WilliamM

Joey Stefano died in the early 1990s!

What Cannes 2019 Tells Us About the Oscar Race BY RICHARD LAWSON Vanity Fair MAY 24, 2019 As this year’s Cannes Film Festival comes to a close, it’s time to stop and consider that most urgent of cinematic questions: is any of this stuff gonna win an Oscar? The answer is, as ever, who knows! But we can at least suss out a few awards narratives that have emerged here on the Croisette—starting with a crowd-pleaser hoping to replicate another music biopic’s success. A Biopic Repeat? One of the buzziest films screening at Cannes this year was the out-of-competition entry Rocketman, Dexter Fletcher’s musical biopic about the trials and tribulations of Elton John. The iconic singer-songwriter is played by Taron Egerton, who cries, yells, and maybe most important, performs his own vocals. That gives him a slight leg up on last year’s Oscar best-actor winner, Rami Malek, who played Freddie Mercury in the runaway smash Bohemian Rhapsody even though he was mostly dubbed over in the music sequences. Rocketman comes out in the U.S. next week, months before the traditional awards season begins. Which could be a hindrance—unless Rocketman is a box-office smash and locks Egerton in early. Either way, Egerton will be considered in a new light after the movie is released. So, if he doesn’t get awards attention for this strong performance, he ought to have more opportunities soon. Antonio’s Turn Though he’s been in the business for decades doing stuff people like (and looking good while doing it), Antonio Banderas has never been nominated for an Oscar. That could change when Academy voters see Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory, in which Banderas plays a version of the famed Spanish director as he faces something of a later-life crisis. It’s not a terribly flashy performance, but our sources on the ground here in Cannes tell us that distributor Sony Pictures Classics is going to launch a real campaign for Banderas. As any of the dozens of well-wishers who approached Banderas at this year’s Vanity Fair party in Cannes could tell you, he’s great in a room, which can often be the X factor that pushes a contender to victory. (See Redmayne, Eddie.) There’s also the narrative that both Banderas and Almodóvar are due for recognition, which works in Pain and Glory’s favor—though of course, the fact that it’s a Spanish-language film could be a hindrance. Still, the Academy saw fit to nominate Penélope Cruz for Almodóvar’s Volver, so the same could easily be true for Banderas. The Hollywood Hagiography There was no bigger film at Cannes this year than Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, the lauded writer-director’s love letter to a bygone age of showbiz and Angeleno life. The Academy loves movies about those two things, and they love Tarantino, so O.U.A.T.I.H. should ride its wave of praise here to some serious Oscar consideration—if it can survive the inevitable (and not undeserved) onslaught of think pieces criticizing its approach to gender, race, and violence. Leading the awards charge will be the film’s stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt, who both give true grade-A movie star performances. My mostly baseless hunch is that Pitt will be run in supporting in the interest of spreading the wealth, as the Academy grows increasingly inured to the practice of category fraud. (He might face some competition there from another Cannes player, Willem Dafoe, whose bonkers, blustery turn in The Lighthousemay catch voter attention.) O.U.A.T.I.H.’s biggest hurdle at this point is that it’s being released in July instead of in the fall. But that matters a lot less than it used to in the old days. Where Are the Women? This has been an awfully male-centric Cannes for awards-predicting purposes, because we sadly don’t live in a world where Noémie Merlant and Adèle Haenel are likely to be nominated for their stunning work in Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire.That exquisite masterwork will at least be in the running for best international feature (the category formerly known as best foreign film), if France picks it as their candidate. Beyond that, we had high hopes for Isabelle Huppert in Ira Sachs’s Frankie—but while she’s wonderful as ever in that film, it’s probably too small to get real awards traction. Though we sincerely hope South Korea gets its first-ever international film nomination for Bong Joon Ho’s terrific class struggled tragicomedy Parasite, we don’t think that film’s standout actress, Cho Yeo Jeong, has a chance in the hunt. Nor does O.U.A.T.I.H.’s Margot Robbie, mostly because she doesn’t speak much in the film—a fact that has caused some consternation here, which has, in turn, frustrated Tarantino. Maybe all that controversy could lead to support for Robbie making the best of what she’s given, but that seems like a long shot. Of course, all of these could be long shots, but with a Sundance lineup this year that didn’t produce a ton of Oscar hopefuls, maybe Cannes has been the real starting point for the race. Stay tuned to VF.com and our awards podcast Little Gold Men for all the latest on this year’s path to glory—and to pain.

You were very kind to Avalon even when he was somewhat annoying. I am glad people here are being even kinder to you. I am just seeing this for the first time. My prayers are with you. Yes, please let us know if there is anyone we can help

My mother told us when she was having problems with her personal finances. My brother and I were lucky.

Probably not because he's been out of the news for about three or four decades.

Probably not because he's been out of the news for about three or four decades.

Marilyn Monroe, Robert and John Kennedy after MSG at the with the Krim family in Manhattan

Rounds was interesting because you never knew who would be there on a weekend night. Once I missed a chance with someone because I picked another guy first. I still sort of regret it.

John and Robert Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson, Marilyn Monroe and many others went to the New York home of the very wealthy Hollywood big shot, Arthur Krim, after Madison Square Garden. Years later, Mathilde Krim, his scientist wife, founded amFAR, the major national organization fighting HIV AIDS.

I remember hearing MM had died early on Sunday morning (east coast time). Very surprising then.

No. A close friend married a female con artist without realizing it. Definitely happens to many people and has little to do with being careless.

Before members go door to door in Rancho Mirage to find @Kenny, I believe he is employed somewhere else

Many celebrities die in Palm Springs. It was discussed here when @Kenny and his husband bought a house in Rancho Mirage.

Novak Djokovic

Quite gay on the macro level. Less so on nudiy and sex We see Richard Maddon's bare butt; RM plays Elton's gay lover. The trusting part of sex is eliminated. That is it. From reviews in the South of France.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/herman-wouk-pulitzer-prize-winning-master-of-sweeping-historical-fiction-dies-a-103/2019/05/17/3eefd034-78be-11e9-b3f5-5673edf2d127_story.html?utm_term=.ba2c3768a1d8 Obituaries Herman Wouk, Pulitzer Prize-winning master of sweeping historical fiction, dies at 103 By Becky Krystal May 17 at 12:28 PM Herman Wouk, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of the Navy drama “The Caine Mutiny” whose sweeping novels about World War II, the Holocaust and the creation of Israel made him one of the most popular writers of his generation and helped revitalize the genre of historical fiction, died May 17 at his home in Palm Springs, Calif. He was 103. His literary agent, Amy Rennert, confirmed the death but did not provide a cause. Mr. Wouk (his last name is pronounced “Woke”) penned a dozen novels, a handful of plays and several nonfiction books over the course of his nearly 60-year career. A meticulous researcher, he specialized in stories of personal conflict set against the backdrop of compelling historical events, including “The Caine Mutiny” (1951), “The Winds of War” (1971) and “War and Remembrance” (1978). The latter two became ABC miniseries in the 1980s starring Robert Mitchum that averaged tens of millions of viewers over the course of their broadcast and were the highest-rated miniseries after Alex Haley’s “Roots.” In a form that the author would echo in other novels, “The Winds of War” and its sequel, “War and Remembrance,” trace World War II through the experiences of one family. “The Winds of War” follows Navy officer Victor “Pug” Henry and his relatives from the German invasion of Poland to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, where its sequel begins and then proceeds to the dropping of the atomic bomb on Hiroshima, Japan. The pair of books established Mr. Wouk’s legacy as a master of historical fiction, in which he blended the narrative power of fiction with great understanding and empathy for the human motivations behind wars and other historical events. The Economist magazine called “The Winds of War” “as serious a contribution to the literature of our time as ‘War and Peace’ was to that of the nineteenth century.” Librarian of Congress James H. Billington said Mr. Wouk helped enliven history in ways that many academic tomes never could and prompted readers to examine the past through engaging fictional characters. “I think he’s been a seminal figure because he’s recrafted the historical novel for a modern audience and not for some niche market,” Billington, who died last year, told The Washington Post in an interview for this obituary. Mr. Wouk, who said he was never a “high stylist,” attracted a mass audience with books that espoused such values as gallantry and leadership under pressure. Leading critics sniffed at his books, which they often said broke no ground in writing style or character development. The literary essayist Leslie Fiedler once explained Mr. Wouk’s critical reputation by comparing him with Nobel laureate Saul Bellow. “Bellow, like most writers critics take seriously, attacked the basic values of middle-class Americans: easy piety, marriage, life in the suburbs,” Fiedler said. “Wouk challenges nothing.” Mr. Wouk said he found noncomformity for its own sake an all-too predictable theme in modern literature and had no interest in experimental or temporarily trendy prose styles. “I write a traditional novel, which is rather unfashionable, and I’ve taken a lot of kicking for it,” he once told The Post. “But the strength of my work comes from this intense grounding in the 18th- and 19th-century novelists.” His very significance, wrote Time magazine in a 1955 cover story, was that “he spearheads a mutiny against the literary stereotypes of rebellion — against three decades of U.S. fiction dominated by skeptical criticism, sexual emancipation, social protest and psychoanalytic sermonizing.” Mr. Wouk began his professional career as a gag writer in the 1930s before moving to the staff of the popular radio comedian Fred Allen. He got that job in part for his notoriety at Columbia University, where his Class of 1934 yearbook named him the wittiest student. He later joked, “It was not a very sparkling class.” Enlisting in the Navy during World War II proved a transformative experience in his development as a writer. “My life was broken at the time, as it was for all of our generation, by the coming of the war, and the winds of war swept a Bronx boy halfway around the world, below the equator, and he landed on an old destroyer minesweeper called the USS Zane,” Mr. Wouk told a National Press Club audience. “And that, I think, is where my adult education really began, because there, the hard shell of a New York wise guy cracked and fell off. The shallow conceit of a successful gag man faded away. . . . When I came back, there no longer was a question of a gag writing. I wanted to write novels.” “The Caine Mutiny: A Novel of World War II” in 1951 brought Mr. Wouk his first critical and popular success, including the Pulitzer. The book centers on a power struggle aboard the destroyer-minesweeper Caine, culminating in a young lieutenant seizing control of the vessel from the paranoid Capt. Queeg after the crew thinks it faces imminent danger. The action culminates in a court-martial for the lieutenant. Although the novel raised questions of authority and duty vs. personal freedom, the naval community embraced it. Queeg also became one of the most memorable characters of the day, a man who relieved his stress by obsessively rolling steel bearings in the palm of his hand. Time magazine called “The Caine Mutiny,” which sold more than 5 million copies worldwide and was translated into 17 languages, the “biggest U.S. bestseller since ‘Gone With the Wind.’ ” A 1954 film adaptation of the novel, , became a popular hit, earning Bogart an Academy Award nomination. Comment: I stopped reading Wouk after The Caine Muntiny," although I did try "Marjorie Morningstar."

"Gypsy" is a serious musical with quite a bit of comedy as well. "Tootsie" is mostly Comedy, with a message.

I forget when I hired Tristan Waters, but it was long after the photo now on line yet again. Yes, he was much older, but otherwise the same. Also, Tristan is still a huge fan of this site.

I have mixed emotions about Tristan's return, because I also like him as an individual.

I mentioned here that it was surprising that my fifth grade teacher lived to age 100, and earlier became principal of a grade school.

I received the audio from Angels in America today. The recording is from the Production in New York. Damn, so Russell Tovey is absent

Doris was a mystery guests on "What's My Line?" Her first time ever on television.