Word: oscar
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Maybe you've never heard of BILLY BOB THORNTON, but that doesn't make him an unknown. The surprise Oscar nominee for Best Actor can be connected to every other Best Actor or Actress nominee through people he has worked with. According to the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon theory, any actor, living or dead, can be traced back to Bacon within six steps. For Billy Bob, it's only four--plus he's friends with the President. Take that, Kevin...
...They were the victims of the Happy Land social club fire in the Bronx. Flip: the Academy Awards. Flip: the dead of the Bronx. I wondered how these things fit together in the world. Would there be a movie made of the Happy Land fire? Would it win an Oscar...
That community, usually ignored by the big Hollywood players, is now the hot place to be. In last week's honor roll of Oscar nominations, four of the five finalists for Best Picture (The English Patient, Fargo, Secrets & Lies and Shine) were released by independent companies; only Jerry Maguire came from one of the seven major studios. Indie films did handsomely in all top categories: three of the slots for Best Actor, four for Best Director, all five for Best Actress. For once the Oscars looked less like the Tonys and more like the Obies. Off-Hollywood had beaten Hollywood...
...screenplay nod). The primary appeal of their stories is not to the young mass audience, which prefers spectacular fantasy and broad comedy, but to older viewers, more sophisticated and more sentimental, liberal in their politics and conservative in their desire for humanist affirmation--folks very like the typical Oscar voter. This audience wants, as Fine Line president Ruth Vitale puts it, "movies that touch your heart, that make you pause, think, maybe pick up the phone and call your...
...That makes the slow-fuse payoff of the quieter people pictures anathema. "Normal thinking at the studios is if audiences aren't there the first weekend, they're not coming," says Gramercy's Russell Schwartz. "But our films have to be discovered. We live by word of mouth." And Oscar has the biggest mouth around. The day after the nominations were announced, the box office for Shine jumped 40% from the previous Wednesday...