Diane Lane – This Had Oscar Buzz

273 – Under the Tuscan Sun (Patreon Selects)

This week, our Patreon Selects episodes continue and they’re staying in Europe! One of our sponsors has selected for us an Oscar nomination follow-up star vehicle for the divine Diane Lane, 2003’s Under the Tuscan Sun. Loosely adapted from Frances Mayes’ memoir, the film follows Lane as a new divorce gifted a Tuscan vacation who decides to feel the rain on her skin (no one else can feel it for her! only she can let it in!) and buys a Tuscan home to uproot her life. Fresh off an Unfaithful Best Actress nomination, the film launched in the fall but was quickly reduced to romcom fare unworthy of awards.

This episode, we talk about Lane’s career leading up to the critical groundswell that resulted in her Oscar nomination. We also talk about Lindsay Duncan going all La Dolce Vita, contemporary production design, and the 2003 Golden Globes Best Actress in a Musical/Comedy lineup.

Topics also include being Gay and Away at the Taco Bell hotel, Grey’s Anatomy, and the incoming Oscar nominations!

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209 – A Walk on the Moon (with Tara Ariano)

This week, Tara Ariano returns to us to talk about a forgotten and quite lovely independent film from 1999, A Walk on the Moon. The first feature directed by actor Tony Goldwyn, the film stars Diane Lane as a late 1960s housewife who has a sexual awakening with a hippie blouse salesman (played by Viggo Mortensen) while vacationing with her family. With Anna Paquin and Liev Schreiber respectively as daughter and husband, the film features Woodstock and the moon landing in the background of this quite potent take on female sexuality and the effect of young parenthood. The film had a quiet spring release after debuting at Sundance, but year-end critical notices kept Lane in the awards conversation.

The film also has similar shades of what Lane would turn into an Oscar nominated role just a few years later with Unfaithful. This episode, we’ll discuss Mortensen’s deep bench of pre-LOTR roles, Happy, Texas’ famous post-Sundance financial failure, and how this film avoids the typical “Woodstock movie” trappings.

Topics also include Julie Kavner as Big Brother, gay euphemisms, and the immediate cultural impact of Ghost.

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020 – Secretariat

After landing a Best Actress nomination in a great Best Actress year for Unfaithful, we once thought Diane Lane could come back to the Oscar race by going to a horse race. This week, we’re talking about Secretariat, a live-action Disney biopic that got buried in the wake of The Social Network. Get ready for a dive into the 2010 Oscar nominations, including a strong defense of its Best Picture lineup. And we obsess over the real reason to watch the movie, even though it does her dirty: the eternal Margo Martindale.

Join us as Joe explains horse racing awards hierarchy, Chris has an Oscar host hot take to end all Oscar host hot takes, and we unpack the cornucopia of the film’s rich white people problems. Come for the remembered Oscar buzz, stay for the elevator stories! Oh and we try and fail to not call this movie Seabiscuit.

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