(Let's stagger on home to the end of the least read series in Mythical Monkey history.)
Best Appearance in Movie Where the Dog Dies
I'm sure she means best appearance by an actor in a movie where the dog dies—like, say, the kid in Old Yeller or something—but I'm more interested in the dog itself, which means I get to write about my favorite movie dog of all time, "Dog" in John Wayne's Big Jake.
In case you've never seen Big Jake—and unless you're a John Wayne fan of a certain age, there's no real reason to think you would have—the Duke's Jacob McCandles has the best trained dog in history. He says "Dog!" and that means maul the bad guy with the machete, and then he says "Dog!" and that means knock the hostage off the horse before the sniper can shoot him, and sometimes he says "Dog!" and that means "heel" or "sit" or pretty much whatever else Big Jake might be thinking at the moment. Very impressive. John Wayne makes Cesar Millan look like a crazy cat lady.
Best Making Way Too Big a Deal About Playing a Gay Character
Generally speaking, gays have not fared well on the big screen. For the first fifty years of movie history, they were comic relief; in the fifty that followed, tragic figures. Perhaps in the next fifty, the movies will depict them as they are—everyday people who just happen to be attracted to the same rather than opposite sex.
Well, maybe when society itself views the matter that way.
In the meantime, to answer the question, I'm going with Tom Hanks in Philadelphia. The performance won him an Oscar but, to my mind anyway, it has not aged well. If the film had been made in, say, 1983, at a time when seemingly respectable people were still saying out loud that AIDS was a "gay problem" and thus of no concern to the "rest of us," perhaps righteous anger alone might still carry the otherwise hackneyed storyline. But by 1993, the year of Philadelphia's release, we had all pretty much agreed—at least as a matter of public policy—both that AIDS was a national problem and that gays were people, too (well, you know, as long as they didn't want to marry or serve in the military or take part in any of the many other workaday activities that heterosexuals take for granted and gays couldn't and in many places still can't). Instead what seemed at the time brave and heart-rending has been revealed as what it always was: timid and cliched.
Unfortunately, that's almost always the case when Hollywood tackles anything even remotely controversial. Mainstream movies cost so much to make that no one is willing is write a check without at least some hope that they'll get their investment back, and to make something truly controversial is to run the risk of whittling your potential audience down to the point where a profit is no longer possible. And if there's one thing Hollywood is not, it's a philanthropic enterprise. So the people in charge wait until it's clear which way the wind is blowing, and then serve up a product, like Philadelphia, that is so bland and smugly certain of itself that what you hear at the end is not applause but the audience patting itself on the back.
There's more emotional power in one AIDS quilt than in this entire movie.
Best Acting on a Boat
If you've never seen Buster Keaton in The Navigator, you're in for a real treat. Released the same year as the better-known Sherlock, Jr., I think The Navigator is the funnier movie, one of Keaton's best.
Best Acting in Sandals
I assume this doesn't mean Katharine Hepburn in a pair of high heel sandals, but instead "sword and sandals" or "Shakespeare" or "Spartacus" or anything with men in togas. Now, I'm not 100% sure what he had on his feet during the "Toga Party" sequence, but I am sure that I'd rather watch John Belushi in Animal House than Marlon Brando in Julius Caesar, Laurence Olivier in Spartacus or Russell Crowe in Gladiator.
Best Performance in a Movie Parents Liked
I can't speak for parents in general, but the people who conceived, birthed and raised me were big fans of the movies and believed that there were certain films you had to see in order to be considered literate. Thus, they introduced me not just to Disney and the usual child-friendly suspects but to the Marx Brothers, Cary Grant, Gone with the Wind and a lot of other stuff, too. The best performance in a movie my parents liked enough to make me see? Jeepers. Let's go with the aforementioned Cary Grant in His Girl Friday, one of the funniest movies he ever did and one of the few movies of its era to suggest that a woman's place is not in the kitchen but in the office, if it turns out that's the work she was born for.
That's it. We're done. Be sure to come back Sunday morning to start voting in the Favorite Classic Movie Actress Tournament.
Birth Name: Natalia Nikolaevna Zakharenko Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Song and Dance" #1 Birth Date: July 20, 1938 Birthplace: San Francisco, California Height: 5' Academy Awards: 3 nominations Signature Role: Wilma Dean Loomis (Splendor in the Grass)
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Rita Moreno
Birth Name: Rosita Dolores Alverio Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Song and Dance" #8 Birth Date: December 11, 1931 Birthplace: Humacao, Puerto Rico Height: 5' 2½" Academy Awards: 1 nomination, 1 win (supporting actress, West Side Story) Signature Role: Anita (West Side Story)
with the winner to take on the winner of
Ann-Margret
Birth Name: Ann-Margret Olsson Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Song and Dance" #4 Birth Date: April 28, 1941 Birthplace: Valsjöbyn, Jämtlands län, Sweden Height: 5' 3½" Academy Awards: 2 nominations Signature Role: Kim McAfee (Bye Bye Birdie)
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Diahann Carroll
Birth Name: Carol Diann Johnson Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "Song and Dance" #5 Birth Date: July 17, 1935 Birthplace: The Bronx, New York City, New York Academy Awards: 1 nomination Signature Role: Julia Baker ("Julia")
Notes: Natalie Wood and Rita Moreno—West Side Story, obviously.
Best Performance in a Movie That Involves Running Away From No Fewer Than Two Explosions
How many explosions were there in the first Die Hard movie—well, let's see, there was one on the roof, and one in the elevator and—well, that's two right there. So I'm going with Bruce Willis in Die Hard, which is not just a great action picture, but a great picture, period.
Best Musician Trying To Cross Over Into Acting
If singers count as musicians, it'd be either Will Smith or Frank Sinatra, and since I've already gone with Smith in an answer, let's say Sinatra in From Here To Eternity, The Man with the Golden Arm and The Manchurian Candidate.
If, on the other hand, an actual musical instrument must be played, then I'm going with a personal favorite, pianist Oscar Levant, who was hilarious in Humoresque and An American in Paris. "I'm a concert pianist. That's a pretentious way of saying I'm ... unemployed at the moment." I can dig it, Oscar. It works the same for writers, too.
Best Performance as an Aging Character Who Wants to Prove He or She's Still Got It
There are a lot of good ones to choose from—Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard, Bette Davis in All About Eve, John Wayne in The Shootist, Orson Welles in Touch of Evil, and that's just off the top of my head—but I'm going with William Holden in The Wild Bunch. As I wrote a year ago, "I don't know anybody over the age of fifty who isn't a little startled, dismayed and embarrassed to realize that the upward trajectory of the life that they so took for granted has nosed over and is now on a permanent downward spiral toward the grave. For Pike Bishop (William Holden), the aging leader of a gang of Old West desperados, it's not just that he no longer understands the world that has changed around him; it's the realization that even if he did understand it, he no longer has the energy, stamina or reflexes to do anything about it. But as Dylan Thomas pointed out, there's more than one way to grow old: you can go quietly into the night, or you can rage, rage against the dying of the light. Pike chooses to rage. And oh how he rages."
Best Performance Involving a Single Manly Tear
That's easy—the native American in the that late-1960s public service ad lamenting the casual littering of the American landscape. Really, people used to throw their trash out the car window without a second thought. This one ad did more to change attitudes than probably all the other ads and speeches on the subject combined.
And no, I have no evidence to support that. Just my personal impression.
Best Performance Where You Have to Age Citizen-Kane-Style Over Years and Years
Another easy one—Orson Welles in Citizen Kane! Sometimes they just softball it in there for you.
Birth Name: Lady Jayne Seymour Fonda Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #2 Birth Date: December 21, 1937 Birthplace: New York City, New York Height: 5' 8" Academy Awards: 7 nominations, 2 wins (actress, Klute; actress, Coming Home) Signature Role: Bree Daniels (Klute)
versus
Tuesday Weld
Birth Name: Susan Ker Weld Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #7 Birth Date: August 27, 1943 Birthplace: New York City, New York Height: 5' 4" Academy Awards: 1 nomination Signature Role: Sue Ann Stepanek (Pretty Poison)
with the winner to take on the winner of
Faye Dunaway
Birth Name: Dorothy Faye Dunaway Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #3 Birth Date: January 14, 1941 Birthplace: Bascom, Florida Height: 5' 7" Academy Awards: 3 nominations, 1 win (actress, Network) Signature Role: Bonnie Parker (Bonnie and Clyde)
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Paula Prentiss
Birth Name: Paula Ragusa Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #6 Birth Date: March 4, 1938 Birthplace: San Antonio, Texas Height: 5' 10" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Abigail Page (Man's Favorite Sport?)
Best Performance in a Quentin Tarantino Movie
In case you haven't noticed, this is actually a pretty tough category. Several actors and actresses have given career performances in Tarantino's films—Michael Madsen, Samuel L. Jackson, John Travolta, Pam Grier, Robert Forster, Uma Thurman ...
Any one of whom would be a great choice. But I'm going with Christoph Waltz as Col. Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Smart, smarmy, sinister, he might be the only actor in history who could make you sweat bullets simply by eating a strudel.
Best Performance With a Serious Disease
Oscar loves this sort of thing, but generally speaking, the Monkey doesn't. If a cartoon character's performance counted, I'd go with the two-part breast cancer episode of FX's spy spoof Archer. But that's television and we're talking movies, so I'm going with Greta Garbo in Camille. She makes dying look so beautiful and stylish, I almost wish I had tuberculosis.
Best Performance Where You Do a Lot of A-C-T-I-N-G and Arm-Waving
Meryl Streep owns this category, but I'll be honest with you—outside of her latter-day comedies, Meryl Streep's not really my cup of tea. Acting may indeed be hard, but I've always thought the best actors made it look easy. I'll take Cary Grant over Laurence Olivier any day.
I do enjoy some of the great ham actors of history—particularly John Barrymore and Wallace Beery—but among cinema's more serious-minded scenery-chewers, I'm quite fond of Kirk Douglas. And my favorite Kirk Douglas performance is that of bottom-feeder tabloid journalist Chuck Tatum in Billy Wilder's Ace in the Hole, quite possibly the most cynical movie ever made.
Best Performance Where You Just Sit There and Your Eyes Get Sad
Usually with a pop tune playing in the background—a staple of bad television. But at the risk of enraging Douglas Fairbanks, I have to say Lon Chaney, the silent era's man of a thousand faces, did more acting with his eyes than nearly anyone I can think of. Being buried under all that makeup, he had to.
He gave many great performances, including The Hunchback of Notre Dame and The Phantom of the Opera, but maybe the one that depended the most on "sad eyes" was Laugh, Clown, Laugh, the story of an aging circus performer who raises an abandoned girl as his own only to find to his horror and his shame that when she grows to young womanhood he is falling hopelessly in love with her. A brilliant performance.
Best Performance With a Lot of Nudity That Was Probably Unnecessary But Not Unwelcome
The 1970s was the era of gratuitous nudity—at least one scene casually featuring bare breasts was pretty much de rigueur back then, especially in films that aspired to hip sophistication—but looking back at it now, the whole trend seems sexist, exploitative and even a bit creepy. So I'm jumping forward two decades to 1997's Titanic, a film that grossed something like a billion dollars, won the Oscar for best picture and has completely faded from my memory except for Kate Winslet's nude scene.
Bluenosed video store owners excised the footage from VHS copies of the movie without realizing Winslet's shapely bosom was the only part of the movie worth watching. I hope they at least had the good sense to stitch all that discarded tape together into a single endless loop.
Tomorrow: explosions, cross-overs, aging, manly tears and Citizen Kane.
Birth Name: Anna Maria Louise Italiano Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #1 Birth Date: September 17, 1931 Birthplace: The Bronx, New York City, New York Height: 5' 6½" Academy Awards: 5 nominations, 1 win (actress, The Miracle Worker) Signature Role: Annie Sullivan (The Miracle Worker)
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Julie Harris
Birth Name: Julie Anne Harris Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #8 Birth Date: December 2, 1925 Birthplace: Grosse Pointe Park, Michigan Academy Awards: 1 nomination Signature Role: Eleanor "Nell" Lance (The Haunting)
with the winner to take on the winner of
Patricia Neal
Birth Name: Patricia Louise Neal Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #4 Birth Date: January 20, 1926 Birthplace: Packard, Kentucky Height: 5' 8" Academy Awards: 2 nominations, 1 win (actress, Hud) Signature Role: Alma Brown (Hud)
versus
Geraldine Page
Birth Name: Geraldine Sue Page Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "All-American Girls" #5 Birth Date: November 22, 1924 Birthplace: Kirksville, Missouri Height: 5' 8" Academy Awards: 8 nominations, 1 win (actress, The Trip to Bountiful) Signature Role: Mrs. Carrie Watts (The Trip to Bountiful)
Note: Of all the actresses in the 1960s bracket, Geraldine Page received the most Oscar nominations—and yet she might be the least known of the bunch.
Best Heartstring-Tugging Child
Let's just go back to the first truly great child performance in movies, Jackie Coogan in Charlie Chaplin's The Kid. If you don't get a little misty when Chaplin rescues him from the orphanage goons, your heart is made of stone.
Hard to believe that cute little tyke grew up to become this guy:
Yikes!
Best Performance With a Director Who Was Really Hard to Work With
You could interpret this question a couple of ways. William Wyler was notoriously difficult to work with—for example, once requiring Bette Davis to do forty takes of a scene in Jezebel where she did nothing but walk down a flight of stairs. Actors, though, knew that Wyler could see something they often couldn't so they put up with him and the result was that he still holds the record for directing the most Oscar-nominated and Oscar-winning performances (36 and 14, respectively).
Fritz Lang, on the other hand, was just an anal-retentive a-hole who would do things like delay production for five hours while he fiddled with a fake cobweb in the background. I get the impression actors succeeded in his films in spite of him rather than because of him. In which case, I choose Peter Lorre's performance in M as the best of the bunch.
Best Weird Thing James Franco Thought Would Be Interesting to Try
I confess I read this one and thought "Now who is James Franco again? Oh, right, the former fascist dictator of Spain." To which the answer is probably "Guernica."
But then I did a little research and found out that James Franco is some sort of an actor. Boy, he's made a lot of crap, hasn't he.
Best Portrayal of a Recovering Addict
He wasn't all that recovering and who knows about babies crawling along the ceiling, but I did very much enjoy Ewan McGregor's performance as a heroin addict who goes cold turkey in the 1996 British comedy Trainspotting. Highly recommended.
Best Surprisingly Grounded Performance in a Superhero Film
I'll probably get drummed out of some sort of bloggers club for this, but I'm not that big a fan of superhero movies. I hate the "with great power comes great responsibility" gibberish that movies like Spider-Man palm off on us. That, and the inevitable Kryptonite business.
And what is it with all the tights?
That said, I'm going with Will Smith in Hancock. Hancock is very much the kind of superhero I would be if I suddenly found myself thrust into that role—just your basic anti-social "leave me alone, why don't you people grow up" kind of superhero. Don't know that I'd become a homeless alcoholic, but I'd probably spend even more time talking to the dog than I already do.
Tomorrow: Quentin Tarantino, diseases, arm-waving, sadness and nudity.
Birth Name: Liv Johanne Ullmann Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #2 Birth Date: December 16, 1938 Birthplace: Tokyo, Japan Height: 5' 8" Academy Awards: 2 nominations Signature Role: Marianne (Scenes from a Marriage)
versus
Lila Kedrova
Birth Name: Lila Kedrova Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" # 7 Birth Date: October 9, 1918 Birthplace: Petrograd (now St. Petersburg), Russia Academy Awards: 1 win (supporting actress, Zorba the Greek) Signature Role: Madame Hortense (Zorba the Greek)
with the winner to take on the winner of
Anna Karina
Birth Name: Hanne Karen Blarke Bayer Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #3 Birth Date: September 22, 1940 Birthplace: Copenhagen, Denmark Height: 5' 7" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Marianne Renoir (Pierrot le Fou)
versus
Romy Schneider
Birth Name: Rosemarie Magdelena Albach-Retty Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #6 Birth Date: September 23, 1938 Birthplace: Vienna, Austria Height: 5' 3½" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Leni (The Trial)
One of the Monkey's favorite fixtures on the Washington Post op-ed page is Alexandra Petri, who is, by turns, amusing, thoughtful, insightful and deep but always non-ax-grinding, which is why the non-ax-grinding Monkey likes to read her.
Today, Ms. Petri suggests that the Academy Awards ceremony would improve with "better categories than Best Actor and Best Actress." Categories such as "Best Performance in an Arty Movie No One Saw" and "Best Appearance in Movie Where the Dog Dies." It's a funny column and you can read it for yourself here.
But, of course, I couldn't help but start wondering who in movie history might actually deserve to win these awards. Here are my suggestions. Feel free to offer up your own in the comments section below.
Although there are 34 categories in the online edition, I'm strictly a read-the-paper-over-breakfast-print-man, so I'm going with the Sunday edition's 26 (assuming I counted correctly). This is going to take the rest of the week.
Best Performance by Someone Old Who Deserves to Win Something
There have been many such Oscars handed out over the years, some deserved, some not (Don Ameche's win for Cocoon being perhaps the most egregious—to quote my late mother: "Don Ameche?! He never could act!"). The best such Oscar-winning performance was probably by Geraldine Page in The Trip to Bountiful. Did you know she was nominated eight times, winning in her last chance? She died the next year.
Of those who were nominated but didn't win, I'd probably go with Peter O'Toole in Venus—hard to believe the guy has never won anything. But then the Academy has a history of neglecting great actors—not only did Cary Grant never win, Edward G. Robinson was never even nominated! Imagine that.
Best Performance in a Biopic of a Person the Audience Actually Recognizes
Which counts out Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot, I'd think. Maria Falconetti in The Passion of Joan of Arc is pushing it—we all know who Joan of Arc was, but would we actually recognize her if we saw her on the street? So I'm going with George C. Scott in Patton.
Best Performance in an Arty Movie No One Saw
Now that would be Maria Falconetti. No one saw The Passion of Joan of Arc upon its release, then the negative was destroyed in a fire and the film was presumed lost for decades. In 1981, it was rediscovered in a janitor's closet in a Norwegian insane asylum. Great movie, great performance.
Least Embarrassing Golden Globes Speech
Honestly, I've never watched the Golden Globes, so I couldn't say, and let's face it, on some level, all awards speeches are embarrassing. Instead, I'll go in the other direction and guess that the most embarrassing Golden Globes speech was when Ving Rhames gave away his award to fellow nominee Jack Lemmon. Actually dragged Lemmon on stage in a moment of enthusiastic self-deprecation and shoved the award into his hands, to Lemmon's mortification. And I say this as a guy who loves both Ving Rhames and Jack Lemmon. Haven't seen nearly enough of ol' Ving since then, by the way.
Best Acting With a Green Screen
Without doing an extensive search, I'm going with Naomi Watts in the remake of King Kong. She made the relationship between her character and the forty-foot CGI monkey not just plausible but touching.
Best Performance for Which You Gained Weight Intentionally
Given that it's one of the best performances by anybody ever anyway, I'm going with Robert De Niro in Raging Bull.
Tomorrow: awards for heartstring-tugging children, difficult directors, James Franco and recovering addicts.
Birth Name: Catherine Fabienne Dorléac Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #1 Birth Date: October 22, 1943 Birthplace: Paris, France Height: 5' 6" Academy Awards: 1 nomination Signature Role: Séverine Serizy (Belle de Jour)
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Jeanne Moreau
Birth Name: Jeanne Moreau Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #8 Birth Date: January 23, 1928 Birthplace: Paris, France Height: 5' 4" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Catherine (Jules et Jim)
with the winner to take on the winner of
Giulietta Masina
Birth Name: Giulia Anna Masina Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #4 Birth Date: February 22, 1921 Birthplace: San Giorgio di Piano, Emilia-Romagna, Italy Height: 5' 2" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Maria 'Cabiria' Ceccarelli (Nights of Cabiria)
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Claudia Cardinale
Birth Name: Claude Joséphine Rose Cardinale Tourney Bracket and Seeding: "A Foreign Affair" #5 Birth Date: April 15, 1938 Birthplace: Tunis, Tunisia Height: 5' 8" Academy Awards: none Signature Role: Jill McBain (Once Upon a Time in the West)
Notes: Deneuve versus Moreau—Paris-born actresses. Masina and Cardinale were both muses for Fellini.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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