Ida Lupino's Anniversary, Oscar Race, Lolita's Anniversary, Bradley Cooper video

Happy Anniversary, Ida Lupino!


A&E Biography Of The Great Ida Lupino. Featuring Interviews with Roddy McDowall, Gena Rowlands & other Friends & Family. Narrated By Peter Graves.

Ida Lupino, promotional portrait for Woman in Hiding (1950)

Nineteen fifty was a phenomenal year for Lupino. With the release of Not Wanted, Never Fear, Outrage, and Hard, Fast and Beautiful, she became Hollywood's golden girl again, as she had been a decade before. As recognition of her new industry status, she was asked to present the Oscar for best director at the 22nd Academy Awards ceremony. Applause swept over her as she stepped to the podium. She announced Joseph Mankiewicz as the winner for A Letter to Three Wives. Said Mankiewicz: "Miss Lupino is the only woman in the Directors Guild, and the prettiest." The press hailed her extraordinary talent. Holiday magazine gave Ida a special award in recognition of her artistic courage: "To the woman in the motion picture industry who has done the most to improve standards and to honestly present American life, ideals and people to the rest of the world."  -"Ida Lupino: A Biography" (1996) by William Donati

Ava DuVernay got sensational reviews for Selma but she did not make the list of nominees for Best Director. However, she did make Oscar history as the first African American woman to direct a film nominated for Best Picture. David Oyelowo, who amazingly played Dr. Martin Luther King in Selma and also got sensational reviews, did not get an Oscar nomination for Best Actor. In over 80 years of the Academy Awards, less than 10 women have been recognized in the category of Best Director.

Let's talk Hollywood history and another trailblazing woman: Ida Lupino. She directed films and TV shows after establishing herself as one of Hollywood's best actresses. Back in the late 1920s and the 1930s, there was one female director in Hollywood. She was Dorothy Arzner. She was the first woman to direct a performer to an Oscar nomination.

Actress Ruth Chatterton, known to many classic film fans as the actress who played the vain, exasperating wife in William Wyler's Dodsworth (1936) was a Best Actress nominee for 1930's Sarah and Son, directed by Ms. Arzner and co-starring Fredric March.

Then came actress Ida Lupino. She started making Hollywood movies in the 1930s. Although she slammed across some solid screen performances, she was never nominated for an Oscar. Although she was a pioneer for women in the field of television as a director, she never received a Lifetime Emmy. She opened the door for future actresses who also became directors. Women such as Barbra Streisand, Jodie Foster and Penny Marshall. Ida should've been given a Lifetime Emmy. She was an actress, scriptwriter, director and a producer. I still feel a film/TV scholarship award for women should be named in Ida Lupino honor. Source: bobbyriverstv.blogspot.com

Bradley Cooper believes the debate surrounding American Sniper is a good thing; Eddie Redmayne's Golden Globe was stopped during baggage check at the airport; and Patricia Arquette felt like a grown-up at Disneyland when she heard she was nominated for an Oscar.

These are just some of the insights and anecdotes shared by the Best Actress and Best Actor hopefuls before they entered the annual Oscar Nominees Luncheon on Monday afternoon at the Beverly Hilton Hotel. Michael Keaton, Emma Stone, Reese Witherspoon and nominees from all 24 categories caught up with each other at the luncheon Source: www.hollywoodreporter.com

"There is a realistic chance that American Sniper could ambush the Oscars," says Tom O'Neil of awards website GoldDerby.com. Because it broke into the race late, no one knows Sniper's strengths yet. But Saturday's Directors Guild Awards will be a great test for whether it can emerge victorious Oscar night, O'Neil says. If Eastwood wins best film, "then Sniper could emerge as the front-runner."

Dave Karger says it's conceivable that Cooper could "pull off an Adrien Brody". However, Golden Globe winners Michael Keaton (Birdman) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything), who also won a SAG award, are possibly a little too far ahead.

Actor Eddie Redmayne won a SAG Award, and if history is any judge, it makes him a strong contender for a best actor Oscar. O'Neil sees a chance for Cooper, however, because he has all the Oscar elements important to win: He portrays a real-life person, plus there's an impressive physical transformation involved. "He put on 40 pounds, facial hair and a Texas twang. He has a lot going for him."

Exhibitor Relations analyst Jeff Bock says the actor category is the best chance for a Sniper upset, mostly because of Cooper's two previous nominations for Silver Linings Playbook and American Hustle. "I can't imagine it gets shut out," he says of the movie. "That'd be a pretty sweet reward." Source: www.usatoday.com

Bradley Cooper reading "Lolita" to Suki Waterhouse in a Parisian park, August 2013. Cooper is 17 years older than his girlfriend British model Suki.

60th Anniversary of Lolita (1955) - Nabokov finished Lolita on 6 December 1953, five years after starting it. The manuscript was turned down, with more or less regret, by Viking, Simon & Schuster, New Directions, Farrar, Straus, and Doubleday. After these refusals and warnings, he finally resorted to publication in France. Lolita was published in September 1955, as a pair of green paperbacks "swarming with typographical errors". Eventually, at the very end of 1955, Graham Greene, in the (London) Sunday Times, called it one of the three best books of 1955. This statement provoked a response from the (London) Sunday Express, whose editor John Gordon called it "the filthiest book I have ever read" and "sheer unrestrained pornography." Today, Lolita is considered one of the finest novels written in the 20th century. In 1998, it came fourth in a list by the Modern Library of the greatest English-language novels of the 20th century.(Wiki)

What makes Lolita “flame” is first of all a love affair with the real America. (“Nothing is more exhilarating than philistine vulgarity…. ”) It is an America where language and event make a seamless web of wonders, terrors, revelations, and portents. English, for Mr. Nabokov, is an instrument for the wildest and most mysteriously fitting shifts of tone, the most cheerfully extroverted, slang-relishing, literate verbal tomfoolery. Lolita’s chief actor, Humbert Humbert, a Swiss “salad of racial genes,” is afflicted with about equal degrees of wit, ennui, taste, and a hideously overt form of nympholepsy; the disease of Ruskin and Lewis Carroll given free and tender rein in a wilderness of American motels, suburbs, and progressive institutions. Lolita is a burlesque of Freudianism that Freud would have had to enjoy. I am inclined to think that the burlesque takes one more turn, at least, than we would expect of any previous example of the “confessional novel” or “roman noir” (Mr. Dupee’s terms). All Mr. Nabokov has to confess, I think, is imagination enough to project the charms of a Phedre or Cleopatra into the skin of an odious suburban bobby-soxer. Source: www.newrepublic.com


Bradley Cooper (You're the Reason) video featuring pictures and stills of Bradley Cooper, with his co-stars Heather Graham, Jennifer Connelly, Scarlett Johansson, Jennifer Lawrence, Amy Adams, Sienna Miller, with girlfriend Suki Waterhouse, etc.