I guess we’ve all helped to kill the Academy Awards.  Now anyone can predict the winners with a reasonably high success rate.  Just pick up any magazine or newspaper (on- or off-line) and someone is there to tell you who to pick in your Oscar pool.  Everyone seems to know that the winner of the DGA [...]

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Merle Oberon died at 68 in 1979 but she would have turned 100 over this past weekend.  I imagine that most people remember her as Cathy, opposite Laurence Olivier’s Heathcliff, in William Wyler’s beloved 1939 screen version of Wuthering Heights.  It was a TV favorite of mine from my teenage years, but it has never [...]

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Thanks to four consecutive films made over a two-year period (1948-49), Betty Garrett became a bright light of the MGM musical:  as love interest to Mickey Rooney in Words and Music; as part of the quartet (along with Esther Williams, Ricardo Montalban, and Red Skelton) that introduced the Oscar-winning “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in Neptune’s Daughter; and, most memorably, [...]

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There is certainly enough press about this February 6th being what would have been the 100th birthday of Ronald Reagan.  Far less will be written about 02-06-11 also being the occasion of John Lund’s hundredth b-day.  While considering what to blog about, I thought, “Do I devote a post to Reagan and perhaps talk about my love [...]

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