July 2020 – This Had Oscar Buzz

104 – The Terminal

Soak this one up, listeners, because this episode we’re taking one of the very few opportunities for us to talk about Steven Spielberg. The beloved director has one of the best Oscar track records in history, earning nominations for all but five of his feature films – including this week’s misfire, 2004′s The Terminal. Tom Hanks stars as a traveler from the fictional eastern European country of Krakozhia who gets trapped in JFK airport when a coup erupts mid-flight. What ensues is a too-cutesy and logic-defying fairy tale that is widely regarded as one of Spielberg’s biggest creative misses.

In this episode, we unpack all of the film’s tonal imbalances and its place in Spielberg’s post-9/11 triptych. We also look at costar Catherine Zeta-Jone’s post-Oscar (and pre-Tony) career, the one category we think The Terminal should have been nominated for, and Stanley Tucci as the film’s bland bureaucrat villain.

Other topics include Casa Zeta-Jones, Broadway billboards, and an extensive dive into all of the nominations (and wins) received by Spielberg’s films.

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103 – Natural Born Killers

This week, we’re going back to the mid-90s to visit Oliver Stone’s highly controversial skewering of the muckraking, blood-thirsty media landscape. Natural Born Killers arrived in late summer 1994 and immediately started a firestorm of outraged Republicans and a number of copycat killings. While an audacious and uncompromising satire, the violence of its central Mickey and Mallory paired with the bombast of Stone’s vision proved to be too daring for the Academy that previously couldn’t resist the filmmaker.

But the film also debuted in the year of Pulp Fiction, and inspired a major grudge toward Stone from original Killers screenwriter Quentin Tarantino. This episode, we praise the performances of stars Juliette Lewis and Woody Harrelson, and look at supporting player Robert Downey Jr.’s much-storied addiction issues during the decade.

Topics also include the 1994 Best Actress race, other movies drunk on dutch angles, and Tori Amos.

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102 – The Walk

Bonjour, listeners! This week, we’re returning to the work of Robert Zemeckis for a film whose buzz was built first by an Oscar winning documentary. In 2008, Man on Wire steamrolled the documentary race with the telling of highwire artist Philippe Petit’s daring tightrope performance between the World Trade Center towers – leading Zemeckis to give Petit the biopic treatment with The Walk in 2015. Promising awe-inspiring visual effects to put audiences in Petit’s shoes, the film nevertheless plummeted to an immediate death at the box office due to audiences’ waning favor for both 3D and the film’s star Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

Despite some more embarrassing elements like JGL’s French accent and a climatic visit from a CGI bird, the film does deliver a satisfying and thrilling climax. But this episode, we unpack how even the film’s visual effects couldn’t crack Oscar’s lineup in a year with a surprising result in the category. We also look at Gordon-Levitt’s rise from teen star to capital “C” Charismatic leading man.

Topics also include the early films of Rian Johnson, An American Tale, and Werner Herzog saying science things.

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101 – Flawless

Philip Seymour Hoffman had a breakout 1999, winning critics prizes for performances in two films that just missed the Best Picture cut but landed his flashier costars with Supporting Actor nominations: Magnolia and The Talented Mr. Ripley. But this week, we’re discussing another less-praised film of his that year that nevertheless landed him a Lead Actor nomination at SAG: Joel Schumacher’s Flawless.

Hoffman stars in the film as drag performer and trans woman Rusty, who starts singing lessons with his bigot ex-cop neighbor Walt (Robert DeNiro) to help him recover from a stroke that was onset by violence in their building. This episode, we talk about the Oscar momentum Hoffman built over several beloved performances before his steamroll to a win for Capote. We also discuss the recently departed Schumacher, including battling over his Batman films and looking at his remarkable range of movies (and their quality).

Topics also include the film’s spotty relationship with trans and queer representation, DeNiro’s long gap between nominations post-Cape Fear, and cufflink guns.

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