Today, we take it for granted that the Oscars will always be on television in February or March of every year. We know that they will be broadcast on ABC on Sunday night. We also know that there’s a good chance that, every year, some clueless TV exec will try to do something to ruin our annual tradition. Whether it’s the idea of introducing an award for Best Popular Film or maybe suggesting that some awards should be given off camera, we know better than to trust ABC.
However, for the first 25 years of the Academy’s existence, the Oscars were not televised. In fact, for a while, they weren’t even broadcast on the radio because it was assumed that no one outside of Hollywood cared about them. It really wasn’t until the mid-30s that the Oscars became an annual ritual for so many Americans. At first, people listened to the ceremony on the radio and then eventually, the ceremony came to television.
The first Oscar telecast was on March 19th, 1953. The ceremony was split between two locations, Hollywood and New York. Bob Hope hosted in Hollywood while Conrad Nagel and Fredric March hosted in New York. The ceremony didn’t start until 10:30 pm and it ran for two hours and 20 minutes. Why the late start? Several of the nominees were also appearing in Broadway shows and they had to finish their nightly performances before they could attend the ceremony.
As for why this ceremony was telecast — well, as always, it all comes down to money. The Academy needed the money that came from selling the broadcast rights to NBC. (NBC, to their credit, did not demand an award for Best Popular Film.) The show was such a ratings success that it led to the annual tradition that we all know and love today.
What won at the first televised ceremony? The Greatest Show On Earth won Best Picture while John Ford took home Best Director (for The Quiet Man) and Gary Cooper was named Best Actor for High Noon. Shirley Booth was named Best Actress for Come Back, Little Sheba. The supporting awards went to Anthony Quinn for Viva Zapata! and Gloria Grahame for The Bad and the Beautiful.
Here is the opening of the very first televised Oscar ceremony. As you can tell, it was quite a bit different from what we’re used to today!
What’ve we got this week? A one-shot, a first issue, the start of a new story arc, and the prelude to the prelude to a new story arc. It’s about as mixed a bag as it sounds, to be honest, but every one of these books has at least something going for it, and you can’t always say that. And so, with that in mind —
Never one to pass on the chance to squeeze as much blood from a rock as they can (and then some), Marvel is cashing in on the resurgent popularity of the Hulk with a series of one-offs from their main series, the first of which is The Immortal Hulk : Great Power #1, which sees Bruce Banner’s gamma powers temporarily take up residence in Peter Parker — and if one guest star’s not enough for you, the entirety of the Fantastic Four is on…
4 Shots From 4 Films is just what it says it is, 4 shots from 4 of our favorite films. As opposed to the reviews and recaps that we usually post, 4 Shots From 4 Films lets the visuals do the talking!
Today’s edition of 4 Shots from 4 Films is dedicated to four of the best films that I’ve ever seen about Hollywood! I mean, it is Oscar Sunday after all!
4 Shots From 4 Films About Hollywood
The Bad and the Beautiful (1952, dir by Vincente Minnelli)
The Stunt Man (1980, dir by Richard Rush)
Mulholland Drive (2000, dir by David Lynch)
Once Upon A Time In Hollywood (2019, dir by Quentin Tarantino)
Welcome, one and all, to Oscar Sunday on the Shattered Lens!
Oscar Sunday is an official holiday at the Shattered Lens Bunker and the humans who work here have got a lot planned for today! There’s going to be a potluck dinner. There’s going to be a horseshoe tournament out back. The flame-haired one even says that she’s going to try to hire a clown to come keep everyone entertained during the commercial breaks!
Maybe a clown like this one:
As for what you’ll be seeing on this site during today’s holiday, the TSL humans have got a lot planned for today! I think there might be some reviews and maybe some Oscar trivia. Whenever the ceremony ends, someone will probably post the end results so you can see how much money you made off of your Oscar predictions. It should be fun so enjoy the day and don’t forget to watch the Oscars tonight!
“The story here is the miracle that we ever found that track. I was convinced – and I think Mick was – that it was definitely a reggae song. And we did it in 38 takes – ‘Start me up. Yeah, man, cool. You know, you know, Jah Rastafari.’ And it didn’t make it. And somewhere in the middle of a break, just to break the tension, Charlie and I hit the rock and roll version. And right after that we went straight back to reggae. And we forgot totally about this one little burst in the middle, until about five years later when somebody sifted all the way through these reggae takes. After doing about 70 takes of ‘Start Me Up’ he found that one in the middle. It was just buried in there. Suddenly I had it. Nobody remembered cutting it. But we leapt on it again. We did a few overdubs on it, and it was like a gift, you know? One of the great luxuries of The Stones is we have an enormous, great big can of stuff. I mean what anybody hears is just the tip of an iceberg, you know. And down there is vaults of stuff. But you have to have the patience and the time to actually sift through it.”
— Keith Richards on Start Me Up
Since today is Oscar Sunday, let’s start the day with a video that was directed by an Oscar winner.
Hal Ashby got his start as an editor and a favorite collaborator of director Norman Jewison. Ashby won his only Oscar for editing the 1967 best picture winner, In the Heat of the Night. Ashby then went on to become a director himself and, in that role, he was responsible for some of the most important films of the 1970s. Check out this list of credits: Harold and Maude, The Last Detail, Shampoo, Bound for Glory, Coming Home, Being There, and Let’s Spend the Night Together. All of these films were directed by Hal Ashby.
Let’s Spend The Night Together was a Rolling Stones concert film and I imagine that his work on that film is probably what led to Ashby directing this music video. Like a lot of the great 70s directors, his career struggled as people like Don Simpson took over Hollywood and the industry’s focus shifted away from empowering directors to keeping studio executives happy. While Ashby found himself practically unemployable in Hollywood, he was still able to make a living with work like this video and directing television episodes.
Hal Ashby died in 1988 of pancreatic cancer. Bruce Dern famously said that the way Ashby was treated in Hollywood was the “most disgusting thing” that he had ever seen over the course of his long career. Fortunately, movies are forever and Ashby’s work has since been rediscovered and continues to influence aspiring filmmakers all over. Richard Linklater is a huge fan and paid homage to Ashby with Last Flag Flying.
The Black Action Group (B.A.G.) has robbed a Mafia bookmaking operation. The Mafia, led by used car dealer Russ Capelli (Martin Landau, in his slumming it years), is less concerned with the money as they are with the fact that one of the militants, a Vietnam vet named Scott Gunn (Herbert Jefferson, Jr.), has also stolen a set of ledgers that could reveal every detail of their organization. Capelli sends the psychotic Ray Kriley (Bruce Glover, father of Crispin) on a mission to track down Scott and kill him.
What the Mafia didn’t count on is that Scott’s older brother, Gunn (Jim Brown), is the owner of Los Angeles’s hottest nightclub. When Scott approaches his brother, Gun tells him that he doesn’t care about the B.A.G. or any of their politics. Still, Gunn allows Scott to stash the ledgers at his club and to hide out at his place. When Scott still ends up getting murdered by Kriley, Gunn sets out to get revenge.
For the most part, Black Gunn is a standard blaxploitation movie with all of the usual elements, a cool nightclub, the mob, black militants,an anti-drug scene and a speech about why it’s important to not sell out to the man, and a hero played by an actor who may not have been able to show much emotion but who still radiated coolness. Not surprisingly, Jim Brown is the main attraction here and he delivers everything that his fans have come to expect from him. Blaxploitation regulars Bernie Case and Brenda Sykes also appear in the film. Casey plays the head of B.A.G. while Sykes is wasted in a one-note role as Gunn’s girlfriend. Among the villains, it’s fun to watch the glamorous Luciana Paluzzi plays a gangster’s niece and Bruce Glover is just weird enough to make Kriley interesting. Though Martin Landau would end his career with a deserved reputation for being one of America’s greatest character actors, he spent most of the 70s sleepwalking through roles in low-budget action and horror films and his performance in Black Gunn is no different. Having Capelli be both a car salesman and a gangster is a nice touch but otherwise, he’s just not that interesting of a character and Landau is only present to get a paycheck.
Black Gunn has some slow spots but the final shoot-out between the militants and the gangsters is exciting and so brutal that it will be probably take even the most jaded blaxploitation fan by surprise. Black Gunn is hardly a classic but, like its hero, it gets the job done.
There’s a lot of film bloggers out there who have a natural aversion to anything that Jason Reitman is associated with.
And listen, I understand. The fact of the matter is that Jason Reitman probably does owe a lot of his success to the fact that people in the industry know and like his father. And it’s also true that Jason Reitman does tend to specializes in making films that you’re either going to love or you’re going to hate. His films mix drama and comedy and sentiment and snark and sometimes, his refusal to come down firmly on the side of either one can feel like a bit of a cop out. There’s a quirkiness to many of his films and sometimes, it can come across as being a bit cutesy. And I’ll even go as far as to agree with those who say that it’s been a while since Reitman’s made a really good film. The most common complaint I hear about Reitman is that his first four films (Thank You For Smoking, Juno, Up In The Air, and Young Adult) were okay and then he let his good reviews go to his head. Of course, some people — okay, a lot of people — will tell you that, of those four films, Juno’s overrated.
I get all of that and I actually agree with some of those points. Reitman is a director who sometimes seems to have lost his way after his early successes. I think the closest that Reitman’s come to giving us a good film post-Young Adult was with Tully and even then, that felt more like a Diablo Cody film than a Jason Reitman film.
But, with all of that in mind, I still really like Jason Reitman’s early films and I think that he still has the potential to once again be an important and interesting filmmaker. Thank You For Smoking and Juno are better than many give them credit for being. Charlize Theron has never been better than she was in Young Adult. Finally, this morning, I rewatched 2009’s Up In The Air for the first time in a long time and I was pleasantly surprised to see how well it holds up.
Up In The Air features George Clooney and Anna Kendrick. Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, an obsessive traveler who boats about living a life without commitment. Ryan works for a company that hires him out to fire people. If your boss is too much of a pussy to tell you that you’ve been terminated to your face, he hires Ryan to do it for him. Ryan specializes in trying to convince people that being fired is not a tragedy but an opportunity for a new beginning. Ryan also has a side gig as a motivational speaker. His speeches are largely about avoiding commitment and personal baggage.
Anna Kendrick plays Natalie Keener. Natalie works for the same company as Ryan but, at the age of 23 and just out of college, she’s a lot less confident when it comes to destroying people’s livelihoods. (“I’ve worked here for 17 years and I’m being fired by a 7th grader,” is one person’s response to being terminated by Natalie.) Natalie has come up with a new plan where all firings will be done via Skype. That way, the person doing the firing will never have to leave their office and won’t have to deal with the people they’ve fired one-on-one. Ryan says he considers this proposal to be inhumane but mostly, he’s just worried that he’ll lose his traveling privileges if Natalie’s plan is instituted.
Ryan and Natalie travel the country. Ryan teaches Natalie how to fire people and Natalie discovers that it’s not as easy to destroy someone’s life as she thought. Everywhere they go, they deal with people who are facing economic uncertainty. Ryan meets another frequent flyer, Alex (Vera Farmiga) and, after Alex reveals that she’s even less interested in commitment than Ryan, they begin an affair. Ryan starts to fall in love with Alex and even invited her to attend his sister’s wedding with him. However, Alex has a secret of her own.
One thing that I really like about Up in the Air is that Ryan and Natalie never end up sleeping together. I remember, when I first saw the movie, I was convinced that it was going to happen. After all, Ryan is handsome and charming and Natalie is attractive and, after her boyfriend dumps her, vulnerable. I was cringing at the knowledge that there would eventually be some contrived scene where Natalie and Ryan end up getting drunk and then end up waking up in bed together and the end result would be Natalie going from being a well-rounded, multi-dimensional character to just being a plot device in Ryan’s journey to becoming a better man. Well, there is a scene where Natalie and Ryan get drunk at the same time but it doesn’t lead to Natalie and Ryan becoming lovers and I respected Up in the Air for having enough respect for its characters to not do the convenient thing.
The other thing I liked about Up In The Air is that it’s one of the few films to make proper use of George Clooney’s deceptively smooth screen presence. We all know that Clooney is handsome and charming but what makes him an appealing actor is that there’s always been hints that there’s a lot dorkiness and insecurity hiding underneath the suave facade. Ryan may seem like he’s got it all together but, as the film progresses, you come to realize that he’s a lot more insecure and neurotic than he lets on. All of his snarky comments have more to do with his own fear of failure than anything else. Much as how the real life Clooney still sometimes seems as if he hasn’t fully gotten over being dismissed as just being another pretty face in the early days of his career, Ryan has never gotten over his dysfunctional childhood. Instead of taking a risk on love, he instead obsesses on getting frequent flyer miles. (At one point, Sam Elliott pops up out of nowhere and, in a scene that you could really only expect to find in a Jason Reitman film, gives Ryan a pep talk.) There’s a sadness to Ryan, one that seems to come from deep inside of his soul. Clooney does an excellent job of bringing that sadness to the surface while still giving a likable and compelling performance.
Up In The Air was released at a time when America was stuck in what seemed like a never-ending recession. Despite the fact that the news media and the politicians were insisting that things were on the verge of getting better (or, at the very least, boasting that unemployed actors were no longer “job-locked,” whatever the Hell that meant), many people believed that their best days were officially behind them. A lot of the contemporary reviews of the film focused on what it had to say about living in a time of economic uncertainty. That was ten years ago and we’re now living in a strong economy but, even so, Up In The Air still resonates. Reitman includes scenes in which people talk about what it was like to be fired. The majority of these people were not actors but were instead people recruited from the local unemployment office and they were speaking about their own experiences. The pain and resentment on their faces and in their voices is so palpable that it’s actually a bit jarring when J.K. Simmons and Zach Galifianakis show up, playing employees who are “terminated” by Ryan. I guess I should admit that I’ve never actually been fired from a job but, after watching Up In The Air, it’s not something that I would ever want to experience.
Up In The Air holds up well. Reitman’s direction is quirky but effective and he does a good job of mixing comedy in with the drama. (Wisely, whenever he has to make a choice, he emphasizes the drama over the comedy, instead of trying to maintain some sort of mythical 50/50 balance between them.) This film features one of George Clooney’s best performances and he has a really likable chemistry with Vera Farmiga. Anna Kendrick also does a great job with a character who could have become a stereotype in less skilled hands. Finally, along with Juno and The Gift, this film is one of the reasons why I always have a hard time watching Jason Bateman in any film or show where he’s cast as hero. Bateman plays Ryan’s boss and the character is so smarmy (and Bateman does such a good job of playing him) that he’ll make your skin crawl.
It’s been a while since Up In The Air was first released and Jason Reitman’s career has had its ups and downs. Still, regardless of whatever film Reitman makes next, Up In The Air remains a classic of the aughts.
Through the Shattered Lens 