Introducing...Saturdays with the Stars!!!

2018 has been one of the strangest years of my life.  In many ways, it was one of the best & one that I should be incredibly proud of looking at my year-end accomplishments.  In January, I moved away from the job I had held for six years (an eon in my profession), and went into a new position that is challenging (some days perhaps a bit too challenging), but also is allowing me to do some of the most impressive work I've done in my career.  In May, after spending nearly 11 years thinking about actually making the plunge, I decided to buy a house, investing in my future in the biggest way I've ever done.  I went on a road trip with my mom earlier this year, fulfilling a promise I made to her years ago that I'd help her get some of the states off of her "Need to Visit" list as we both quest toward fifty.  In terms of seeing movies, I don't know that I've had a cleaner awards season-you won't get my Top 10 of the year until late January due to some traditions I wanted to keep with my brother, but know that it will have almost every movie I intended to watch in 2018.

This has also been a tough year.  Forgetting for a second the world-at-large (and that's tough to do in the Trump Era), I had two failed relationships this year, proving that while I can get better at some things, love is never one of them.  I am roughly one pound lighter than I was last year, and both Tinder & my trainer insist that number change more dramatically in 2019.  I had three random health incidents that, while none are life-threatening, meant I spent more time in a doctor's office in 2018 than I had for the previous decade.  There is a novel that I think I made about four paragraphs of progress on on my computer, and while 2018 will be the year of a lot of successes, it will also stand as another year I felt like I hit a bunch of ground rule doubles, rather than more clear home runs.

But 2019 is fast-approaching, and I am a firm believer in New Year's resolutions, as well as taking time to reflect on my life over the past year, and figuring out things I need to continue and things I want to change/alter/add.  And of course since this blog is a big part of my life, I have a project for it.

The past year was focused quite heavily on the midterm elections, but as I'm someone that likes congressional elections far more than presidential ones, I would assume that I'll take some steps back from the wall-to-wall coverage of politics, and instead will be moving back to the movies a bit more. I put the finishing touches on my resolutions this weekend, and as a result you're going to be seeing a lot more film reviews on this blog, as well as considerably more OVP write-ups (I have some time off next week so we'll be getting back into 2015, with the hope of finishing that up in January and moving on to another year in February...though I'm not entirely sure what that will be).  I also loved doing the October "Classic Horror" theme month, so we'll be doing that again next October, as well as at least one other theme month, probably in June for my birthday.

But what I'm most excited for in 2019 for the blog is the new series I'll be introducing here every Saturday, something I've been planning for months and am officially announcing right now before our Christmas break: Saturdays with the Stars.  Inspired in no small part by TCM (my compass), I wanted to start having a Star of the Month on the blog, and so each Saturday I will be reviewing a film that I have never seen before from our monthly star.  Some of the films will be OVP, some will be random movies, but all of them will be new-to-me.

I wanted there to be an overarching theme for this series, however (at least for 2019), and so I brainstormed a bit on what that could be.  We already do a series on Oscar-nominated films, so picking performers like Spencer Tracy or Meryl Streep seemed a bit redundant.  I have become really obsessed with the idea of filmographies lately, and in particular the filmographies of largely forgotten, former matinee idols (I can thank Karina Longworth's You Must Remember This for this passion), and so I wanted to do classic Hollywood, and because so often film retrospectives focus on the achievements of men, I wanted the stars to be entirely female to highlight artists that usually get forgotten in film discussions.  Then it occurred to me: we should do a series about once (or perhaps still) famous leading ladies from Hollywood's Golden Age...who never were nominated for an Oscar.

So that will be our theme for 2019!  I have picked twelve actresses who were, at some point in their careers, important leading women in Hollywood but who were never blessed enough to be nominated for an Academy Award.  While some of them acted before & after this period, by-and-large these women achieved their peak fame sometime between 1934 and 1959, and that will be where we focus almost all of our viewings.  I want this to increase my filmic knowledge, so I'm not going to pick actresses whose careers we've talked about a lot here (someone like Veronica Lake, where almost all of her important pictures I've already seen), though we'll obviously have a few actresses whom we've discussed at least once or twice on the blog, and I want to be forming opinions about these actresses, so I'm not leaning into ones who are already favorites (Myrna Loy, Rita Hayworth, and Ann Miller will unfortunately not be joining us, despite them arguably being my three favorite actresses without Oscar nominations).  Instead, we'll pick twelve actresses whom I've either never seen their films or whom I haven't formed a full opinion of quite yet.  I'll announce the Star of the Month on the first of each month so that you can weigh in on her career & your favorites (or your viewing gaps), and then every Saturday for the month we'll take a look at movies from her career as a headliner (all of the films will feature her as an above-the-line lead).  We'll talk through some viewing issues (for January's star, I struggled to find arguably her second most famous role, though I got to her most well-loved film) as we go, but for now I'll let you wildly speculate who might show up next year, and let you get excited.  More soon!