In Contention

Tag: In the Heat of the Night

  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 1967 and 1968

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    The civil rights struggle raged through America in the late 60’s and the issue found its way to Oscar’s front door in 1967 with “In the Heat of the Night” triumphing over “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner.” Neither has the lasting impact of fellow nominees “The Graduate” or “Bonnie and Clyde” but we can’t expect the Academy to award progressive filmmaking over safe filmmaking with a progressive message.

    1968 was a strange year indeed, with two big musicals, two historical, costume dramas and one independent thriller. “Oliver!” came away with the Best Picture prize while “2001: A Space Odyssey” had to settle for one win in the Visual Effects category. So…. why do we care about the Oscars again?

    More exciting is the fact that 1968 saw an exact tie in the Best Actress race. How thrilling must that have been to the Oscarwatchers in that day? Assuming there were any. And Alfred Hitchcock picked up the Irving “whoops, sorry we didn’t award you an Oscar” G. Thalberg award and gave the best speech in Oscar history.

    So, what failed to impress Ernest Borgnine and company these years?

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  • Norman Jewison to receive career award from DGA

    Norman JewisonWow, what’s with all the big announcements today? Space yourselves out, folks.

    Anyway, this is one bit of news I’m very happy to pass on. 83 year-old filmmaker and producer Norman Jewison has been named the next recipient of the Directors Guild of America’s Lifetime Achievement Award. He will accept the honor at the DGA’s awards ceremony on 30 January.

    Jewison is the kind of artist for whom career achievement awards were invented — accomplished, versatile and hard-working across five decades in cinema, he’s rarely had the spotlight to himself. This despite having directed a Best Picture Oscar winner (“In the Heat of the Night,” 1967) and having amassed a career total of seven Oscar nods for such films as “Moonstruck,” “A Soldier’s Story,” “Fiddler on the Roof” and “The Russians Are Coming, The Russians Are Coming.”

    The Academy paid their respects to Jewison in 1999, with an Irving G. Thalberg Award, so the DGA (who have nominated him thrice themselves) is playing catch-up here. Nice to see. Press release excerpt after the cut.

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  • Nothing…going…on…

    Just Comic-Con prep.  And I really just am not interested in the “TR2N” viral stuff, but I did come across this IMDb tweet regarding Norman Jewison’s birthday.  As I mentioned recently, I’ve been buried in Mark Harris’s “Pictures at a Revolution,” so Jewison’s “In the Heat of the Night” has been very much on the brain.  So…Happy 83rd to one of the good guys.

  • TCM’s ‘Summer Under the Stars’ posters

    Brad Brevet over at Rope of Silicon points me today over to the Turner Classic Movies website, which, in preparation for August’s mega “Summer Under the Stars” program, has released a modest series of redesigned posters for a few of the classic films set to be screened.  The “Magnificent Seven” and “Grapes of Wrath” posters are, of course, exquisite, but I was taken by the arresting simplicity of this one for “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?”:

    Guess Who's Coming to Dinner?

    Speaking of Stanley Kramer’s film, I finally got around to Mark Harris’s book “Pictures at a Revolution” last week, maybe 100 pages in so far.  It’s a look at a pivotal time in American film history through the lens of 1967’s five Best Picture nominees (“Bonnie & Clyde,” “Doctor Dolittle,” “The Graduate,” “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner?” and “The Graduate”), and I can’t put the damn thing down.  It’s expertly rendered journalism that reads like a novel and every chance I get, I’ve been recommending it to film enthusiasts.  So it only makes sense I bring it up here.  Seek it out.