Monster movie fans will forever be indebted to special effects guru Ray Harryhausen.

Today’s filmmakers can conjure up any creature they can imagine courtesy of computer technology. But for much of the 20th century directors had two stark choices – dress up an actor in a garish costume or pick up the phone and call Harryhausen for help.

The FX maestro perfected the art of stop-motion animation, the kind that brought early movie monsters like King Kong to life. Harryhausen’s work is front and center in “Mysterious Island,” the 1961 thriller just released on Blu-ray. The story of Civil War soldiers deposited on an island filled with danger roars to life whenever Harryhausen’s handiwork shuffles onto the screen.

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And the Oscar doesn’t go to…

An incurably snarky acquaintance of mine has recently introduced me to the word “suckage.” Apparently this magic word can qualify as a noun, verb, adjective, and with a little creative thought, a personal pronoun as well. While I am not sure I agree with the idea that this is the Swiss army knife of words, I think that this is the perfect word to express how I feel about whatever process is used to figure out who gets honored with an Oscar statue.

While there is always a healthy debate over who won the industry’s most aesthetically unpleasing award, there is not often a lot of discussion about the folks who were completely snubbed by an academy dedicated to the principals and values of “suckage.”

Here are 10 people, films, or entities that should be displaying Oscar on their mantles but aren’t.

Ray Harryhausen
Anybody watching Ray Harryhausen work would think he was just a middle aged man playing with dolls. While this is probably not uncommon in Hollywood, especially in any residence owned by somebody from the Sheen family, what was really going on was a master craftsman at work. Ray may not have invented the stop motion technique, but he certainly perfected it. During his prime he was a one man “Industrial Light and Magic” who inserted world class special effects into mediocre (at best) films. His long shadow fell over, and influenced an entire generation of special effects enthusiasts and without his groundbreaking work the world would probably not have films like Jurassic Park and the Lord of the Rings trilogy. It is a crime against nature that, other than a special technical Oscar, this man was never honored for his magical work in a specific film. 

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Late last spring, through the auspices of a mutual friend, I spent an afternoon visiting with eighty-nine-year-old author Ray Bradbury. Walking upstairs to his den, I found the genial (and, for the record, fairly conservative) writer dressed in a rumpled shirt and boxer shorts, surrounded by a sea of awards and papers and memorabilia of every description, and happily watching Turner Classic Movies on a big-screen TV. “Isn’t this channel great?” he enthused, telling me how excited he had been to guest host there a year earlier. We spent the next hour talking about films — his early days as a local boy visiting the studios on roller skates and asking stars for autographs, his long friendship with special effects maven Ray Harryhausen, his experience writing the screenplay to Moby Dick (1956) for director John Huston.

And all the while TCM played in the background, like an old friend.

I’ve since reflected on how Turner Classic Movies has grown over the years into one of the most universally admired cultural forums in America. It’s a familiar presence in households of all political persuasions. If you like old movies, you like TCM, period.

That’s why the mini-uproar here at Big Hollywood last week was so disheartening. For those of you who missed it: during an on-air introduction to the 1957 movie A Face in the Crowd, TCM host Ben Mankiewicz gave legions of conservative viewers a collective poke in the eye, by way of a not-so-veiled sneer at talk-show host Glenn Beck. You can see the sad spectacle for yourself by clicking over to the TCM website, but here are the money quotes: (more…)

Looking back at The Karate Kid (1984), which turned twenty-five years old this week, a thought keeps recurring.

Wow. . . Avildsen made it work twice.

John G. Avildsen is, in some ways, a director of little distinction when compared with well-known marquee names like Spielberg, Scorsese, Nolan, and Tarantino. The vast majority of his movies are utterly forgotten by the average filmgoer — indeed, he’s been nominated for Worst Director at The Razzies three times. And yet, like Victor Fleming decades earlier with his twin successes The Wizard of Oz and Gone with the Wind (both 1939 — read a great recent article on Fleming here), Avildsen has twice punched way above his weight, netting himself an Oscar for Best Director and giving birth to some of the most memorable moments in motion picture history. (more…)