• SPECIAL • The 91st Academy Awards

This Sunday, February 24, 2019, ABC will broadcast live the 91st Academy Awards.

I watched the Oscar ceremonies from 1983 (honoring 1982 film achievements), at which time I was 11 going on 12, and continued doing so through 2015 (honoring 2014 film achievements), at which time I was 43 going on 44. So, I was at it a long time.

I became tired. I also lost a lot of interest in films. They haven’t been as good as the ones I grew up with. I also felt like I may have lost touch. Some of the people we are told are our stars—well, I don’t see why. Back in the 1970s, there was an old Hollywood star who looked at the actors and actresses who had arrived or were coming up. I don’t remember if he or she named anyone specific. The old Hollywood star had an observation which has stayed in my memory.

“They look like my neighbors!”

That is a feeling I get with a good number of today’s supposed stars.

I anticipate, on Sunday night, two actresses I do like will win Oscars: Glenn Close, with her seventh nomination for performance in Björn Runge’s The Wife, as Best Actress; Regina King, with her first nomination, for her performance in Barry Jenkins’s If Beale Street Could Talk, as Best Supporting Actress. (The above photo, which included several other actresses, was edited and comes from Hollywood Reporter.)

Close was first nominated for the year, and for a film, when I first started watching the Academy Awards. That was 1982 and The World According to Garp. She had five of her seven nominations in that decade alone: 1983’s The Big Chill and 1984’s The Normal, each time in the supporting category and, moved up to lead, in 1987’s Fatal Attraction and 1988’s Dangerous Liaisons. (Close was nominated as well for 2011’s Albert Nobbs.) And if she wins, Close will become the 25th person to have won the Triple Crown of Acting: Oscar, Tony, and Emmy. This has been a trend this decade with the likes of Frances McDormand, Jessica Lange and, last year, Glenda Jackson having complete the trio.

For King, she has won three Emmys over the last four consecutive years—two for ABC’s American Crime followed by Netflix’s Seven Seconds. So, the television academy really digs King. I understand. Her performances are honest and humane.

If these two actresses end up winning, I may tune in in time to catch those category presentations. But, in the meantime, I would like to avoid a ceremony where more neoliberal Hollywood elites suck up precious air time basically stating that the problems with the U.S. come only from the fact that Donald Trump is its president. Oscar has a long history of controversial and political speeches. I don’t actually mind that. I’m just not interested in neoliberal Democrats preaching to the choir while not sincerely expressing concern for people who are living paycheck-to-paycheck (if they didn’t, they could go see more of the stars’ movies), are drowning from debt of health insurance or no health insurance and the need Medicare for All, as well as the continuation of more wars. But, of course, they’re not expressing concern for those issues.


In the meantime, as I did with last year’s Oscar-related thread (• SPECIAL • Oscar Weekend), here are some video clips of films and performances—actually tied in with anniversaries—honored from the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Science in the distant past:

50 Years Ago

In the Best Actress contest for 1968, a tie result: Katharine Hepburn, with the third of her four Oscars, for her performance in Anthony Harvey’s The Lion in Winter; and, making her big-screen debut, a 26-year-old Barbra Streisand in William Wyler’s Funny Girl.

30 Years Ago

For the year 1988, Rain Man captured Best Picture, Director (Barry Levinson), Actor (Dustin Hoffman, with the second of his two Oscars), and Original Screenplay (Barry Morrow and Ronald Bass).

25 Years Ago

Steven Spielberg, who has two Oscars for Best Director, won his first for the Best Picture of 1993: Schinder’s List. (He repeated, five years later, for Saving Private Ryan.) Schindler’s List was the first film to win the top prize from all four main film groups: National Board of Review, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, New York Film Critics Circle, and National Society of Film Critics. At the Academy Awards, it won seven, including those already mentioned as well as Best Adapted Screenplay (Steven Zaillian).

20 Years Ago

The winner of the 1998 Oscar for Best Supporting Actress was Judi Dench in John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love. It won seven statues, also including Best Picture, Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), and Best Original Screenplay (Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard). Dench, who received her first nomination at age 63 for Best Actress of 1997 in Mrs. Brown, has since been nominated seven times. The number eight springs to mind because that is how many minutes she appears on screen in her Academy Award winning performance.

10 Years Ago

More than three decades after Peter Finch was posthumously awarded 1976’s Best Actor in Sidney Lumet’s Network, Heath Ledger, who died at age 28 on January 22, 2008, won the Best Supporting Actor Oscar for 2008 as The Joker in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight.




If any readers of Progressives Chat feel like posting in the comments a scene from a motion picture he or she appreciates—and it doesn’t have to be from one that received Academy Awards recognition—I invite readers to do so.