10 People You Didn’t Know Have Oscars

1. Uncle Ben

Cliff Robertson as Ben Parker in Spider-Man

No, not the rice mascot.

Cliff Robertson’s Ben Parker, beloved uncle to Peter Parker, was perhaps the best-judged performance in the entirety of Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man trilogy. The actor, who passed away in 2011 aged 88, was not familiar to younger audiences for anything other than this iconic role. So it will surprise some to learn that Robertson was the proud owner of an Academy Award for Best Actor, won in 1969 for his role in the film Charly.

Yep, that’ll win you an Oscar: Cliff Robertson in Charly

The disappointing flipside to this, however, is that the current Uncle Ben, Martin Sheen, has never won an Oscar. Mull on that for a moment, and then let’s move on.

2. This guy

I know that guy from something…

More like THAT guy! That guy is Fisher Stevens. A character actor known for his snide antagonists and sidekicks, he will be most familiar to viewers of the 1990s magic newspaper TV series Early Edition, and more surprisingly familiar to fans of the Short Circuit movies, in which he donned brown-face to play Steve Guttenberg’s Indian business partner Ben, taking the lead role in the sequel.

Well that’s just unfortunate

He also played an obnoxious boyfriend of Monica in an early episode of Friends, and played the villain in the ridiculous 1995 computer caper Hackers.

But when he’s not acting, Stevens is a director and producer, who notably (and not widely known-ly) produced the 2009 documentary The Cove, the film which people claimed they were seeing out of support for dolphins, but actually just wanted to catch a glimpse of Hayden Panettiere in a wetsuit. The Cove won Best Documentary, and Stevens was there to pick up the statue.

Lucky for some

3. Walton Goggins

Walton Goggins in TV’s Justified

Like Fisher Stevens’s Early Edition co-star Kyle Chandler (Zero Dark Thirty, Argo), The Shield actor Walton Goggins can be proud to have appeared in two Best Picture-nominated films this year – Django Unchained and Lincoln. In Django he played Billy Crash, all too comfortable with a burning-hot poker. In Lincoln he played nervous Democratic Congressman Clay Hawkins, whose backing-and-forthing on the subject of abolition much of the plot rests on. That’s some range right there.

But before any of this Goggins starred in and co-produced a short film called The Accountant, way back in 2001. That took home the Best Live Action Short Oscar, which he shared with director Ray McKinnon and producer Lisa Blount. Yet another person on the set of Django to have more Oscars than Leonardo DiCaprio.

4. Malcolm Tucker

Peter Capaldi in The Thick of It

Peter Capaldi is best known for playing Malcolm Tucker, the terror-striking Director of Communications for the British Government in satirical BBC comedy The Thick of It, and its spin-off movie In the Loop. Malcolm is one of TV’s greatest monsters, whose abuse-filled tirades make symphonies with profanities. On the flipside of that, some film fans will recognise him as the timid Danny Oldsen in the wonderful 1983 dramedy Local Hero, in which he falls in love with a girl with webbed-toes, believing she’s a mermaid.

But back in 1993 he directed the gloriously titled short film Franz Kafka’s It’s a Wonderful Life, which tied for Best Live Action Short with the film Trevor in 1995. You can watch the whole demented film here.

5. Keith Carradine

Keith Carradine, back in the day

The Carradine name has been tainted in recent years by rambling speeches about Superman, and autoerotic asphyxiation. But David’s half-brother Keith has kept up the good work begun in The Duellists and Southern Comfort with roles in TV’s Deadwood and Dexter. If any Carradine was going to have an Oscar under his belt, it was going to be him. And he does!

But what’s strangest about this is that he won his gong for Best Song. ‘I’m Easy’, from Robert Altman’s dramedic masterpiece Nashville, was not just performed by Carradine, but written by him as well. It’s a pretty damn good tune too, I’ll have you know.

6. Dean Pelton

Jim Rash has yet to win an Oscar for playing Dean Pelton

While audience’s expect to see Community’s Jim Rash dressed as Carmen Miranda before they’d imagine him in a tuxedo, Rash has a lot more to him than the gloriously flamboyantly clown he appears as on TV. Last year Rash took home a Best Adapted Screenplay Oscar for his work on Alexander Payne’s The Descendants.

While Payne gave the speech, Rash unwisely spent his time on stage impersonating a meme-worthy pose of Angelina Jolie, ensuring the speech would forever be incomprehensible to future generations.

7. Christine Lahti

Christine Lahti

Nowadays more famous for not actually being Allison Janney, Christine Lahti was one of the biggest stars of ’90s hospital drama Chicago Hope, and was a Best Supporting Actress nominee at the Oscars for Swing Shift back in 1984. But like so many on this list, her biggest achievement came as a Best Live Action Short Film award, which she won for directing 1995’s Lieberman in Love (in which she also co-starred with Danny Aiello). That tops Allison Janney’s two Emmys any day!

Not Christine Lahti

8. Homer Simpson

Wooo-hooo!

No, Homer Simpson has never actually won an Oscar. In fact 2007’s The Simpsons Movie wasn’t even nominated for Best Animated Feature. There is no Academy Award for best voice-acting (there should be), so Dan Castellaneta has never won an Oscar either. In fact, if any member of the Simpson family is likely to win an Oscar, it’s little Maggie Simpson, whose short adventure The Longest Daycare is nominated for Best Animated Short this Sunday.

But while Homer has never won an Oscar, he does have an Oscar, as revealed in the season 7 episode of The Simpsons ‘Team Homer’. Displaying his trophy collection, Homer is shown to have come into possession of the Best Supporting Actor Oscar won by Dr. Haing S. Ngor for The Killing Fields in 1985.

Haing S. Ngor

Which is a nice way of segueing into Ngor’s win. The physician was a first-time actor when he took the pivotal role of Dith Pran in The Killing Fields. He starred in a dozen lesser-known films before he was murdered by a street gang outside his Los Angeles home in 1996, only a month after ‘Team Homer’ aired. Out of sensitivity, for subsequent syndication and DVD release Homer’s Oscar was shown to be that of Don Ameche, won for 1985’s Cocoon.

9. Lionel Richie

The epitome of ’80s cool

Here’s a strange one. Not content with having No.1 songs with ‘Hello’ and ‘All Night Long (All Night)’, the ’80s R&B icon also has an Oscar to go with his Grammys. He won the little gold man for ‘Say You, Say Me’, which he composed for the now much-forgotten Cold War ballet drama White Nights (1985). More troubling is that the music video for ‘Hello’ wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. That thing is amazing.

10. This goat

She-Goat

Well no, obviously this bronze goat sculpture has never won an Oscar, but, and bear with me here, it does share a home with one. Pablo Picasso’s ‘She-Goat’, cast in 1952, is one of the most recognisable works in the permanent collection of The Museum of Modern Art in New York. MoMA has one of the oldest film departments of any museum in the world, and in 1978 had an Honorary Award bestowed upon it by the Academy, “for the contribution it has made to the public’s perception of movies as an art form”.

MoMA’s Oscar has an interesting history of its own, being the subject of a theft some years back. When it was recovered, a small patch of the figure’s crown had been scratched away by crooks eager to see just how much gold the statue contains (note: not very much, it’s a very thin coating). After the recovered Oscar returned from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences fully restored, it was locked away in a drawer for its own protection for several years. However, in happy news, MoMA’s Oscar was only this month returned to the Museum, where he now greets visitors at the film entrance on 53^rd Street. Hooray!

Home is where you hang your Oscar

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Wreck-It Ralph – Game changer

Hero for a day: Wreck-It Ralph tries his hand at Hero’s Duty

It is a widely held opinion that no good film based on a video game has yet been made, and it’s a hard point to argue against. But the culture around video games and its concept of infinite digital worlds has produced some fine stand-alone films, from charming ’80s family fun like Wizard, to reality-bending thrillers like David Cronenberg’s eXistenZ. But if any film paved the way for video games to be taken seriously in the movies, it was The King of Kong, the outstanding 2007 documentary about obsessive gameplay and retro fixation.

It’s hard to think of Wreck-It Ralph existing in a time before The King of Kong, and yet the idea was first pitched at Disney back in the 1980s. The set-up is reminiscent of Toy Story – when an arcade closes down for the night, the characters from various games take their leisure time, travelling between games or resting in the train station-like lobby inside the multi-socket plug that connects the games together.

Inside Fix-It Felix, a fictional 8-bit retro game still mercifully standing in the arcade after 30 years, time has taken its toll on the game’s badguy, Wreck-It Ralph. A Donkey Kong-like brute (Fix-It Felix is a window repairman to Mario’s plumber), Ralph dreams of being taken seriously by the denizens of the game, and not still treated like a villain when he clocks-off after closing. At an AA-style meeting for video game badguys, Ralph admits to his peers (cameos include Mario’s Bowser, Street Fighter 2’s M. Bison and Zangief, and Sonic the Hedgehog’s Dr. Eggman/Robotnik) that he doesn’t want to be a badguy any more. “Just because you are a badguy doesn’t mean you are a bad guy,” Zangief reassures him, but Ralph takes no solace in the good advice.

It’s good to be bad: Ralph attends a badguys’ anonymous group

To prove he is a hero, Ralph game jumps from his 8-bit pixellated comfort zone into the hi-def world of contemporary shoot-’em-ups in a game called Hero’s Duty (Halo meets Medal of Honor). Come morning, his absence from the Fix-It Felix game draws disappointment from arcade customers, and the manager is forced to mark the game “out of order”, making unplugging imminent. Felix himself teams up with a feisty female sergeant from Hero’s Duty to find Ralph and save their world.

Ralph’s rage issues make him an unlikely children’s movie hero, as his tantrums range from hormonal teenager to potential domestic abuser, but his upset is easy to appreciate and his journey makes him a calmer, happier person. Voiced by John C. Reilly, whose input into the character earned him a writing credit on the film, he is far gruffer than traditional Disney heroes – a less handsome or street-smart Aladdin, a less upbeat Pinocchio.

Much of the latter half of the film is set in the game Sugar Rush, a candy-themed version of Mario Kart where Bratz-like J-pop characters race across mountains of marshmallow and rivers of caramel. Here Ralph meets Vanellope, a childish outcast like himself, who due to faulty programming uncontrollably glitches into 1s and 0s, meaning she can’t take part in the actual game, or leave its world. Sarah Silverman’s potty-mouthed performance is at first highly irritating, but once Ralph and Vanellope develop a rapport there is an undeniable sweetness in the oddball coupling, he 20 times her size.

Manic pixel dream girl: Vanellope von Schweetz gets ready to race

Jack McBrayer (of 30 Rock fame) is awkwardly charming as Felix, but Jane Lynch steals the film as the no-nonsense Sergeant Calhoun, a far tougher version of her Glee character Sue Sylvester. Calhoun is “programmed with the most tragic backstory ever”, and nabs many of the film’s most brilliantly melodramatic lines, referring to the unsettling world of Sugar Rush as a “candy-coated heart of darkness”. Alan Tudyk hams it wonderfully as King Candy, the flamboyant ruler of Sugar Rush, taking his cues from the Mad Hatter in the 1951 Disney Alice in Wonderland.

While the story is mostly predictable (barring one excellent twist near the end), Wreck-It Ralph’s greatest achievement is in its creation of its video-game world. Like Rex the dinosaur discussing his being “from Mattel” in Toy Story, the characters know the rules of their complicated world – there is no Buzz Lightyear-style confusion. In addition to the countless cameos by famous game personalities (Mario is notable in his absence), there are several clever nods to more obscure games and gameplay rules. Minor characters in Fix-It Felix move in stuttered pixellated spurts, even when fully realised in 3D animation. The 1980s beer-serving game Tapper is where characters go to drink, and a drunk game character walks mindlessly into a wall like a World of Warcraft avatar with the forward key held down. 3D versions of Pong figures, massive cuboids instead of bars, continue to pass the ball back and forth even outside their game. Even more subtle, the security code to a vault is the “access any level” cheat code from the original Sonic the Hedgehog.

8-Bittersweet Life: Felix gets the pie, Ralph gets the angry mob

Despite its charms and humour, Wreck-It Ralph is let down by its look, lacking the gloss of Pixar or DreamWorks’s latest outputs. So much of the film is set in the Sugar Rush game that the artificial colours and textures begin to grate visually, although the countless puns on sweets are more than welcome (Felix nearly drowns in a pit of Nesquiksand!). The added 3D throws up very few moments of engrossing depth, even during the climactic race, so opt for the glasses-off version.

But this is not an ugly film, and it is often very playful with its look as it switches between 3D and pixellated visuals – the closing credits feature the heroes popping up in several classic games tracing decades of video game development. Sometimes moving, regularly funny, often exciting and always far more clever than it needs to be, Wreck-It Ralph is a real treat worth putting all your quarters into for a fun arcade adventure.

It would be unfair not to mention the Disney digital short, Paperman, which precedes Wreck-It Ralph; a gorgeous, simple romantic tale, told in black and white, about a pencil jockey trying to attract the attention of a beautiful stranger. Make sure you’re not late to the cinema.

4/5

(originally published at http://www.filmireland.net)