Author: Alan Kuhl Graham

One Best Picture After Another #2: The Broadway Melody (1929)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

It seems fitting that the first Academy Award for a Sound Picture should go to a musical. The arrival of the Talking Picture had caused all sorts of chaos in Hollywood as it struggled to get to grips with the new technology. However filling the Big Screen with songs was an immediate winner when it came to using the Modern Day Marvel That Is Sound™

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #282: The BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings Part Three: Stephen Oliver, The Composer For The King

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I think many people remember the first time that they discovered music that really fired the imagination. Music that wasn’t just the signature to a tale, but an integral part of the experience. If you wanted to imagine the other worlds of a tale – just a few bars of a theme and your mind begins to inhabit a whole new universe.

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One Best Picture After Another #1: Wings (1927)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

Many years ago a movie journalist gave me a very good insight into the type of films that win the Best Picture Oscar. The winner, they argued, will tend to be the film that best reflects the type of film Hollywood – at that time – wants to be making. Not necessarily the films that they know they need to make in order to bring in the money, nor the most technically adventurous or innovative. Nor even the most critically acclaimed. It’ll be the film that the Academy voters working in the industry look at and think: “Yes! That’s the type of film I wanted to make when I chose this career.”

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One Best Picture After Another: Overture

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – our new fortnightly blog where Barista Alan will attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. Before it all begins in earnest tomorrow, here’s his explanation as to why he embarked on this madness.

When it comes to the Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s an adage that goes: “The right pictures get nominated, the wrong picture wins.” And while you could easily do a very long-running blog on all the amazing films that didn’t get close to even a nomination, I think there’s some truth in that. Especially when it comes to the great injustices of the Award’s history, it is almost always framed in terms of a nominated film that is now revered as a classic losing out to a film that is now almost unheard of.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #277: The Gates Of Europe… and other Origin Stories

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

What are the origins of modern nations? Where does national identity come from, and how has it been shaped to fit modern political structures? Going by a lot of the recent books I have read, this definitely seems to be a subject I’m interested in right now.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #268: Agatha All Along

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Okay – I’ll start with the headline. I absolutely love Agatha All Along. It’s one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe TV shows that stands up to a rewatch. It’s funny, creepy and, over the course of its nine episodes, slowly unravels a satisfying and unpredictable story. So many streaming shows these days feel like a single large plot arbitrarily cut to fit awkwardly into the episodic TV format. But Agatha All Along understands how to tell a story episodically, each week delivering revelation and plot, including some cracking cliffhangers.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #266: The ITV Ghost Story For Christmas

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

During the 1970s, the BBC were to make an annual ghost story to be broadcast over the Christmas period. Under the auspices of producer Laurence Gordon Clark, they delivered a festive dose of chills memorable enough that they have since acquired quite a cult following. These BBC ghost stories for Christmas are all excellent stand-alone dramas, brilliantly delivering a creepy, unsettling tale for the Yuletide audience.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #262: The Valeyard

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Back in 1985, Doctor Who was not in good health. The show had been struggling in the ratings for a few years, and the planned relaunch of the show in spring of that year – with a new Doctor, a new format and a Saturday teatime timeslot – failed to find an audience. A show that for several decades had been demonstrating how to create imaginative stories on limited budgets seemed out of place against the slick action dramas of the Eighties. Rumours flew that the show was getting axed, but when it finally got recommissioned for its 1986 season, there were a few changes.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #256: The BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings Part Two: The Two Adaptors

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

A dark and stirring refrain swells up from the silence, musically suggesting something both epic and haunted. And then a brilliant voice is heard saying the following:

“Long Years Ago, in the Second Age of Middle Earth, the Elven smiths of Eregion forged Rings of Great Power...”

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #251: Carole Lombard, The Profane Angel

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Screwball comedy suited Carole Lombard perfectly. She was an engaging, and energetic performer, possessing the fine ability to invest the lines with a real sense of fun. Called upon to play the vain, the arrogant, the naïve and the street smart, she always made you want to find out what these characters were going to get up to. For all the silliness in the plots, you have to be invested in the predicament of the leads to buy into it all, and Lombard’s effortless big screen charisma made that happen.

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