Oscar’s People It’s Showtime In The Capital Of Big Shows, And Here’s A Look At Some Of The Players
English accent
The decidedly English accent to this year’s Academy Award nominees for best actress emphasizes Hollywood’s neglect of female stars.
Not to suggest the four British women in the race aren’t worthy, but why is there only one American among the nominees? The answer, it seems, is that English producers can make modestly budgeted films that offer strong roles for actresses, while Hollywood concentrates on expensive movies of the male-oriented action category.
A list of the 20 most in-demand U.S. stars would contain few actresses.
“It shows that people think we (British) can do it,” nominee Judi Dench says. Yet fellow nominee Kate Winslet cautioned, “I don’t think it’s got anything to do with (the notion) that English actors are better; I’ve never ever thought that for a minute.
“These (nominated) actresses are lucky enough to be in fulfilling roles that they have played to the best of their abilities. And let’s face it: There aren’t that many great roles for women these days.”
Fossil fuel
If the movie business is supposedly slanted toward youth, why is the average age of the nominees for this year’s Academy Award for best actor nearly 55 years?
The numbers: Robert Duvall, 67; Jack Nicholson, 60; Dustin Hoffman, 60 and Peter Fonda, 59. Only Matt Damon, at 27, is anywhere near youthful.
What all this seems to mean is that more mature actors are getting the meatier roles, while the young stars are largely limited to action and special effects films, which play well to younger audiences but not necessarily to Academy voters.
His night to boogie?
The history of Academy Awards for supporting actor contains tales of comebacks for onetime stars who have suffered career lulls. Burt Reynolds is this year’s candidate for Comeback Kid.
James Dunn had been a star of romantic comedies in the 1930s, then changing styles and booze made him unwanted. He regained prominence with the 1945 Oscar for the alcoholic father in “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn.”
Frank Sinatra’s career began to fizzle in the late ‘40s, but the 1953 award for the doomed Maggio in “From Here to Eternity” made him bigger than ever.
Don Ameche had been out of films for 30 years when he scored with “Cocoon” in 1985 and was suddenly in demand.
Reynolds appears to be the favored recipient of such good luck .
The 62-year-old actor had reigned as a top star until bad movies and worse publicity dimmed his appeal.
After his TV series, “Evening Shade,” was canceled, he began taking supporting roles. One of them gave him pause.
“I turned it down eight times,” Reynolds says of “Boogie Nights,” the story of a San Fernando Valley porno movie operation in the 1970s. He was offered the role of Jack Horner, a director who becomes the surrogate father for a ragtag band of actors and crew.
She’s a survivor
Gloria Stuart remembers when the Academy Awards were presented in a hotel ballroom before a few hundred members of the movie community. That was 60 years ago.
She was a blond beauty who starred in B pictures as well as some important ones like “The Invisible Man,” “Gold Diggers of 1935,” “The Three Musketeers” and two Shirley Temple movies. But by the mid-1940s she had retired.
Stuart might have remained a footnote in Hollywood history except that James Cameron sent for her in 1996 when he was preparing to film an epic about the Titanic.
He chose her for the role of Rose Calvert, the 101-year-old survivor of the ocean disaster, the role Kate Winslet plays as a young woman.
Cameron wanted an actress who was “still viable, not alcoholic, rheumatic or falling down,” the vigorous 87-year-old has said.
She endured hours in the makeup chair so she could look like a centenarian, and she traveled to the Atlantic location, where the wreck of the real Titanic was photographed.
Stuart quit films in 1939 because she was tired of playing “girl detective, girl reporter and Shirley Temple’s friend.”
In her later years, she took an occasional role in television, but before doing “Titanic,” she hadn’t worked in 14 years.
Their opinions are what counts
It’s one of the world’s more exclusive and powerful clubs.
The Oscar electorate now comprises 5,371 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences - the figure varies almost monthly — whose Oscar decisions can make careers, shatter egos and add millions of dollars to the profits of a winning film.
The voters are, in a sense, the cream of the motion picture business.
Who are they? John Pavlik, an academy spokesman, said members were divided into 13 branches, the largest among them actors. The other branches include directors, writers, cinematographers, producers, sound technicians, editors, executives and musicians.
Oscar nominees are automatically considered for membership in the following year. Otherwise, candidates are sponsored by two members. Generally, applicants have worked five to eight years in the movie business.
America’s hope
The lone American nominee for best actress, Helen Hunt, 34, occupies the rare position of being a star in both movies and television. She has won two Emmys for her role in the high-rated “Mad About You” and played a lead role in the 1996 hit “Twister.”
Hunt began acting at 9 in the TV series “Pioneer Woman.” She continued working in films and TV, notably as Gavin MacLeod’s daughter in “The Mary Tyler Moore Show.”
As Carol Connelly, the waitress in “As Good As It Gets,” she endures a rocky relationship with a misanthropic writer (Jack Nicholson), detesting his bigotry and rudeness, then softening as he attempts “to be a better person.”
The movie, Hunt said, “became the most delicious thing I’d ever heard of: arguably the No. 1 actor I wanted to work with and the No. 1 director (James L. Brooks) I wanted to work with.”
Battlin’ Bob Duvall
Robert Duvall may be America’s premiere actor, a rugged charmer and seeker of truth, but he’s no pussycat. Ask anyone who worked on “Tender Mercies” in Waxahachie, Texas, in 1981, and they’ll tell you about his battles with director Bruce Beresford.
“We used to just stand back and let ‘em go at it,” a crew member said. One day the embattled Australian was so irked that he walked off the set and flew home to New York. After the dust settled, Duvall carried off a best-actor Oscar for his quiet, subtle turn as a country singer on the way back from the skids.
“The Oscar was nice to get,” he says. “It’s a prestigious thing.” But the gold man with a sword and no genitalia (as his old friend Dusty Hoffman pointed out) didn’t help get financing for the film that brought his third best-actor nomination.
“Back in those days of the beginnings of ‘The Apostle,’ my agency tried to use that as leverage to get financing or studio backing or whatever in California, and it didn’t work,” he says.
The Oscar winner wagged his film project all over the country. “In California, we went to all the studios, all the smaller people out there, people in New York, all over. In Texas, we went to some oil people. You get a lot of hot air and a lot of cocktail parties. That’s what they want is the cocktail party so they can meet such-and-such. After that, it was all downhill.”
In the end, the actor anted up his own $5 million to fund the film. “But it worked out best this way because we were like a law unto ourselves. We were doing it — sink or swim — on our terms.”
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: TV coverage Billy Crystal hosts the 70th Academy Awards at 6 p.m. Monday on KXLY, Channel 4. The E! channel hosts two-hour pre-Oscar show beginning at 4 p.m. Barbara Walters interviews actors Will Smith, Kim Basinger and Burt Reynolds on ABC after the awards show.