Nicolas Cage – This Had Oscar Buzz

320 – Matchstick Men

After his comeback stretch of high grossers Gladiator, Hannibal, and Black Hawk Down, Ridley Scott returned in 2003 with a downshift into the character focused Matchstick Men. The film starred Nicolas Cage as a conman with compounding mental health issues who is then reunited with his daughter, played by Alison Lohman. With Sam Rockwell as Cage’s partner in con, the film played both Venice and TIFF to a positive critical reception, but was ultimately forgotten by awards voters by the end of the year.

This episode, we discuss Scott’s waning Oscar chances this year for Gladiator 2 and Scott is our first director to get a Six Timers quiz. We also discuss Cage’s stretch between his Oscar win and the Adaptation nomination, Lohman’s transformation into a teenager, and Rockwell’s emergence into a beloved character actor in the early 2000s.

Topics also include the audience response to City of Angels, local bakeries, and Nutcracker and the Four Realms.

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083 – Captain Corelli’s Mandolin

For this week’s episode, we have another quintessential prestige picture that flubbed with Oscar: it’s-a Captain Corelli’s Mandolin! Coming off of a Best Picture win with Shakespeare in Love, director John Madden returned with a WWII romance set on a gorgeous Greek island between recent Oscar winner Nicolas Cage and next-big-thing Penélope Cruz. But this love story was instantly derided for its tepid sparks and cringe-worthy dialect work from Cage, making it more of a punchline come Oscar time than the viable contender it seemed to be before release.

This week, we look back at Madden’s very THOB-friendly filmography and the behind-the-scenes business maneuverings that crossed this film with Miramax. We also take an extended look at 2001′s acting categories and imagine what a Best Picture ten could have been in the year of A Beautiful Mind and the first Lord of the Rings installment.

Topics also include Cruz’s busy 2001 amid her relationship with Tom Cruise, how movie-going was impacted by 9/11, Christian Bale’s butt, and prostitute pasta.

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065 – Bringing Out The Dead

With the incoming arrival of a new Martin Scorsese film with The Irishman, naturally we had to talk about the master, right? But rare is the film that results in no Oscar nominations for Scorsese – except for this week’s film which came at the end of the director’s downward trend with the Academy. Even forgotten among Scorsese diehards, we’re unpacking 1999′s Bringing Out The Dead. A strange look at a night shift insomniac paramedic played by Nicolas Cage (leading a wild ensemble that ranges from Patricia Arquette to Tom Sizemore to… Marc Anthony), this one leaves Joe and Chris divided on its merits and place in the Scorsese filmography.

The film reunited Scorsese with his Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader and served a somewhat hallucinatory, somewhat religious vision of the gritty New York City streets. Did it just get lost in the shuffle of the landmark 1999 film year or was this a victim of dwindling perceptions of Scorsese’s work before the 2000s firmly returned him to the Academy’s graces?

This episode, we look at Scorsese and Cage in their transitional stage between Oscar love, offer our own 1999 Top Ten lists, and Patricia Arquette’s little corner of horror movie history. Special shout out this week to artist Athena Currier for tributing us in Inktober!

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