OVP: Cliffhanger (1993)

Film: Cliffhanger (1993)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, John Lithgow, Michael Rooker, Janine Turner, Rex Linn, Paul Winfield

Director: Renny Harlin

Oscar History: 3 nominations (Best Visual Effects, Sound, Sound Editing)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

I don't mean to compare Stallone's career all month to Schwarzenegger's, but it's hard not to both because that's what the press did during their entire heyday and it's also hard when you look into the 1990's as they were on deeply different paths.  By the late 1980's, Schwarzenegger was regularly churning out hits in films like Predator, but the best was still to come.  For Stallone...the 1990's were a series of pitfalls.  It started with Rocky V, which made money but given the expectations after the last four films, was a disappointment.  But this would arguably be a high-point when you look at what would come next.  While Arnold was making mountains of money with Total Recall, Terminator 2, and True Lies (all films audiences adored), Stallone was working in truly crappy flicks like Oscar, Stop! Or My Mom Will Shoot, and Judge Dredd.  Even his films that made money, like The Specialist or Daylight, were critically-lambasted and were largely only popular overseas.  Stallone at this point was to the Razzie Awards what Meryl Streep was to the Oscars (fun fact-Stallone gave Meryl her Oscar for Sophie's Choice).

(Spoilers Ahead) The one really bright spot from the first half of the decade for Stallone was in 1993.  Cliffhanger is not a critically-acclaimed film by any means (and Stallone got nominated for Worst Screenplay at the Razzies), but it had decent reviews, and made a fortune.  One could argue it was the last unequivocally successful blockbuster built off of Stallone as a leading man.  The movie is about Gabe Walker (Stallone), a mountain rescue ranger who is traumatized by his friend Hal's (Rooker) girlfriend dying in the opening moments of the film from an accident while ziplining through the Colorado Rockies.  Walker largely checks out of his life and wants to leave it behind, taking his girlfriend Jessie (Turner) with him, but she refuses.  Meanwhile, a group of hijackers, headed by Eric Qualen (Lithgow) steal a fortune of $100 million aboard a US Treasury plane, but a mishap in the hijacking causes them to crash in the Rockies.  After tricking Hal, Jessie, & Gabe into rescuing them, this causes an increasingly staggering standoff, as Hal, Gabe, & Jessie try to stay alive as these people attempt to escape with all of the money.

Cliffhanger is a movie that is, and I say this lovingly, dumb as a post.  The plot of the film rarely makes sense beyond a second grader's description of an action film, and it is impossibly repetitive.  We have the same standoffs between Stallone, Lithgow, Rooker, and Rex Linn for about 60 minutes in a row.  But that shouldn't confuse with it a bad movie, as Cliffhanger is not a bad movie.

For starters, some of the action scenes are really well done.  The opening scene with Stallone desperately trying to save a doomed Michelle Joyner from falling to her death thousands of feet below is nerve-gripping...I was actively clutching a pillow wondering what would happen.  And the film as it progresses lives up to some of the camp of its premise, mostly because John Lithgow (with an accent that kind of has to be heard to be believed) acting as over-the-top as is humanly possible to keep the audience amused between Stallone getting different elaborate killing scenes in.  This is, like many of Stallone's films, a clear paycheck role for a decent actor who regularly was selling out...but that doesn't negate that it works more than it doesn't, and Stallone's everyman appeal is there, especially in the first half.

First Blood (1982)

Film: First Blood (1982)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Richard Crenna, Brian Dennehy

Director: Ted Kotcheff

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Last month we talked about Arnold Schwarzenegger, and this month with us approaching Sylvester Stallone, it's important to talk about them in conjunction.  While I could've picked an actual film they made together (the minor 2013 hit Escape Plan probably made the most sense) to frame this, it actually makes more sense in terms of a film from the 1980's when the feud was actually waging.  First Blood and the Rambo franchise really launched Sylvester Stallone away from some of the risks he was taking post-Rocky with films like Paradise Alley, Escape to Victory and Rhinestone (these films scripts might have also helped deter Stallone), but it also made him a quintessential action star of the 1980's.  The other quintessential action star of the 1980's was Schwarzenegger, and younger audiences might now know how intense their rivalry was.

Amongst other things that they did during the roughly 10-year stretch that the two would feud was Stallone marrying Schwarzenegger's ex-girlfriend (Brigitte Nielsen), and they would take a series of jabs at each other in movies like Twins, Tango & Cash, and Last Action Hero.  It's not clear, in retrospect how much of this was the press feeding into things (by all accounts Arnold's relationship with Nielsen was a momentary fling, and all of the jokes in those movies are clearly said as fourth well-breaking jest for the audience to chuckle at), but it's worth noting that Stallone seemed to take it more seriously than Schwarzenegger, purportedly helping to fund the legal fees of a reporter who had called Schwarzenegger's father a Nazi (which he was, though rumors about him committing war crimes or being involved in carrying out the Holocaust have long circulated but never been proven, and are likely untrue), probably the biggest escalation in the feud (and one Stallone initially did behind-the-scenes).

Why am I picking First Blood to be the movie we discuss the Arnold/Sly feud?  Because it probably wouldn't have been possible without First Blood.  Sly Stallone's career was made with Rocky, but while the film piled on successful sequels, most of the other movies that Stallone was making at the time were flops.  All of the movies I listed above didn't succeed, and while Nighthawks turned a profit, it wasn't enough to really notice in the way the Rocky films did.  The one bonafide box office performance during this time he turned in was Staying Alive, which made a fortune...but was only directed by Stallone, and instead it was John Travolta who got the box office credit for it.  Were it not for Rambo, it's arguable that Stallone would've spent the 1980's making movies like Chuck Norris & Charles Bronson did-middling, lucrative but barely registering straight-to-video style pictures that no one would remember.  But he did make First Blood, and it changed the trajectory of his career, making him a theatrical movie star for at least another decade.

(Spoilers Ahead) First Blood is the story of John Rambo (Stallone), a Vietnam war veteran who is basically a drifter, coming into town in a small city in Washington, and being chased out of town for not being "the right sort."  Rambo doesn't take this lying down, and gets into a war of wills with Will Teasle (Dennehy), a sheriff who abuses Rambo, and causes him to have flashbacks to Vietnam.  During the PTSD, he escapes, and essentially sets off a series of attacks that result in the deaths of multiple police officers, initially unintentionally, but eventually very intentionally.  They even bring in Rambo's supervising officer in the army Colonel Sam Trautman (Crenna) to try and deal with Rambo as the showdown escalates, and we see that only one man between Rambo and Teasle will survive...

...except both of them do.  In an interesting scene toward the end involving Stallone, Dennehy, & Crenna, we see Stallone admit that he felt confused by the public rejection of his service after Vietnam.  First Blood is really interesting as a cultural artifact because it represents (at the rise of the Reagan Era) a nail-in-the-coffin of the hippie liberalism that had existed in the late 1960's.  Read any discussion about the treatment of Vietnam veterans returning from the war (that they were spat upon and called "baby killers") and you'll find a host of different anecdotal and academic evidence online, the former insisting that it was relatively common while the latter pointing out that it was rare to the point of providing virtually no persistent evidence in terms of things like video or police records.  That all three of these men come together for Stallone's John Rambo to soliloquize about this treatment becomes a sort of fascinating case study of your political beliefs-conservatives see in John Rambo a fighter, someone who was rejected after he did his service to his country by anti-war protesters, while liberals see a man broken by a war who is still rejected by authority figures (it should not be lost on anyone that the men both terrorizing & supporting Rambo are leaders in a law & order organization, a longtime bastion of conservative reverance).  Stallone's sort of two-dimensional approach to the character, as just a "guy who is living his life" helps tremendously here-it makes you think First Blood is about what you want, and fighting against the other guy, while they see it the same way.  In terms of propaganda, it's honestly really impressive, and adding in the early scenes which have a John Boorman directing Deliverance vibe, it's a much better movie than you'd expect.

But First Blood's complicated politics did not continue in the very successful film sequels that would basically just make Rambo another Terminator (Bruce Willis would have this same issue with the Die Hard movies).  The next three films would all make north of $100M at the box office, and would become Stallone's life-blood as a bankable star along with Rocky.  But unlike Schwarzenegger, Stallone (despite, for my money, being the better actor) didn't have good enough taste in his scripts and cared too much about his paychecks to really win the war against Arnold.  It helped that Schwarzenegger had the good luck to find a proper talent (James Cameron) to make his two best films, but it's more than that-Schwarzenegger had better quality control (he actually said no to sequels when they didn't make sense), and ultimately came out on top.  Even Stallone would later admit (years later, when the two had become friends offscreen) "He wanted to be number one.  Unfortunately he got there."  We'll talk about why Stallone & Schwarzenegger fell off next week. and how both of their careers would change in the 1990's.

Rocky II (1979)

Film: Rocky II (1979)

Stars: Sylvester Stallone, Talia Shire, Burt Young, Carl Weathers, Burgess Meredith

Director: Sylvester Stallone

Oscar History: No nominations

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Each month, as part of our 2026 Saturdays with the Stars series, we are looking at the men & women who created the Boom!-Pow!-Bang! action films that would come to dominate the Blockbuster Era of cinema.  This month, our focus is on Sylvester Stallone: click here to learn more about Mr. Stallone (and why I picked him), and click here for other Saturdays with the Stars articles.

Sylvester Stallone's early life & career are interesting enough that they're literally releasing a biopic about it in the next year.  Born the son of an astrologer and hairdresser (both of whom, if their later outbursts on talk shows & reality television appearances were any indication, were probably not the most fit parents you could imagine), he grew up in a working class background.  Due to a mistake during his birth, he was left with some paralysis on his lower face, meaning that he consistently looked like he was grimacing, which he was mocked for in school.  This would've probably deterred most young people, but Stallone dreamed of being an actor & director, and so he headed to Hollywood.

Stallone's early years in Hollywood are honestly pretty bleak.  He struggled to find work, and at one point has admitted that he literally was homeless, sleeping in bus stations.  He got work in a softcore pornography film (you read that right) called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (Stallone would play Stud), and pursued extra work, eventually getting some in MASH, Bananas, & What's Up Doc?.  Stallone's big break happened through his own hard work-he wrote a script for the film Rocky, with the intention of him playing the lead part given Hollywood was not giving him these kinds of roles.  The film got the attention of producers Irwin Winkler & Robert Chartoff, who were making a name for themselves at the time by producing crime & action pictures starring established leading men like James Caan & Charles Bronson.  Stallone refused to sell the script, even with an offer of over $350k (over $2 million today) and the recent memory of homelessness on the line, unless they let him star in the film.  The producers relented (eventually having to cut the budget without someone like Robert Redford or Burt Reynolds as box office insurance), but Stallone's gambit paid off.  The film made over $200 million, and was not just the highest-grossing film of 1976, but (after Star Wars) out-earned every other film from 1977 the following year.  The movie would win the Best Picture Oscar, and Stallone would get nominations for both Best Actor and Best Original Screenplay (ultimately losing both to Network).  Just a few years after sleeping in bus depots, Sly was now one of the biggest names in Hollywood.

(Spoilers Ahead) I have seen Rocky many times because my parents had cable in the 90's, and to be fair, I've probably seen chunks of all of the first five Rocky movise thanks to the marathons TV stations would run of it during this era ad nauseum, but I believe this is the first time I've ever sat down and truly watched Rocky II cover-to-cover.  The film takes place immediately after the events of the previous film, when Apollo Creed (Weathers) has just defeated Rocky Balboa (Stallone) in a tight contest, which has put a chink into Creed's armor even if he lost (given Rocky came out of nowhere).  The film starts with Creed demanding a rematch, but given that Rocky has promised Adrian (Shire) he won't fight anymore, he won't give into one.  But the film shows the pitfalls in one's 15 minutes of fame, and after a while Rocky can't get a job, and is broke with a kid on the way.  He realizes that the only way that he's ever going to provide the kind of life he wants for his newborn son and young wife is to fight, even if it's putting his life at risk due to injuries from the first film.  Rocky begins training again with Mickey (Meredith), and in a climactic final scene, does what he couldn't do in the first film-he wins, defeating the heavyweight champion of the world (and thus becoming it himself).

Rocky II, here directed & written by Stallone himself (something that he would do throughout his career with other films-Stallone directed more of his own movies than he gets credit for in conversations about his work), is not Rocky, and it's not nearly as well-regarded as some of the other follow-ups in the series.  Part of that problem is because the film itself is not well-made, being too repetitive of problems from the first film, and too ridiculous about trying to convince the audience that the fight (and the redemption from it) won't result in Rocky defeating Apollo Creed.  Stallone, as we'll find this month, is a more talented actor than Schwarzenegger was last month (it helps that English is his first language), though not as versatile as, say, Sean Connery.  There's a naturalism to his Rocky that almost makes it feel like he's playing himself, which isn't really fair given he'd play against this type repeatedly, including in our movie next week.  But the script here is too paint-by-numbers, and it takes too long to get to the (thrilling) final scene.

Saturdays with the Stars: Sylvester Stallone

Each month of 2026 we are looking at an actor or actress who found their fame in action films, fighting bad guys & saving the day.  Last month, we spoke about Arnold Schwarzenegger, a man who dominated the box office throughout the 1980's with violent, explosion-heavy action thrillers.  This month, we're going to talk about a man who, if you were alive during Arnold's heyday, you pretty much always referenced him with.  While not as successful (something he would later admit), there was a time these future friends would have a combative, sometimes shockingly so, relationship in the press, which would be good for both of their careers, but would, for this star, feel like a step down to the type of roles he once felt capable of playing.  This month's star is Sylvester Stallone.

Stallone's early childhood honestly reads like one of his movie's, with his mother being a famed wrestling promoter (and astrologist) and his father Frank a hairdresser.  During delivery, Stallone had to be removed from his mother with forceps, which pinched a nerve that would cause the lower side of his face to be seen in a snarl, something that would become the actor's signature look in years that followed, and caused him to have a ready-made tough guy aesthetic.  Stallone, unlike Schwarzenegger, was a fairly good student, briefly attending Notre Dame, before he started to work in movies as an actor.

Stallone's early career is famous to anyone who read tabloid newspapers, but he appeared in a soft-core porn film called The Party at Kitty and Stud's (later titled Italian Stallion, capitalizing on Stallone's famous nickname), and got extra work in movies like MASH, Bananas, and Klute before writing himself the role that would make him a legend, as Rocky Balboa.  In the 15 years that followed, Stallone would become a household name, associated with both Rocky and Rambo, as well as occasional forays outside of the action hero ring that weren't nearly as successful.

Stallone today is not a particularly well-regarded actor, in many ways reducing his talent (he is, lest we forget, a two-time Oscar-nominated actor, something that Schwarzenegger never came close to achieving) to an asterisk compared to a series of crap (and political choices like endorsing Donald Trump) that would make him unpalatable to a new generation of moviegoers.  This month we're not going to ignore the unsavory aspects of Stallone's celebrity, but we're also going to look at what might be neglected in his filmography, with me seeing one of his most critically-acclaimed roles, as well as watching a Rocky film I've never caught before, and somehow introducing myself to John Rambo for the first time.

OVP: Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Film: Farewell, My Lovely (1975)

Stars: Robert Mitchum, Charlotte Rampling, John Ireland, Sylvia Miles, Harry Dean Stanton, Jack O'Halloran, Sylvester Stallone

Director: Dick Richards

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actress-Sylvia Miles)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 2/5 stars

Chinatown is one of my favorite movies (as I get older, it becomes basically impossible to corner my favorite films to more than 4-5 films as it genuinely changes based on the day, but know this would be in contention for the crown).  I have not, however, spent a lot of time focusing on the films that came after the success of Chinatown, and honestly hadn't really thought about the strange history of the neo-noir film in the 1970's, which Chinatown was obviously the crown jewel of, but featured a number of films, some starring very important actors.  That's the case with Farewell, My Lovely, filmed in the wake of Chinatown (which you can tell based on the way the movie is shot), and starring Robert Mitchum as Philip Marlowe, a role that the actor was taking on for the first time & feels born to play (he is the only actor to have played the part, which saw actors as diverse as Dick Powell, Humphrey Bogart, James Garner & Elliot Gould take on the role, twice).  While Mitchum is well-cast, the movie itself struggles, not just in comparison to Chinatown, but also in trying to match that film's pacing & plotting twists.

(Spoilers Ahead) Mitchum's Philip Marlowe is hired by bank robber Moose Malloy (O'Halloran) to try to find his old girlfriend Velma, whom he hasn't seen since he got arrested.  Marlowe starts chasing down Velma, initially thinking she's a woman that has been locked up in an asylum, but this appears to be an imposter.  The real Velma we only learn in the last minutes of the film is Helen Grayle (Rampling), the trophy wife of a wealthy local judge.  As the film goes, we learn that Helen was a prostitute who helped with the bank robbery that Moose had perpetrated, though she didn't go to jail for it, and has been slowly killing everyone that is connected with her past in hopes of erasing it, getting to restart her life of privilege with her rich, oblivious husband.  The film ends in a giant shootout on a boat, where pretty much everyone except Marlowe ends up getting shot, and he lives to see another day as a detective, once again wisened by the streets.

That's the plot in a nutshell.  One of the defining characteristics of film noir is that it has a lot of story-there are tons of twists & turns, frequently characters, especially beautiful women you shouldn't trust, & where you start is never where you land.  This is what I love about it-it requires you to expect the unexpected.  But Farewell, My Lovely doesn't handle the extra plot well enough because it seems to be so obsessed with Chinatown.  In some ways this works-the music by David Shire is properly moody & delicious, and the cinematography is gorgeous and I'm surprised wasn't nominated for an Oscar that year.  But while Chinatown's difficult-to-comprehend plot is anchored by three strong performances (as well as Roman Polanski's precise direction), Farewell, My Lovely doesn't have actors ready to gloss over the movie's constant twists, oftentimes throwing in too many characters at once (which makes them difficult to track, and more importantly, difficult to vest into).  This isn't because these aren't great actors (Charlotte Rampling, Harry Dean Stanton...come on, this is a good call sheet), but they aren't able to elevate the material.

This is particularly true for Sylvia Miles, the one Oscar nominee from the film.  Miles is famous in some sections of Film Twitter for delivering two tiny performances that got nominated for an Oscar (her combined Oscar nominations make up less than 13 minutes of screen-time, less than any of the eight women she competed against at either of her Oscar ceremonies), but this isn't one of those mind-blowing cameos that you can't stop raving about.  She gets two scenes, the first as a relatively capable drunk attempting to mine booze from Marlowe (no matter what danger the information she's sharing will bring to her), and the latter scene is a throwaway moment, a return to a character that only left an impression because there's so few women in this movie.  Miles has no bearing on the plot, and honestly feels like the sort of role that people mine meaning from because she's so distinctive, not because she's giving something radiant.  Personally, I would have much rather one of the many women giving sensational turns in Nashville have gotten a third Supporting Actress nod from that film rather than a blink-and-you'll-miss-it return for Miles here.

OVP: Supporting Actor (2015)

OVP: Best Supporting Actor (2015)

The Nominees Were...

Christian Bale, The Big Short
Tom Hardy, The Revenant
Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight
Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies
Sylvester Stallone, Creed

My Thoughts: After over a year profiling this (I say this every time, but I mean it this time-we are not taking as long when we do the next year which I plan on starting in July), we are now arriving in the Top 6 of 2015, the big, iconic races that even lax Oscar fans might remember.  The Best Supporting Actor race of 2015, I'm going to admit right now, was never going to be a great race.  Unlike the female acting contests, which featured some of the best work Oscar had seen in a while, the male races were pretty underwhelming, and even if I was to replace it with my own choices, I wouldn't do that much better as it just wasn't an amazing year for supporting actors.

The best way to indicate that is to look at the actual winner of the Oscar race, Mark Rylance.  Rylance IS one of the great actors of his generation if you count his stage work.  I saw him in Jerusalem in 2011, and I still talk about the performance-it might be the single greatest performance I've ever seen on Broadway.  That said, this performance is fine.  It's admittedly pretty subdued, and he finds the quieter moments in Rudolf Abel, particularly the scene by his desk before he's eventually arrested, but there's not a lot there, particularly when he treads familiar territory with Hanks (and certainly for Spielberg) in the bonding period in the back half of the film.  It's the sort of performance that people applaud Oscar for recognizing since it rarely goes for introverts, but it feels like the sort of win that only happened because there wasn't an obvious, showy piece-of-work to go after.

Then again, there probably was a showy performance of sorts that Oscar could have gone for, but thankfully they didn't.  Mark Ruffalo has been on the outside-looking in with three Oscar races now, but he should have just been watching at home for his work in Spotlight.  Arguably giving the worst performance in the Best Picture winner (and I love Mark Ruffalo usually, so don't come after me in the comments), Ruffalo plays for the rafters with Michael Rezendes.  The giant speech "it could have been any of us" is meant to be a big coming-together moment, trying to unite the journalists with the victims of abuse, but Ruffalo goes so large, and is so bombastic it almost ruins the movie.  It's easy to see why this performance was nominated, but considering that Michael Keaton is nailing his role in the film and easily could have been cited instead, I don't think the "why" is forgivable with actually going through with nominating Ruffalo for one of his lesser efforts.

Tom Hardy is easier to forgive since this is his first time to the dance (I always struggle going too hard after a first-time nominee), and is considerably better than Ruffalo.  That's not to say that Hardy is doing something remarkable here, but there's more nuance in his performance than Leo is giving to his role, giving him more layers and a better trajectory for his character, relying on actual acting and the work of his eyes more than sheer physicality.  That said, he's stuck in a bad movie, and he's not given enough to be able to save it fully.  There's no actual interest in character development from the director, so Hardy's touches don't create something fully-fledged, just a more interesting personage than you'd expect given what the rest of the actors are doing.

Bale has a director who does care about his characters, albeit one whose idea of character development is simply stating "and now the character is like this" rather than growing the story through subtle changes in direction (Adam McKay is many things, not all of them bad, but he is decidedly not subtle).  Bale is also not a subtle actor, and while he is impressive in his ability to inhabit characters, he rarely finds time to grow them without big jerks, going in heavy on the tics that Michael Burry brings to The Big Short, but never finding reasons as to why he eventually has a change-of-heart about the corruption he's profited from.  Bale is hindered by McKay not really understanding the ramifications of the movie he's made (he is also a millionaire who might not be the best representative of the common man's struggles), but you can't blame the scenery-chewing on McKay-that's this actor's constant handicap.

Our final nomination is an actor that almost no one would put in the same thespian league as Bale, mostly because he's played the same character over-and-over for 40+ years, but Sylvester Stallone in Creed is proof that you can find new ways to reinvent a character you know by heart.  Stallone's performance gets the unfair advantage of nostalgia, something no other actor on this list has; there's a lifetime's worth of screen memories in his worn face, his expressions, the way that he has almost a boxer's beaten tenor to his voice at this point.  But there's also a knowledge here in the way he pushes out sentences that would be a struggle for a boxer in his twilight years (knowing what we know about the impact of concussions) and he brings such calm as he hands his baton to the next generation of fighters.  This is an actor who might have only had one truly great character in him, but he plays the part with such care you can't claim he's an actor of limited scope even if you might claim he's of limited range.

Other Precursor Contenders: This category actually had more room in the precursors than I remembered.  Stallone took the Globe, besting Rylance but also Oscar-skipped Paul Dano (Love & Mercy), Idris Elba (Beasts of No Nation), and Michael Shannon (99 Homes).  SAG, in what should have been an ominous sign dropped the Globe-winning Stallone, but stuck to Oscar's Bale & Rylance, also favoring Elba, Shannon, and Room's Jacob Tremblay, with Elba winning despite eventually missing with Oscar.  BAFTA skipped Stallone & Hardy, favoring Elba and Benicio del Toro (Sicario) for the nominations instead, and gave it to a third winner, Rylance.  In terms of sixth place, Elba has the most action headed into Oscar, but his nomination was clearly more of a "screw Netflix" rather than a "screw Elba" so I kind of want to guess Michael Shannon was sixth...Oscar seems to only like him when he comes out of nowhere.

Performances I Would Have Nominated: I'd probably throw out all but my winner here.  Sam Elliott was doing a better performance in Grandma than he would a few years later when he was cited for A Star is Born, while Michael Keaton definitely outdid Mark Ruffalo in Spotlight (plus, Oscar owed Keaton for skipping him in the obviously finest performance in Best Actor the previous year).  Oscar Isaac continues to be one of the best non-nominated actors currently working in the jaw-dropping Ex Machina (perhaps they felt that they had already cited Steve Jobs with Michael Fassbender, but they're both so good it's worth mentioning twice).  And lastly, Jason Statham is not a great actor.  He might not even be a good actor.  But if you're going to throw your persona for a loop in a comedy, I don't know that you could do it better than what he brings to his hilarious work in Spy.

Oscar’s Choice: Sentiment did not command the day with Oscar, as in an echo of Alan Arkin/Eddie Murphy a decade earlier, a quiet character actor in a Best Picture nominee took out an 80's icon who was trying to get an award he'd spent most of his career uninterested in winning.

My Choice: This feels so weird to say, but Sly Stallone totally deserved this Oscar.  He's so much better than the rest and had such a good narrative (and is reportedly a nice guy) I'm still flummoxed as to why he missed this trophy.  I'd follow with Rylance, Hardy, Bale, and Ruffalo.

Those are my thoughts-what are yours?  Are you with me that Stallone missed a perfect (and probably his only) opportunity to take a trophy, or are you with the more traditional choice of Rylance?  Is Mark Ruffalo ever going to win an Oscar?  And who was sixth place-Shannon or Elba?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!

Also in 2015: Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Production Design, Costume, Film Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup & Hairstyling, Documentary Short, Live Action Short, Animated Short, Previously in 2015

Past Best Supporting Actor Contests: 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014

OVP: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)

Film: Guardians of the Galaxy, Vol. 2 (2017)
Stars: Chris Pratt, Zoe Saldana, Dave Bautista, Vin Diesel, Bradley Cooper, Michael Rooker, Kurt Russell, Sylvester Stallone, Karen Gillan, Elizabeth Debicki
Director: James Gunn
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

Few things have been as consistent (and as profitable) in the past few years as the Marvel Cinematic Universe coming out with 1-2 films a year, having people show up to the movies to catch the latest superhero installment (this also happens with the DC films, but no one seems to like them so it's kind of a bizarre conspiracy theory as to why they all seem to still be insanely profitable).  This May there was no exception, with the followup to one of my personal favorite films in the series, Guardians of the Galaxy (Winter Soldier is still the best movie by a wide margin the series has created, in my opinion) coming out.  Guardians set itself apart from Marvel and in particular the dour DC films by having a sense of humor about its crew, a motley group of space bandits led by a stuck-in-the-80's rebel named Peter Quill (Pratt).  Would the second film live up to the delight of the first?  Let's take a look...

(Spoilers Ahead) The film is centered around Quill, after a hilarious interaction with the Sovereign People (headed by the glorious and vastly-underused-in-every-film Elizabeth Debicki), finding his father Ego (Russell), who is essentially a god that has both created and exists concurrently as a man and as his own planet.  This leads to Quill realizing that he has some magical powers (Starlord, indeed), and bonding with the man whom he never knew growing up.  All-the-while, the Sovereign are intent on coming back and attack him for Rocket slighting them and stealing their batteries, while Yondu (Rooker), Quill's surrogate father, is also being chased toward the planet by his rebelling troupe, who are now under the leadership of Taserface (and yes, the name is properly mocked).

While the film has its fun moments, particularly anything involving Debicki as the Sovereign (easily my favorite storyline of the bunch), I will admit that this felt fun in the way that Pitch Perfect 2 felt fun.  It was great being in the saddle again with these characters, and in particular the chemistry between, say, Cooper's Rocket and Diesel's Groot, or Pratt with pretty much anyone but particularly Russell, is charming, but the wear is starting to show that wouldn't have in the entire series if there hadn't been a sequel.  This may be blasphemous, but the reality is that sequels aren't always a good thing, particularly when they point out ways the initial movie failed, and here it's that the characters are somewhat underwritten and occasionally one-note.  Dave Bautista's Drax, for example, becomes increasingly annoying as the film goes on, his unconventional reactions to social cues being relatively predictable and groan-worthy.  The film is more reliant upon you remembering the minutia of the first film than I was used to for a comic book film (I had to rely for parts of the picture more on my childhood knowledge of the Marvel Universe than I can remember having to do in any comic book picture since before the 2008 relaunch), and is too long.  The entire sequence with Taserface, for starters, is a bit of a drag, and while I enjoy Sly Stallone randomly showing up as much as the next person, between this and Andy Garcia in Passengers, is it in Chris Pratt's contract that an Oscar nominee has to show up and do almost nothing for a paycheck?  Seriously-unless Stallone is being positioned for a later movie or to be the Samuel L. Jackson of the Guardians pictures, I don't get what that was...was he James Gunn's matinee idol or something?  I generally like Stallone, but he had literally nothing to do here.

Still, it was not a film without charms.  Kurt Russell is such a joy to see onscreen always, and he relishes this moment in the spotlight.  In what has to be on either the Makeup or VFX clip reel for the Oscars later this year (from what I've read it was a combination of both), Russell's de-aging at the beginning of the film is the closest I've seen to actually avoiding the Uncanny Valley, perhaps because it's more makeup than CGI (it puts even Rogue One from last year to shame on that front).  In fact, the reliance on traditional makeup in the movie is intense-in a film that is a throwback to a different era (the 1980s continue their bizarre reverence in cinema), James Gunn wanted to celebrate such a time.

Additionally, the movie is funny at parts.  It's hard not to like this crew, even if I feel like the gimmick is being stretched now more than added to...no one wants to see Peter Quill become an Iron Man-level cascade of serious, but the world of Marvel's cinema has never been great about going deeper (the point of a sequel) without finding a solid balance between humor and drama.  This is all to say, I don't know where this goes in the third film, even if the post-credits sequence gives an obvious hint that Adam Warlock could soon be in-store for us.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Are you leaving pleased, but not entirely as pleased as you were the first time?  Where do you think that the Guardians chapter of the Marvel universe should go next?  Are you feeling good about Adam Warlock as the next big challenge for the crew?  And who else is still in-awe of that Kurt Russell effect?  Share below!

OVP: Creed (2015)

Film: Creed (2015)
Stars: Michael B. Jordan, Sylvester Stallone, Tessa Thompson, Phylicia Rashad, Tony Bellow
Director: Ryan Coogler
Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Supporting Actor-Sylvester Stallone)
Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

If you had told me at the beginning of the year that I'd be paying my hard-earned money, excitedly, to go and see yet another Rocky sequel, I would have laughed you into the next room.  Like almost every person who had cable in the 1990's (or went to the movies in the 70's/80's), I have seen multiple Rocky movies, catching them back when they used to be near-constant marathons on TNT, and we all knew the formula, frequently trading on the original Rocky, a major movie that won Best Picture in a field that included Taxi Driver and Network, and then went on to make Sylvester Stallone, "Adrian!" and those 72-steps at the Philadelphia Museum of Art all movie lore.  And yet, Creed, after years of the franchise (which, like its star, became a bit of a pop culture punching bag in the years that followed) getting lukewarm reviews about how the myriad sequels have shaken the allure of the first film, has reignited the franchise in a way no one else could have suspected.  In a year where long-running series like Mad Max, Jurassic World, and Star Wars all made it back to the screen, perhaps no movie quite shocked this moviegoer quite like the kinetic Creed, an electrically fast-paced movie that features memorable long-take cinematography and proof that boxing movies, when done well, can still fire up a crowd.

(Spoilers Ahead) I think the thing that instantly started to set apart Creed was the way that the film, while obviously trying to find a place opposite that of Rocky, wasn't afraid to show the impact of Rocky and the ways that boxing has changed in the decades since.  Here we see both Apollo Creed and Rocky Balboa not as characters whose heads we're trying to get inside, but instead as immortals in the world of boxing.  There's a scene late in the movie where Adonis Creed's (Jordan) opponent "Pretty" Ricky Conlin (Bellow) is fighting with Creed at a boxing press conference, and he points out that Creed is coasting on his name, whereas the man sitting next to him (Stallone as Balboa) is the "true" fighter on their team.  Creed, of course, eventually proves to Conlin that he can in fact fight, and that he isn't just a name, but it shows how immortal Balboa has become through the years-even his opponents can't help but respect him.

This is true in many ways of Stallone himself, who has started to gain Oscar buzz for this role, a career-capper after a few misfires in trying to cap his role in the Rocky sequels.  It's quite frankly hard to tell at times whether or not what Stallone is doing is truly great acting, or whether he's able to make decades of nostalgia and Hollywood iconography trick the audience into thinking that's what he's doing, but he's mesmerizing reprising his most legendary role.  Every scene, quite frankly, he seems to be in command of the screen, a magnetic force to be reckoned with; there's a naturalism here, as Stallone knows this character's every heartbeat, but with his age and our knowledge now of the effects of boxing on the brain and development, we see him in a different light as he speaks in short, gruff sentences, and his victories become us cheering on a childhood friend.  Michael B. Jordan, possibly the most exciting male American actor under thirty currently working, is also quite good and finds a wonderful balance with Creed (born in foster care, but eventually raised in intense privilege, his weird combination of entitlement and proving himself is hard act to create, but he nails it), also worth the price of admission but Stallone is the one you're begging to see.  When they finally show the "Rocky Steps" you're realizing what you're seeing is one of the best entries in this series.

The movie, of course, isn't without its faults.  The plot is intensely predictable, even the eventual outcome where Creed gets a technical loss like Rocky did in the first movie, setting up a theoretical sequel, and the film has no idea what to do with its female characters.  Talia Shire won an Academy Award nomination for the first film, but Phylicia Rashad and Tessa Thompson will just have to settle for another line in their SAG cards and hopes that they can command a bigger payday in the sequel, as they are mere window dressing, which is disappointing as a lot of care actually went into creating Thompson's character (whose hearing loss and burgeoning music career made for their own interesting subplot until the entire film dismissed it).  Plus, there's no new ground being tread here that the original film didn't already cross.  Still, the editing and direction are sharp, and the two leading men more than live up to the hype surrounding the performance.  This is a fight you should know you'll be in for a good battle, and you won't have to shell out $200 to HBO for the privilege.

Those are my thoughts-how about yours?  Were you a fan of Creed, or is this the franchise that will never die?  Do you think Stallone can make Oscar history?  And for that matter, can Jordan finally break into the AMPAS club?  Share your thoughts in the comments!

Sylvester Stallone's Quest for Oscar Trivia Glory

While Mad Max: Fury Road got all of the headlines yesterday, for me the moment of truth was Sylvester Stallone's victory for Creed.  Suddenly, in the ebb of massively positive reviews, pretty much the entire collective Oscar blogosphere (including yours truly) proclaimed Rocky Balboa one to beat in the Best Supporting Actor race.  This is a shock for a variety of reasons, principally because a few weeks ago I think most of us would be stunned to find out that Creed would actually be any good, much less a serious Oscar contender.  The movie, the seventh in the long-running Rocky franchise, is one that I admittedly haven't seen yet (it's toward the top of my list after all of this praise though, let me tell you), but we've all seen how Stallone's career and the movies that followed his initial Best Picture nominee ended up being kind of a joke-as a result it seemed impossible that he'd be back for another nomination for the same role (or, considering his somewhat limited macho action-hero appeal, another nomination period).  How rare is this?  Let's take a look at three select clubs Stallone is trying to join.

Actors Who Have Been Nominated Twice for the Same Role

Were he to be nominated, Stallone would be only the sixth actor ever to be nominated twice for playing the same part.  Other actors who have accomplished this include Paul Newman as 'Fast Eddie' Felson (The Hustler and The Color of Money), Bing Crosby as Father O'Malley (Going My Way and The Bells of St. Mary's), Peter O'Toole as King Henry II (Becket and The Lion in Winter), Al Pacino as Michael Corleone (The Godfather and The Godfather, Part II), and Cate Blanchett as Queen Elizabeth I (Elizabeth and Elizabeth: The Golden Age).  All five of these actors, though, unlike Stallone, were far more beloved by Oscar when they won the second nomination.  Crosby and Blanchett already had Oscars, O'Toole and Newman were both many times over nominees, and Al Pacino was in The Godfather Part II, arguably the finest sequel ever made.  Of the five Stallone has to be hoping to emulate Paul Newman, who is easily his most hopeful doppelganger.  Both are longtime actors that seem to be well-liked in the acting community (everything I've read about Stallone seems to be that he's pretty popular in Hollywood, which helps when you're doing a comeback campaign), both were nominated for arguably their most iconic roles, and both went from being the young upstart to mentoring an emerging movie star.  The similarities between The Color of Money and Creed are quite incredible, and Stallone has to be secretly hoping that he can keep that comparison going.

Actors Who Have Been Nominated for Sequels

This is nearly as short of a list, and one that isn't 100% comprehensive online.  The reality is that Oscar doesn't go much for sequels, but in particular he doesn't like actors in sequels.  Honoring the same actors for the same role is a thing they do at the Emmys, and with the exception of the four above (O'Toole doesn't count here as his films aren't really connected), usually when you're cited for a sequel you weren't nominated initially.  In fact, most of the people nominated for sequels (like Robert de Niro, Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio, and Ingrid Bergman) weren't even in the initial movies.  Only Sigourney Weaver and Talia Shire come to mind of actors who got in when they weren't cited for the previous film.  The Golden Globes, actually, are far more likely to cite a sequel.  David Carradine, Johnny Depp, and Michael Douglas, for example, recently were cited for sequels even though they didn't translate over to the Oscars.  Stallone getting nominated here would be pretty damn rare, particularly if the film didn't also score in other acting categories or Best Picture (Weaver in Aliens is the only one I can think of that felt completely solo), so Michael B. Jordan or the film itself may be being underestimated at this point if Stallone feels assured.

Nominees Whose First and Second Acting Nods are More Than 20 Years Apart

While Stallone was nominated not only for acting in Rocky, but also for writing it, he hasn't been nominated in the 39 years since his first nomination.  Were he to be cited for Creed, that would put him in a very elite crew of nominees who waited twenty years or longer to be nominated for a second acting award.  Only eleven actors have actually pulled off the feat, in fact (years apart in parentheses): Henry Fonda (41), Christopher Walken (34), John Wayne (20), Kenneth Branagh (22, though he was nominated in other categories in the meantime so it's questionable whether this should count), Richard Farnsworth (21), Richard Harris (27), Ralph Richardson (35), Max von Sydow (22), James Whitmore (26), Helen Hayes (39), and Lynn Redgrave (32).  As you can see, Stallone would be on the longer end of this club, but that's no guarantee that he would win the second trophy-Wayne and Fonda were the only two actors to have lost the first time and went on to win the second, and though he's a pretty big star Sylvester Stallone is hardly John Wayne or Henry Fonda.  It's also (randomly) worth noting that Stallone, whose gap would put him in second place behind Fonda and tied with Helen Hayes, could potentially not even be the biggest gap this year between first and second nominations, as Lily Tomlin is making a play in Best Actress for Grandma forty years after winning a nod for Nashville.  It should be further noted that, while Walken, Branagh, and von Sydow are all still living, none of these people so far have won a third nomination, so if Stallone wants the win it's now or never.

And there you have it-three tidbits of trivia about Sylvester Stallone's potentially record-breaking bid for a second Oscar nomination in Creed.  Do you think he'll do it?  And do you think he can win?  Share your thoughts below in the comments!