Dec 14

The Oscars

THE OSCARS
 
 
The Academy Awards  (the official title was rebranded as The Oscars in 2013) is an annual American awards ceremony honoring cinematic achievements in the film industry.  The various category winners are awarded a copy of a statuette, officially the Academy Award of Merit, that is better known by its nickname Oscar.  The awards, first presented in 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, are overseen by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).  The Academy Awards are widely considered to be the most prestigious cinema awards ceremony in the world.   (More from Wikipedia)
 
See Also:    Academy Awards  
 
Sadly, Rosemary Clooney is mostly remembered today not so much for her formidable powers as a performer, but rather for the members of her extended family – and also for the long-running PBS series This Old House that was named after her 1954 hit song.  The eldest son from her marriage to Puerto-Rico–born movie star José Ferrer – the first Hispanic to win an Academy Award – is another movie and television star, Miguel Ferrer.  Her nephew George Clooney is one of the biggest movie stars of our time and has two Oscars of his own. 
 
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In the 1978 film, The Buddy Holly Story, Gary Busey stars as Buddy Holly in an Oscar-nominated performance; Busey even performs the songs himself rather than having them dubbed in, as is the usual custom.  Gary Busey was previously in a rock band called Carp; I have a copy of their debut self-titled album, Carp that was released on Epic Records in 1969. 

 

(June 2013/1)
 
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Apropos of this discussion, Julianne Moore won the Academy Award for Best Actress for her portrayal of a real-life woman with early-onset Alzheimer’s in the film Still Alice.  Her acceptance speech was one of the highlights of the telecast of the Oscars this month; in part she said:  “I’m so happy – I’m thrilled actually that we were able to hopefully shine a light on Alzheimer’s disease.  So many people with this disease feel isolated and marginalized, and one of the wonderful things about movies is it makes us feel seen and not alone.  And people with Alzheimer’s deserve to be seen, so that we can find a cure.” 

 

(February 2015)

 

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Dreamgirls created drama at the Oscars that year to match what was being portrayed on the screen.  Despite not being nominated for Best Director or Best Picture (or any nominations for Best Actor or Best Actress either, for that matter), Dreamgirls had the most Academy Award nominations in 2007 with eight – a first at the Academy Awards.  In a rare feat for an actor in a debut role, Jennifer Hudson was named Best Supporting Actress, but Eddie Murphy’s loss to Alan Arkin (for his role in the quirky and delightful comedy Little Miss Sunshine) as Best Supporting Actor was regarded as an upset.  Three of the songs from Dreamgirls were nominated for Best Song, but they also lost out to the Melissa Etheridge song “I Need to Wake Up” from the Al Gore documentary film, An Inconvenient Truth.  

 

It was a different story at the Golden Globes, where both Jennifer Hudson and Eddie Murphy won in their categories, and Dreamgirls took the award for Best Picture – Comedy or Musical; Beyoncé Knowles was also nominated for Best Actress in a Comedy or Musical.  

 

If you ask me, the insistence on having only one category of film or performer is a major flaw at the Academy Awards, and the recent decision to multiply the nominations for Best Picture to 10 or 12 only highlights the problem.  The Golden Globes is a more enjoyable television experience than the Oscars nearly every year; each Golden Globe actually means something, in contrast to the parade of technical awards that almost no one cares about that composes the middle two-thirds of the Academy Awards show. 

 

(April 2015/1)

 

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Robert Tepper, Modern Madness – Sylvester Stallone selected the title song from Robert Tepper’s debut album No Easy Way Out, “No Easy Way Out” for the soundtrack of the 1985 film Rocky IV.  This was the most successful of the Rocky films and, in fact, was the biggest selling sports movie of all time until overtaken by The Blind Side (2009), the hit movie that gave Sandra Bullock her Oscar.   
 
(December 2015)
 
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The above headline took my breath away when I first noticed it a few months ago on NBCNews.com:  “This Oscar Winner Has the Most Supportive Wife Ever”.  The wife in question is Holly Ramos, one of my Facebook friends as a result of this series of Under Appreciated Rock Band posts; and she was the bandleader in the UARB with the shortest name (Fur) coming at the end of the longest post (June 2013).  
 
Holly Ramos had tipped off her Facebook friends that her husband Tom Cross was up for an Oscar for Film Editing, and I had my eyes open during the 2015 Oscar ceremonies.  It might be my imagination, but I think I remember a flash of a few seconds toward that part of the crowd when I saw Holly reacting to the announcement of the winner.  In his acceptance speech, Tom Cross thanked, among others, his wife Holly Ramos and their two children. 
 
These great quotes are given in the piece on NBCNews.com, as taken from comments Holly Ramos had written on her blog before the Oscars that year:  “‘This is being called the whitest Oscars ever.  Tom Cross is half Asian,’ she wrote.  ‘Represent, Tom Cross, represent!!’ 
 
“She also called her husband, ‘genuinely humble, gracious, kind and savvy’. 
 
“‘Tom is so hard working and focused,’ Ramos wrote.  ‘He worked in a video store in High School and knew he wanted to work in film his whole life.  He has never done anything else.’” 
 
The Oscar for Film Editing was awarded to Tom Cross for his work in Whiplash; J. K. Simmons won an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor in this film, where he played a sadistic instructor at a prestigious music conservatory.  Cross has been nominated numerous times for many different awards for his film editing work, including a second nomination for an Oscar for La La Land (2016).  Cross speaks of the technical aspects of his work on Whiplash (again as quoted on NBCNews.com):  “‘The sync [to the music] was close but not perfect,’ Cross said.  ‘We couldn’t alter the soundtrack and couldn’t slow or speed up the music; that would have been immediately obvious.  I needed to line the pictures up, manually, for every drum hit.  The most precise way was with jump cuts and to take out frames.  And this had to be imperceptible.’” 
 
(Year 9 Review)
 
Last edited: March 22, 2021