Album)
Artist: Metallica
Release Date: August 12, 1991
Copies Sold In U.S.: 16 million Continue reading
I can’t even remember the last time I reviewed a new movie on this blog, but let’s see if I still remember how to do it. This isn’t to say that there haven’t been a lot of good movies to come out post-pandemic, since we were able to put together our Top Ten Movies of 2020 lists without it feeling like we were scraping the bottom of the barrel. But it’s still been a while since I’ve seen a movie that has affected me enough that it was able to transcend the fact that I was still stuck at home watching it, even though it’s a film featuring the expanse of the American West that you’d prefer to see on a big screen. But whatever format you’re seeing it on, aside from the prettiness of its natural imagery, Nomadland is also filled with a ton to chew on in terms of its themes, topicality, and of course empathy. Continue reading
It’s hard to say what new music will look like in 2021. You would think that there may be a dearth of album releases due to the pandemic making it harder for musicians to collaborate in the studio over the past year. Though unlike film and TV, music doesn’t rely as much on large groups of people for creative fulfillment, and as we even saw in 2020, some artists are perfectly capable of writing and recording worthwhile material while in isolation. So for that reason, I think 2021 won’t be the greatest year for music or anything, but I don’t think it’ll be a complete wasteland the way movies were in 2020 and TV will almost surely be this year.
I can’t verify whether both Jazmine Sullivan’s and The Weather Station’s new albums were recorded during lockdown (though I know Heaux Tales was), but their introspective nature certainly checks off what we want out of music these days. They’re two albums that are among the most critically lauded albums of the year so far (though I suppose Heaux Tales is technically an EP), while also being probably my two favorite albums of the still-young year. They’re not that similar of sounding albums, as they’re coming from two artists that inhabit two very different spaces of the music world (Sullivan coming from the mainstream R&B world, while The Weather Station comes from the artier side of indie-pop). However, they feel worth comparing to me because they both see two artists in similar stages of their careers finding their sounds in truly revelatory ways. Continue reading
