In Contention

Tag: Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?

  • TCM’s ‘Summer Under the Stars’ posters

    Brad Brevet over at Rope of Silicon points me today over to the Turner Classic Movies website, which, in preparation for August’s mega “Summer Under the Stars” program, has released a modest series of redesigned posters for a few of the classic films set to be screened.  The “Magnificent Seven” and “Grapes of Wrath” posters are, of course, exquisite, but I was taken by the arresting simplicity of this one for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”:

    Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

    Speaking of Stanley Kramer’s film, I finally got around to Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” last week, maybe 100 pages in so far.  It’s a look at a pivotal time in American film history through the lens of 1967’s five Best Picture nominees (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “Doctor Dolittle,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “The Graduate”), and I can’t put the damn thing down.  It’s expertly rendered journalism that reads like a novel and every chance I get, I’ve been recommending it to film enthusiasts.  So it only makes sense I bring it up here.  Seek it out.

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 ‘right actor, wrong film’ Oscars

    As we head into the thick of awards season, one of the biggest “will-they-won’t-they” questions about this year’s Academy Awards concerns one of their most favored sons, Clint Eastwood. Specifically: despite wildly polarized responses to the film, and a widespread perception that he has already been amply rewarded in other categories, can Eastwood ride the wave of sentiment to a first acting victory for “Gran Torino?”

    That sneaky National Board of Review award last week suggests it’s still very much a possibility, whether or not people believe that it’s a performance for the ages — and, more to the point, whether or not it ranks with the best of Eastwood’s own onscreen work.

    It’s no secret that, in the acting races, the Academy frequently bases their vote less on the performance at hand than the actor delivering it — one can point to any number of Oscar victories determined less by merit than by personal affection for an already rewarded star (let’s say Michael Caine in “The Cider House Rules”) or industry guilt over an under-rewarded one (most recently, Alan Arkin in “Little Miss Sunshine”).

    Meanwhile, recent victories by the likes of Russell Crowe and Cate Blanchett point to the familiar “deferred-Oscar” syndrome, where an actor widely believed to have been snubbed in the recent past is hastily handed a statuette as a kind of cumulative acknowledgment of their recent strong work, frequently for a performance that doesn’t represent any particular breakthrough. (Kate Winslet might be vying for one of those this year.)

    All are variations of the oft-lamented “right actor, wrong film” Oscars that are peppered throughout Academy history — a solution generally deemed more credible (though I’m not sure why) than the honorary “quick, before they die” lifetime achievement gongs doled out to the likes of Peter O’Toole and Kirk Douglas, actors who continually slip through the cracks in Oscar voting.

    Age isn’t always the determining factor, though.  The Academy has shown in recent years by passing over Lauren Bacall and Ruby Dee — both of whom would have been exemplary “right actor, wrong film” honorees — they’re not always in a sentimental mood.  As the following list shows, reasons for rewarding actors for lesser work are many and varied: genre bias on the Academy’s part, mainstream emergence on the actor’s, or simply the voters’ collective nostalgia for a familiar face at the podium.

    The one thing all these names have in common is that they’re distinguished, even great actors who deserve to have “Academy Award winner” forever attached to their monikers — just not necessarily for that performance. Will Clint Eastwood be the latest name to join their ranks? The jury is out.

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