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With his Best Actor Oscar nomination for “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” Chadwick Boseman is the first actor posthumously nominated for an Academy Award since Heath Ledger.

Ledger was nominated and won Best Supporting Actor at the 2009 ceremony for “The Dark Knight.” It’s widely anticipated Boseman will also win an Oscar at the 93rd annual Academy Awards in April for his “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” performance.

See 2021 Oscars nominations full list

Throughout Oscars history, there have been multiple people nominated for an Academy Award after their death. Before Boseman, the most recent posthumous nominee was “Fences” playwright August Wilson, who received a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay at the 2017 ceremony. Before Wilson, Walt Martin received a nomination for Best Sound Mixing for “American Sniper” at the 2015 ceremony.

The last posthumous Oscar winner was producer Gil Friesen, who won Best Documentary at the 2013 ceremony for “20 Feet From Stardom.”

Boseman almost...

Hal Roach looks on as technicians install Vitaphone equipment in his studio screening room, ca. 1928. (Click on the image to enlarge it.) 'A Century of Sound': Q&A with former UCLA Preservation Officer Robert Gitt about the evolution of film sound technology Long before multi-track Dolby stereo and digital sound technology, there were the Kinetophone and the Vitaphone systems – not to mention organ and piano players at movie houses. Much of that is discussed in A Century of Sound, which chronicles the evolution of film sound from the late 19th century to the mid-1970s. A Century of Sound has been split into two parts, with a third installment currently in the planning stages. They are: Vol. 1, “The Beginning, 1876-1932,” which came out on DVD in 2007. Vol. 2, “The Sound of Movies: 1933-1975,” which came out on Blu-ray in 2015. The third installment will bring the presentation into the 21st century.

Ann Blyth movies: TCM schedule on August 16, 2013 (photo: ‘Our Very Own’ stars Ann Blyth and Farley Granger) See previous post: "Ann Blyth Today: Light Singing and Heavy Drama on TCM." 3:00 Am One Minute To Zero (1952). Director: Tay Garnett. Cast: Robert Mitchum, Ann Blyth, William Talman. Bw-106 mins. 5:00 Am All The Brothers Were Valiant (1953). Director: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Robert Taylor, Stewart Granger, Ann Blyth. C-95 mins. 6:45 Am The King’S Thief (1955). Director: Robert Z. Leonard. Cast: Ann Blyth, Edmund Purdom, David Niven. C-79 mins. Letterbox Format. 8:15 Am Rose Marie (1954). Director: Mervyn LeRoy. Cast: Ann Blyth, Howard Keel, Fernando Lamas. C-104 mins. Letterbox Format. 10:00 Am The Great Caruso (1951). Director: Richard Thorpe. Cast: Mario Lanza, Ann Blyth, Dorothy Kirsten, Jarmila Novotna, Richard Hageman, Carl Benton Reid, Eduard Franz, Ludwig Donath, Alan Napier, Pál Jávor, Carl Milletaire, Shepard Menken, Vincent Renno, Nestor Paiva, Peter Price, Mario Siletti, Angela Clarke,...

Ann Blyth today: Light songs and heavy drama on TCM Ann Blyth, a 1940s Universal leading lady best remembered for her Oscar-nominated performance as Joan Crawford’s cute-but-sociopathic teenage daughter in Warner Bros.’ Mildred Pierce, is Turner Classic Movies’ "Summer Under the Stars" star on Friday, August 16, 2013. Note: Today, Ann Blyth, one of the earliest surviving Oscar nominees in the acting categories, turns 85 years old. (See: “Ann Blyth Movies: TCM Schedule.”) (Photo: Ann Blyth ca. 1955.) First, the good news: Ann Blyth is a likable, talented actress and singer, and it’s great that TCM is dedicating a whole day to her movies. The bad news: As mentioned above, Ann Blyth was mostly (1944-1952) a Universal star; TCM is presenting only one of Blyth’s Universal movies, Brute Force (1947), which has been shown before. In other words, not a chance of finally having the opportunity to catch Ann Blyth in B...

If not for a last minute change, legendary opera star Maria Callas would have been the female lead in The Guns of Navarone.

Opera superstar Maria Callas was set to make her movie debut in Carl Foreman’s iconic war film The Guns Of Navarone, according to a new book, The Making Of The Guns Of Navarone launched this weekend at the Bradford Widescreen Film Festival (April 26-29) by Scottish film historian Brian Hannan.

The singer had scandalised the world by her affair with Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who would later marry Jackie Kennedy, widow of assassinated president John F Kennedy. Callas was first choice for the role of the older female Greek partisan. Producer Carl Foreman promised ‘mucho love scenes’ with star Gregory Peck.

Commented Hannan, ‘At the time, Maria Callas was the most famous woman in the world, a fiery mixture of Princess Diana and Madonna, the...

Linda Darnell, Ann Sothern, Jeanne Crain, A Letter to Three Wives DGA Awards vs. Academy Awards Pt.2: Foreign, Small, Controversial Movies Have Better Luck at the Oscars Since pre-1970 Directors Guild Award finalists often consisted of more than five directors, it was impossible to get an exact match for the DGA's and the Academy's lists of nominees. In the list below, the years before 1970 include DGA finalists (DGA) who didn't receive an Academy Award nod and, if applicable, those Academy Award-nominated directors (AMPAS) not found in the — usually much lengthier — DGA list. The label "DGA/AMPAS" means the directors in question received nominations for both the DGA Award and the Academy Award. The DGA Awards vs. Academy Awards list below goes from 1948 (the DGA Awards' first year) to 1952. Follow-up posts will cover the ensuing decades. The number in parentheses next to "DGA" indicates that year's number of DGA finalists if other than five.

Ann Blyth is Turner Classic Movies Star of the Evening tonight, as part of TCM's "The Essentials" film series. [Ann Blyth Movie Schedule.] Opera- and Broadway-trained Ann Blyth began her film career in the mid-1940s at Universal, appearing in light B musicals opposite Donald O'Connor and/or Peggy Ryan, among them The Merry Monahans, Chip Off the Old Block, and Babes on Swing Street. Blyth's big break came in 1945, when — following back surgery — she played Joan Crawford's pathologically selfish daughter Veda in Michael Curtiz's classic film noir-cum-melodrama Mildred Pierce. A well-deserved Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination followed, and so did leads in darker, bigger-budgeted productions, among them Jules Dassin's Brute Force (1947), with Burt Lancaster; Zoltan Korda's A Woman's Vengeance (1948), opposite Charles Boyer; and Michael Gordon's film version of Lillian Hellman's Another Part of the Forest (1948), a prequel to The Little Foxes. Unfortunately, TCM isn't showing any of Blyth's hard-to-find Universal titles.

By Doug Gerbino

Warner Archive has just released three classic silent (or part-silent) films. The Merry Widow (1925), Don Juan (1926) and Noah's Ark (1929). These three films are among the best-remembered hits of the late silent, early sound era. First, let's start with The Merry Widow (1925, MGM). This film stars Mae Murray and John Gilbert and was directed by Erich von Stroheim. Much has been documented about von Stroheim's excesses as a director. This was his first film after the infamous debacle known as Greed. Hollywood legend has it that while going through the daily rushes of this film with MGM chief Irving Thalberg, von Stroheim showed a single 10-minute take of one the character's shoe closet. When Thalberg questioned the 10 minute shot of shoes, von Stroheim said, "This is to establish that the character has a foot fetish." Thalberg supposedly replied, "And you have a footage fetish!" Loosely based on the...

Ann Blyth, who received a Best Supporting Actress Oscar nomination for the film noir Mildred Pierce (1945), is pictured above during a discussion following a screening of the Joan Crawford classic at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills on Monday, June 14, 2010. Mildred Pierce was shown as part of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ "Oscar Noir" series. In the movie, Blyth plays Mildred Pierce’s conniving, selfish daughter. Crawford plays Mildred. A Universal contract player in the 1940s and an MGM contractee in the ’50s, Blyth appeared in about three dozen movies from 1944 to 1957. In addition to Mildred Pierce, Blyth’s other important movies include A Woman’s Vengeance (1947), Brute Force (1947), Another Part of the Forest (1948), The Great Caruso (1951), All the Brothers Were Valiant (1953), The Student Prince (1954), and The Helen Morgan Story [...]...