Word: oscars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Vietnam-era AM radio, where the song hit the top of the pop charts. What's extraordinary is that Theme from Shaft somehow beguiled the Bel Air senior citizens who constitute the Academy membership. Hayes, a newcomer to Hollywood movie scoring, was up against such former and future Oscar winners as Johnny Mercer, Henry Mancini, Marvin Hamlisch and the Sherman Brothers. The award typically went to doyens of the classic-pop establishment, all of whom were white. For nearly two decades, the movie-music fraternity had fought the onslaught of rock and soul music through the simple expedient of ignoring...
...when Hayes' name was read out, you could practically hear the sound of mandibles detaching throughout the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, while back at Stax Records in Memphis there must have been astonished cheers. Hayes had become the first African American to win a music Oscar (or, indeed, an Oscar in any category except for acting). But that belated recognition was less a harbinger of enlightenment than a blip on the rainbow radar. No black musician would cop another Oscar until 1985, when Prince was honored for the score of Purple Rain...
...With this dramatic presentation, and after the benediction of Oscar, directors lined up to cast Hayes in their films. He had the title role in Jonathan Kaplan's Truck Turner, starring with Yaphet Kotto, Scatman Crothers and, as a randy-mouthed madam, Star Trek's Nichelle Nichols. (It was really a black Rockford Files, the James Garner TV series that started the same year and on which Hayes had a few guest shots.) Hayes also co-starred in Duccio Tessari's Tough Guys, which mixed the blaxploitation and Italian action genres to produce what might be called a blaxpaghetti movie...
...with lovely grad student: we've heard that one before. So had Philip Roth, whose novel The Dying Animal is acutely attuned to the dissonance of May-December love. This fine film has a touching performance by Penélope Cruz and a great one by Ben Kingsley. Cue the Oscar buzz...
...Most Popular Costume: The Joker. If Oscar ballots were tallied in San Diego, Heath Ledger's posthumous Best Actor statuette would be a lock. Guys with red lipstick-smeared smiles and purple dinner jackets were as plentiful at Comic-Con this year as those perennials, the Storm Troopers. A few Jokers said their costumes were an homage to Ledger; one confessed it's just more breathable than a Batsuit...