No "Love" at the Oscars

The Academy Awards came and went this year, and one of my favorite films of 2010, True Grit, got no love at the Oscars, despite receiving 10 nominations! While The King's Speech won best picture, it tied with Inception for the most number of wins--four. (All of the wins for Inception were much deserved technical awards.) Otherwise, the winners were evenly distributed--The Social Network won three awards, while The Fighter, Toy Story 3 and Alice in Wonderland each won two. Black Swan received one win, as did The Wolfman (for make-up, which was the only thing in that movie that was worth even mentioning). Despite all that sharing of Oscar gold, Joel and Ethan Coen's adaptation of Arkansan Charles Portis' beloved novel didn't make the cut.

Our Home Fry-ed Movie for March also got no love on Oscar night, even though it received six nominations including best picture. Love Affair, directed by Leo McCarey and starring Irene Dunne and Charles Boyer, didn't have a chance. It was bested in four of its nominated categories by Gone With the Wind, that went on to receive a record-setting ten Academy Awards. In the other two categories, it was beat out by Mr. Smith Goes to Washington and The Wizard of Oz. If you're going to get beaten, this is good company!

Like True Grit, 1939's Love Affair is a great movie and well worth seeing, even though both got the snub on Oscar night. The first showings of Love Affair are Friday, March 25 at 8 p.m., Saturday, March 26 at midnight and Sunday, March 27 at 11 a.m. on UALR University Television (Channel 61 on Little Rock Comcast and 99 on U-Verse). You can also catch it at various times in April.

And Then There Was... The Devil?

I recently watched the 2010 movie Devil, produced by M. Night Shyamalan. It's the first film in a trilogy he's producing based on some "Twilight Zone" type stories that he comes up with and then passes on to other writers and directors to complete. I was interested to find out that part of Night's inspiration for Devil came from Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None, which was adapted to the screen in 1945 and featured on Home Fry-ed Movies in February.

Devil is about five people that get trapped on an elevator in a high-rise office building. One by one, they get murdered, and we discover that one of them may be the devil in disguise. As we get to know each of the characters, we discover that they all have some guilt from their past.

And Then There Were None was about 10 people trapped on an island, who get killed off one by one. Like the characters in Devil, they all have committed some crime (or at least look like they have), and one of them is the murderer (although he or she is probably not the devil).

Hollywood is heavily into recycling, especially when it comes to stories.