Skip to main content

A Star is Born

By



It seems just about every year a new star is born out of the Academy Awards.  Last year it was Jennifer Lawrence.  This year it is Lupita Nyong'o.  Of course it helps to be young and beautiful, but one can look back and find male actors who emerged from the Academy Awards as full blown stars like Daniel Day-Lewis (My Left Foot), Geoffrey Rush (Shine) and Billy Bob Thornton (Sling Blade). Thornton won for Best Screenplay, although he was nominated for Best Actor.

If you go back even earlier, most persons never heard of Meryl Streep before The Deer Hunter.  As the story goes, it was De Niro who had spotted her in a summer theater group and introduced her to Michael Cimino.  She was nominated for Best Supporting Actress and won the following year for her supporting role in Kramer vs. Kramer.  Since then she has garnered a record 18 nominations, winning three times.

But, this was an unusual year in that Lupita wasn't the only newbie to win.  Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto both won for their first ever nominations from the film, Dallas Buyers Club, which really seemed to strike a chord with the Academy.  I was rooting for Michael Fassbender, who I think is one of the best actors of his generation, and turned in a mesmerizing performance as a plantation owner in 12 Years a Slave.

For Lupita, the sky now appears to be the limit.  She has quite an international upbringing, ranging from Kenya to Mexico to the United States, and is being heralded for her poise and style much like Grace Kelly when she emerged on the international stage.  Funny enough, Grace's first big movie was Mogambo, set in Kenya, but she didn't become famous until after her work with Alfred Hitchcock, Dial M for Murder and Rear Window, in 1954.



As for Jennifer Lawrence, last year's darling, she now has major competition, but she seems like a good sport and I wouldn't be surprised if Hollywood tries to pair these two young women in an upcoming movie, as it would be a sure bet at the box office.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire

By
  Welcome to this month's reading group selection.  David Von Drehle mentions The Melting Pot , a play by Israel Zangwill, that premiered on Broadway in 1908.  At that time theater was accessible to a broad section of the public, not the exclusive domain it has become over the decades.  Zangwill carried a hopeful message that America was a place where old hatreds and prejudices were pointless, and that in this new country immigrants would find a more open society.  I suppose the reference was more an ironic one for Von Drehle, as he notes the racial and ethnic hatreds were on display everywhere, and at best Zangwill's play helped persons forget for a moment how deep these divides ran.  Nevertheless, "the melting pot" made its way into the American lexicon, even if New York could best be describing as a boiling cauldron in the early twentieth century. Triangle: The Fire That Changed America takes a broad view of events that led up the notorious fire, not...
230 comments
Read more

Team of Rivals Reading Group

By
''Team of Rivals" is also an America ''coming-of-age" saga. Lincoln, Seward, Chase et al. are sketched as being part of a ''restless generation," born when Founding Fathers occupied the White House and the Louisiana Purchase netted nearly 530 million new acres to be explored. The Western Expansion motto of this burgeoning generation, in fact, was cleverly captured in two lines of Stephen Vincent Benet's verse: ''The stream uncrossed, the promise still untried / The metal sleeping in the mountainside." None of the protagonists in ''Team of Rivals" hailed from the Deep South or Great Plains. _______________________________ From a review by Douglas Brinkley, 2005
293 comments
Read more

The Searchers

By
You are invited to join us in a discussion of  The Searchers , a new book on John Ford's boldest Western, which cast John Wayne against type as the vengeful Ethan Edwards who spends eight years tracking down a notorious Comanche warrior, who had killed his cousins and abducted a 9 year old girl.  The film has had its fair share of detractors as well as fans over the years, but is consistently ranked in most critics'  Top Ten Greatest Films . Glenn Frankel examines the origins of the story as well as the film itself, breaking his book down into four parts.  The first two parts deal with Cynthia Ann Parker and her son Quanah, perhaps the most famous of the 19th century abduction stories.  The short third part focuses on the author of the novel, Alan Le May, and how he came to write The Searchers. The final part is about Pappy and the Duke and the making of the film. Frankel noted that Le May researched 60+ abduction stories, fusing them together into a nar...
123 comments
Read more