"amadeus"

The 2014 Oscar nominations are just out, and once again, this year’s Best Picture nominees demonstrate the connections that great movies have to each other. To illustrate, here’s a list of the current nominees matched with previous winners that share some common themes.

Many memorable films that aren’t strictly musicals have centered on the piano — those who play it, or teach the playing of it. Interestingly this discipline born of talent is not always portrayed in the most glamorous of settings or circumstances. In fact, as the following titles confirm, quite often the piano is the one concrete symbol of cultivation in an otherwise base and misguided world.

We decided to look at a few of the past winners (and losers) to try to discern what might have contributed to some of the more head-scratching wins.

James Brown, the "Godfather of Soul," will finally get his due in director Tate Taylor’s "Get On Up," out this week some 12 years after Brian Grazer (who co-produced it with Mick Jagger) first tried to get the project off the ground.   Early reviews champion star Chadwick Boseman’s kinetic performance as "The Hardest Working Man in Show Business." Congrats, Chadwick: those are very big (and very active) shoes to fill. This is just the latest addition to a treasure trove of music biopics that have made some serious box office noise over the decades. Below are ten that deserve a debut or encore performance on your home screen. Pick one, and give your eyes and ears a treat.  

What happens after an actor or actress wins an Academy Award?   The assumption is that the performer’s career skyrockets. Offers come pouring in. The thespian’s price tag certainly rises. What had been the usual “on-and-off” career of the struggling working actor suddenly gets a lot more hectic; members of the paparazzi who may not have known him or her from Adam (or Eve) are suddenly camped out on their doorstep.  This is what often occurs when one of these statuettes ends up in your hands. But not always. 

It was gratifying, if not particularly surprising, to see Cillian Murphy capture the Best Actor Oscar this year. He’d just starred in the year’s most critically acclaimed film, “Oppenheimer,” which also took Best Picture. It was a big performance in a very big movie.

Does the name Dick Smith ring a bell? Probably not, I’d guess. So you’ll be surprised when I tell you that Mr. Smith, who passed away on July 30th at age 92, was actually responsible for some of the most memorable and astonishing moments in American film. His area of expertise: the unsung art of movie makeup. Smith — a Yale graduate who’d originally wanted to become a dentist — was a veteran of both TV and films. On the small screen, he worked on the campy sixties horror soap, “Dark Shadows,” and was Emmy-nominated four times, winning one for transforming a then-young Hal Holbrook into a considerably older Mark Twain in 1967’s “Mark Twain Tonight!”