Flickgrrl

A reader who asks not to be identified complains that with the exception of Penelope Cruz in Volver, none of this year’s Oscar nominees for best actress appeals to his libido.

Well, Jack (name changed to protect the guilty), guess you aren’t familiar with the pre-Queen, pre-Prime Suspect career of Helen Mirren. Directors used to want her for her body; now they want her for her body of work.

Before she donned QEII’s sensible tweeds, Dame Helen famously appeared wearing little more than a strategically-placed hand and a smile in Age of Consent (1969) as a painter’s model to an artist inspired by Norman Lindsay (of Sirens notoriety). She also played the nude descending a staircase in the biopic Savage Messiah, as muse to Vorticist sculptor Henri Gaudier-Brzeska. No one who saw The Cook, The Thief, His Wife & Her Lover will forget MIrren’s voluptuous beauty.

A pair of free passes to the next Mirren feature to the first reader who correctly answers the question: Which improbably sexy 1968 film co-stars this year’s Oscar nominees Helen Mirren and Judi Dench in the near-altogether?

By the way, Jack, none of this year’s best actor nominees knock my knees, but they’re all damned fine actors. Speaking of which…

From Fast Times at Ridgemont High through Good Morning, Vietnam, The Color of Money and The Crying Game, Forest Whitaker has been the screen’s gentle giant, typically playing a guy who lives quietly in his head. With the exceptions of Bird and Ghost Dog, in which he starred, he has been a reliable support for marquee names. With his flamboyant, flame-snorting performance as Ugandan dictator Idi Amin Dada in The Last King of Scotland, one of the screen’s most interior performers exteriorizes his rage. It is one of the most dramatic persona change-ups in acting history. Switching gears gets the attention of the Academy, as when Jack Lemmon, passed over for comedy roles in Some Like it Hot and The Apartment, got serious – and an Oscar -- for his role in Save the Tiger.

When Lemmon finally collected his long-deferred prize in 1973, he cracked, “I had a speech prepared in 1959 [for Some Like It Hot], but I forgot it.” A certain much-nominated director might follow his example….

Along with Alfred Hitchcock, Stanley Kubrick, Spike Lee and Orson Welles, Martin Scorsese belongs to a very exclusive club: Legendary Directors Without Oscars, a/k/a The Academy Snub Club.

That’s due to change when the maker of Raging Bull and The Aviator is expected to win a best director statuette for The Departed, his ultra-violent and ultra-enjoyable story starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Matt Damon, respectively, as a police mole in the Boston mob and a mob mole in the Boston police.

As is frequently the custom, Scorsese will not win the prize for what is regarded as his best work. What do you think his best film is? The Aviator, Gangs of New York, Goodfellas, The Last Temptation of Christ or Raging Bull – all films for which he was nominated?

Or is it The Age of Innocence, The Color of Money, Taxi Driver, The Last Waltz or Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore? – Scorsese films that look even better now than when they were released?

Because they’re in heavy rotation on cable right now, and because their implicit violence has deeper resonance than the explicit sequences of Raging Bull and Goodfellas, I’m inclined towards The Aviator and The Age of Innocence, exquisite variations on Scorsese’s consistent theme, the crashing and burning of American dreamers. What’s your choice? Why? Show your work.

Join me in the annual Oscar prayer, invoked 55 years ago by emcee Danny Kaye: “The Academy asks that no acceptance speech be longer than the movie itself.”