Come Back a Star: A Movie Award Podcast

It was a great award season, but largely because we added a few that weren't included by the academy.

A cowboy movie? A social commentary? The story of people's personal evolution or lack thereof? It's tough to say what Cimarron is. It's definitely a Western that tries to deviate from the genre's typical storyline, but will that deviation pay off? Listen in and find out!

The movie that launched the prestigious career of Marlene Dietrich was not nominated for Best Picture despite its international acclaim. The film was done almost shot for shot in both German and English. With a variably bilingual German cast, we decided to watch the German version that is considered the better of the two. Technically the German version was not even eligible for the Academy Awards, but hey, this is the Notscar: A Movie Award Podcast Movie Award. We'll make up our own rules! Will the movie get a nomination from us? Tune in to find out!

Happy Holidays! Enjoy the season with family, friends, a warm drink, and a gangster movie about an ultra-violent mobster and his partner who just wants to dance!

The Public Enemy wasn't a nominee back in 1931, but we're covering it anyway because it sure has been seen by more people than any of the Academy's nominees for this year.

Early in the 20th century, the joke was that theaters would put on a play adaptation of East Lynne whenever they had just produced a flop. The story was just that well known and loved. When motion pictures came along, the novel was adapted for film SEVERAL times before this 1931 talkie. This adaptation keeps the principle characters' names the same, but otherwise re-writes decent portions of the story. The result is a more modern story that lacks some of the melodramatic absurdity of the original. Sadly the last twelve minutes of the film are missing. The big question is, will the changes made to this height of melodrama be enough to make us care about the missing footage.

Fresh off the presses! It's His Girl Friday sans the chemistry between actors. Not bad, just not His Girl Friday. Still, does The Front Page have merits in its own right? It did launch a genre for one.

Skippy took us a little by surprise. Great child actors are difficult to find, so finding a whole group of them to work on this film is an accomplishment itself. Jackie Cooper, 9 years old at the time, held the record for youngest Best Actor nominee for almost 50 years. That said, we've seen great performances in mediocre movies before. Will Skippy as a whole measure up to Jackie Cooper's acting? How well does a child-focused movie handle our first real look at the Great Depression? Listen in and find out!

It's The Patriot! Except it's not the missing 1928 Lubitsch film. It's the 2000 Mel Gibson movie. Get ready to dodge some musket fire and awkward moments about slavery! The Patriot *wasn't* nominated for Best Picture, so we won't be covering it in our 2000 season. Was it robbed though? Did it deserve a nod from The Academy? Listen in and hear what we think.

Trader Horn is just bad - both aesthetically and morally bad. Perhaps it is still an important movie to acknowledge-- as the worst example of the ethical lows Hollywood can stoop to.