BEFORE: It's finally here, Oscar night - by the time this day is over, we'll know who the winners are in some very tight races. I've read up on the Oscar odds, but unfortunately when it comes to the Best Picture award, there are 9 contenders, and the last article I read made a case for all of them, along with a reason why each one should NOT win. So that's pretty confusing - they really only ruled out "Little Women" because it's been remade so often, that's supposedly why "A Star Is Born" didn't win last year.
For once, I've got more than a fair shot of having seen the Best Picture winner before it wins, I managed to see three of the (let's say) top four contenders in January: "Joker", "The Irishman" and "1917". The war film has all the momentum, but Joker has the most nominations, however when was the last time a comic-book movie won the top prize? "The Irishman" got a lot of praise, and being on Netflix already guarantees it maximum awareness, but some people say it's too long and they're thrown by the de-aging effects. I haven't seen "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood" so even though I'm Team Joker AND Team Irishman, I figure there's a fair chance the Tarantino film will win, just to keep my losing streak alive. I've scheduled "Marriage Story" for March and "Once Upon a Time...in Hollywood" for April, and I will get to the others, too, it's just that "Ford v. Ferrari" isn't a priority topic for me, and with Hitler material coming up in April, I'd love to program "Jojo Rabbit", but so far I can't work it into the chain, so I may have to wait for something like "Black Widow" to connect to it. I have co-workers who would love to see "Parasite" win, but that's going to be a bitch for me to link to - I still haven't seen "Roma" from last year for the same reason. Look, I finally finished watching the Best Picture nominated films from 2016 when I saw "Moonlight", but I haven't seen "Phantom Thread" or "Call Me By Your Name" from the year after that, so I'm still always behind it seems.
I'll also be paying close attention to the award for Best Animated Feature, rooting for the three films I've seen there - "Toy Story 4", "Missing Link" and "How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World", and supporting "Avengers: Endgame" and "Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker" for any technical awards. Every other award is sort of a non-starter for me, I just want a good, clean race with no mis-reading of the envelopes and let's keep that show moving, OK?
Eric Stoltz carries over from "Some Kind of Wonderful", the second last-minute addition to the romance chain, and I'm back on the plan tomorrow. OK, maybe the day after.
Meanwhile, over on Turner Classic Movies, Tom Drake links from "The Sandpiper" to tomorrow's first film, can you fill in the other links? Answers below.
MONDAY, FEBRUARY 10 on TCM (31 Days of Oscar, Day 10)
7:45 am "Raintree County" (1957) with _____________ linking to:
10:45 am "Magnificent Obsession" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
12:45 pm "The Front Page" (1931) with _____________ linking to:
2:30 pm "A Star Is Born" (1937) with _____________ linking to:
4:30 pm "One Foot in Heaven" (1947) with _____________ linking to:
6:30 pm "Our Town" (1940) with _____________ linking to:
8:00 pm "Stagecoach" (1939) with _____________ linking to:
9:45 pm "True Grit" (1969) with _____________ linking to:
12:00 am "Network" (1976) with _____________ linking to:
2:15 am "Executive Suite" (1954) with _____________ linking to:
4:15 am "The Strange Love of Martha Ivers" (1946)
I've seen only 2 of these: "Network", of course, and I think they made us watch "Stagecoach" in film school, I'm going to count that, even though it was a long time ago. It's a good day for films, it's just that some of these are the original films, and I've only seen the remakes of "The Front Page", "A Star Is Born" and "True Grit", so I can't count that. That brings me up to 37 seen out of 115, and I'm down to 32.1%
THE PLOT: An aspiring singer sacrifices her own singing career to write hit songs that launch the careers of other singers. The film follows her life from her first break, through the pain of rejection from the industry and a bad marriage, to her final triumph.
AFTER: We'll also find out shortly if Martin Scorcese wins his second Oscar for Best Director, so it might be very appropriate that I'm watching "Grace of My Heart" today. Scorcese didn't direct this one, but he's listed as the executive producer. If he doesn't win, will the award could go to Tarantino or Sam Mendes? We'll just all have to wait and see.
This film is not a biopic of a real person, but does play out a lot like a roman à clef, which is a type of fiction where they just change the names of everyone so the storyteller can't get sued, but everyone tries to figure out who each fictional character is supposed to represent. The best candidate for the Edna Buxton/Denise Waverly character is probably Carole King, who wanted to be a singer but got similarly sidetracked into songwriting at the Brill Building, where she wrote songs like "One Fine Day", "Up on the Roof", "I'm Into Something Good" and "(You Make Me Feel Like a) Natural Woman", all songs recorded and made famous by other singers and groups. Her songwriting and marital partner was Gerry Goffin, just as Denise works with and marries Howard Cazsatt, and they worked well together but found they couldn't maintain the combination of working and personal relationship, which is tough in any industry, from filmmaking to running a restaurant.
The record producer she works with could easily be a thinly-veiled Phil Spector - someone who produced girl groups once he had the right material for them, despite claiming a year or so before that girl groups were on their way out, and no longer viable. It's funny how record executives also said that guitar groups were passé in 1964, only to have the Beatles prove them very wrong - and I just read an article about what's going on in country music right now, where radio stations seem to have an unwritten rule that they can't play two songs by female artists in a row, which is a de facto form of sexual discrimination. It shouldn't be a radio station's job to determine what songs they should play, in a perfect world they should just play everything new and let the fans decide what they like and buy, but as we all know, it's not a perfect world and a cadre of radio program directors can collectively block whatever songs or groups they want. Record sales are also a factor, of course - or I guess now it's "download sales" - but how can people find out what new songs they'd like to buy if they don't hear them on the radio? Ideally, record sales and airplay should work hand-in-hand, that's why both are important to determining chart positions.
Anyway, after Denise leaves NYC and heads out to the West Coast, that's when the fiction starts to divert from the real 1960's music history - Carole King did move to L.A., but she then started hanging out with James Taylor and Joni Mitchell, and the fictional Denise forms a working and personal relationship with Jay Phillips, the lead creative force behind a surf-rock group called the Riptides, and this could only be a stand-in for Brian Wilson, given this particular level of obsessive creative control and drug-related psychosis bordering on mental illness. Again, this character is ultimately a pastiche, because his story diverges from Wilson's in many ways, but come on. Brian never married someone with their own music career, but isolating himself from society by never leaving the house, falling under the influence of several lifestyle "gurus", who else could this possibly represent? Having previously seem movies like "Love & Mercy", "The Wrecking Crew" and "The Beach Boys: Making Pet Sounds" came in very handy here.
Similarly, the female pop singer Denise writes for who's got a secret relationship with a woman could easily be Dusty Springfield, or a mash-up of Springfield and Lesley Gore. The music credits also read like a who's who of great songwriters, from Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach to Carole Bayer Sager and even Gerry Goffin himself. The songs are collectively almost good enough to make up for the obvious vocal dubbing (and/or lip synching) done for the lead actress. I wish I could have seen more of the Williams Brothers, who sang with tight harmonies, akin to the Everly Brothers - apparently they're the nephews of Andy Williams, I personally thought that one of the songs they performed, "Love Doesn't Ever Fail Us", was a stand-out but most people seem to prefer "God Give Me Strength", which was just all right to me. To each his own, I guess.
Anyway, I'm glad I re-worked my whole chain to find a slot for this one on short notice - I think it really fit the February brief in the end, following one woman through her many relationships during her songwriting career, and I enjoyed it better than some of the more obvious choices for the romance chain. Plus with TCM running "A Star Is Born" twice this weekend, I feel like we're (sort of) on the same page again - this one bears some small resemblance to the other two versions of the film, the Streisand/Kristofferson remake and also the Lady Gaga/Bradley Cooper one. That's one week down, and just five more to go....I'm gradually building up to more romantic fare, which is exactly where I think I should be in early February.
Just one NITPICK POINT, when Denise borrows the headphones of a woman in the coffee shop to hear her song playing on the radio for the first time - how did she KNOW in advance what song the woman is listening to, and why do the headphones look like current ear-buds, with a very thin white cord? I thought that headphones back in the late 1950's were very large, with thick cords, and looked like earmuffs, and that the very small ones didn't come along until the 1990's. Just sayin'.
Also starring Illeana Douglas (last seen in "Factory Girl"), Matt Dillon (last seen in "Going in Style"), John Turturro (last seen in "Hands of Stone"), Patsy Kensit (last seen in "The Great Gatsby"), Bruce Davison (last seen in "Breach"), Jennifer Leigh Warren, Bridget Fonda (last seen in "It Could Happen to You"), David Clennon (last seen in "Vacation"), Lucinda Jenney (last seen in "Practical Magic"), Christina Pickles (last seen in "Legends of the Fall"), Richard Schiff (last seen in "Kill the Messenger"), Drena De Niro (also last seen in "Hands of Stone"), with cameos from Chris Isaak (last seen in "That Thing You Do!"), Jill Sobule, J. Mascis, Shawn Colvin, China Kantner and the voice of Peter Fonda (last seen in "The Most Hated Woman in America").
RATING: 6 out of 10 temporary receptionists
ANSWERS: The missing TCM "360 Degrees of Oscar" links are Agnes Moorehead, Mae Clarke, Adolphe Menjou, Fredric March, Martha Scott, Thomas Mitchell, John Wayne, Robert Duvall, William Holden, Barbara Stanwyck.
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