oscars

Oscar Preview

This week, we preview the Academy Awards. The casting director of “Moonlight” talks about the complicated process of finding the right actors for three different time periods. Plus, “La La Land” director Damien Chazelle guides Kurt through the classic Hollywood musicals that inspired his film. And the director of the Oscar-nominated “The Red Turtle” talks about making an animated Studio Ghibli movie unlike any other.

Oscar Preview

How the Oscar Speech Became a Political Manifesto

Click on the player above to hear the audio version of this essay by Newsday Film Critic Rafer Guzman. Follow him on Twitter: @RaferGuzman

The 88th Academy Awards will take place Sunday night with all its usual fanfare. You've likely heard of the controversy surrounding the 2016 Oscars—for the second year in a row, not a single person of color was nominated for an acting award.

The controversy has embarrassed liberal Hollywood and made Oscar voters look like a bunch of Archie Bunkers. So this year, the big question is: When the winners get up on stage, what are they going to say?

For anyone who’s been asked to speak at a wedding, you’ll know the best advice on giving a speech is to be clear, be brief and be gone. For years, those were pretty much the rules those accepting an Oscar.

“The trill of this moment keeps me from saying what I really feel," Grace Kelly said in accepting her Oscar for “The Country Girl” in 1955. "I can only say thank you with all my heart to all who made this possible for me. Thank you.”

Back then, acceptance speeches were short, gracious, and never political. Even when Sidney Poitier became the first African-American to win as a leading actor for "Lillies of the Field" in 1964, he opted for understatement.

“Because it is a long journey to this moment, I am naturally indebted to countless numbers of people....” he began, only to name a few individuals who worked on the film with him. And that was it.

But by the 1970s, the speeches started to sound a little different: Marlon Brando opted to not accept for his performance of Don Vito Corleone in "The Godfather."

Audience members and viewers at home were surprised to hear this instead:

"Hello, my name is Sacheen Littlefeather. I'm Apache and I am president of the National Native American Affirmative Image Committee," Littlefeather told the crowd. "I am accepting on behalf of Marlon Brando this evening, and he has asked me to tell you in a very long speech which I cannot share with you presently ... that he very regretfully cannot accept this very generous award. And the reasons for this being are the treatment of American Indians today by the film industry."

Overnight, Littlefeather's moment in 1973 became one of the most controversial in the history of the awards, but produced little action. In the wake of her appearance, she was attacked by Hollywood and the media, accused of falsifying her Native American identity, and even Brando expressed some regret about the position that he had put her in. 

Two years later, a documentary filmmaker, Bert Schneider, spoke out against the Vietnam War.

"It is ironic that we are here at a time just before Vietnam is about to be liberated," said Schneider. "I will now read a short wire that I've been asked to read by the Vietnamese people."

That went over like a lead balloon with the show's host, Frank Sinatra. He came out and read a letter from the Academy, apologizing for the remarks. But that was nothing compared to the reception Vanessa Redgrave got in 1978, when she jumped into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict:

“And pay tribute to you, and I think you should be very proud that in the last few weeks you've stood firm, and you have refused to be intimidated by a small bunch of Zionist hoodlums," said Redgrave to a chorus of boos from the audience. "Whose behavior," she went on, "whose behavior is an insult to the statute of Jews all over the world and to their great heroic record and their struggle against fascism and oppression.”

When Michael Moore picked up an Academy award in 2005 for his anti-Bush documentary “Fahrenheit 9/11,” you just knew it was coming.

"We live in a time where we have fictitious election results that elects a fictitious presid...

How the Oscar Speech Became a Political Manifesto

The Politics of Oscar Speeches, The High Priestess of Soul, America's Greatest Innovation

February 26, 2016: 1. FBI Standoff: What's Next for Apple | 2. The 3-Dimensional Chess of the Senate's Supreme Court Fight | 3. How Innovative Problem Solving Keeps You Safe | 4. America's Greatest Innovation: Winner Revealed | 5. How the Oscar Speech Became a Political Manifesto | 6. Films to Catch and Skip at the Box Office This Weekend | 7. Humanizing the High Priestess of Soul

The Politics of Oscar Speeches, The High Priestess of Soul, America's Greatest Innovation

Humanizing the High Priestess of Soul

Click on the audio player above to hear this interview.

Nina Simone, known as the "High Priestess of Soul," came to represent the music of the civil rights era.

Her life is the subject of a new Netflix documentary, "What Happened, Miss Simone?" The film is up for an Academy Award for best documentary this Sunday.

Jayson Jackson, a longtime music manager who's worked with Simone's modern-day contemporaries, like Lauryn Hill, is a producer on the documentary. He says that his quest started with an attempt to humanize an artist who to this day remains larger than life. 

Humanizing the High Priestess of Soul

Oscars Special: Return of the Western, Boston Accents, and #OscarsSoWhite

From “The Revenant” to “The Martian,” why do so many of this year’s most celebrated films hark back to a genre we thought was long gone — the Western? Plus, we hit the streets of Boston to find out why so many actors find a certain Northeastern accent so hard to pull off. Wendell Pierce of “The Wire” and “Selma” gives the Academy some pointers to fix their #OscarsSoWhite problem. And we finally find out what the heck a gaffer does.

Oscars Special: Return of the Western, Boston Accents, and #OscarsSoWhite