Word: onscreen
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...Washington detective, investigates a homicide at the well-known Pennsylvania Avenue address. These films are only the most recent manifestations of a trend that dates back to Dave, the 1993 comedy in which Kevin Kline plays a gentle presidential impostor. Since then we have probably seen more Presidents onscreen than, say, strippers and volcanologists combined. We have seen Presidents and ex-Presidents as the lead in a romantic comedy (The American President), as crabby partners in a road movie (My Fellow Americans), as an ambiguous foil for action hero Harrison Ford (Clear and Present Danger), as a work-obsessed...
...Ford, if not Wills, shrewdly sensed, the imposing physical presence and the cranky large-heartedness Wayne conveyed onscreen gave good dramatic weight to this sense of obligation. But by 1979, when he died, most of us no longer found that idea or the ideal of the frontier very useful. Our culture had ceased to celebrate people who bound their lives to the defense of the simple moralities that Wayne embodied--moralities that even liberals, deploring his reactionary politics, found they missed. Wayne's legend, his apparent immortality, the sources of which keep eluding Wills, derive from that curiously haunting sense...
...necessitate the same maverick spirit in the final balloting. My suspicion is that Hollywood is still far more predictable than one might think. The nominations themselves, however hip, bear much in common with Old Academy tradition, and if you don't think lifetime achievement, physical affliction, and onscreen heroics can still push a nominee to the podium, you don't know your Oscars...
...Will Win: Realistically, Secrets Lies lost the minute an actress changed her tampon onscreen. Likewise, Fargo will never survive its woodchipper finale. Even though Patient once seemed poised to dominate (and it won the Golden Globe), I'm seeing a tough three-way fight with Shine and Jerry Maguire. Still, with nominations in the most categories, Patient seems to have the broadest-based support in the homestretch...
Hedy Lamarr is always ahead of her time. In 1933 she pranced naked onscreen in Ecstasy. Now Lamarr, 82, is being recognized for a different breakthrough. The Electronic Frontier Foundation is honoring her for a 1942 patent that anticipated frequency-hopping technology used in satellites and cellular phones...