Word: hollywoodisms
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...rights activist Harvey Milk in the biopic Milk. This was the one half-surprise in an evening of few big upsets. The oddsmakers had Penn tabbed as a slight underdog to Golden Globe winner Mickey Rourke, whose performance in The Wrestler had all the earmarks of a sentimental Hollywood comeback. (See pictures of Rourke...
...would like to be. The "is": The Dark Knight, which has earned more than a billion dollars at the worldwide box office (in the process becoming the second highest grosser in film history, after Titanic), and which represents a big-budget action picture as only Hollywood can make them. The "would like to be": the message films Milk and The Reader, which hammer home Hollywood's liberal views on gays and its unslakable fascination with the Holocaust. And the "was": Slumdog. With its skimpy budget ($14 million) and mongrel pedigree, it might seem like...
...Hollywood nativists are rankled that the top prize and headlines went to a foreign movie, the feeling may be similar on the Indian subcontinent, where Slumdog's box office take hasn't even approached that of any robust local film. As pleased as they might be about the picture's international éclat, the folks in Mumbai also realize that the first "Bollywood" production to make a major impact at the Academy was written, produced and directed by Englishmen - subjects of the old Raj. In the 1980s, Gandhi, another film about Indians and made by colonialists, took Best Picture. This...
...measure of his lingering impact that Hollywood is still embarrassed by the very idea of Jerry Lewis, let alone his presence. To the graybeards at the Academy, Jer is not only the demolisher of Oscar's gravitas but the unkillable specter of his first eminence, in the late '40s and '50s, as the goony kid prancing around the cool crooner. (One producer cruelly called Martin and Lewis "the organ grinder and the monkey"). He is the comic whose genius, or even the robust grosses of his movies, nobody in Hollywood took seriously. And because he was championed as an auteur...
...Comedy duos had been a staple of vaudeville (Buck and Bubbles, Gallagher and Shean, Burns and Allen) and movies; in 1942, theater exhibitors voted Bud Abbott and Lou Costello the No. 1 "star" in Hollywood. What Lewis saw in Martin, when they first teamed up in 1946, was something unique: a sexpot straight man, a perfect complement to Jer's goony girly-boy. Dean was Lewis's public enabler; by acting as the imperturbable wall against which the kid's maniacal energy kept bouncing, he translated Jer to the mainstream audience...