Word: actorly
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...that's what you get on Oscar night: five names, one winner, four losers; then it's move on, dot, yawn. What if we learned, as the tally was shown on a big board behind the person reading out the nominations for Best Actor, what the names of the top two contenders were - and that they were just one vote apart? That actually happened in 1932, and the Oscar was given to both Fredric March and Wallace Beery. But we know that only because the Academy later changed the rule: to declare a tie, the tallies had to be exactly...
...like the Academy to reveal the votes that went into the nominations. The top five are announced; let's hear the top 10. That would have told us exactly where The Dark Knight finished. And whether Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino got anywhere near the top five for Picture, Actor or Director. Another thing: this year it's entirely possible that Kate Winslet finished in the Best Actress top five for two performances - one in The Reader, the other in Revolutionary Road - but was named only for the first because that role earned her more votes and the Academy doesn...
...long as the particulars of Academy voting are suppressed, we movie lovers will find Oscar night less exciting as we watch it, less likely to lodge in our collective memory. ("Hey, remember how close that Best Actor race was in 2009?") Hollywood is supposed to be the best at creating drama, suspense, thrills - at putting on a great show. If we knew not only who the winners were but by how much they won, the Oscar show could be the Super Bowl of movies...
...Oscars was 50 years ago, as one of the hosts of the 1959 show. In the three years since he and Dean Martin had ended their partnership as the country's all-time hottest comedy team, each had established successful a solo career: Martin as a dramatic actor in The Young Lions, Some Came Running and Rio Bravo, Lewis in the popular farces Rock-a-Bye Baby and The Geisha Boy. Each man had recorded hit singles, headlined in Vegas, guested on many TV shows. Lewis had also emceed the Oscar event twice before, with wit and dignity and without...
...finest pieces written on Lewis, and who may have seen the movie - described it as "the Holocaust on black velvet." In what must be another painful twist for Lewis, Roberto Benigni did the same shtick in 1998, starring in and directing Life Is Beautiful and won a Best Actor Oscar...