It's Nearing Oscars Time Again

 I think as the pandemic raged last year, the lives and activities of celebrities in Hollywood didn't matter quite so much. When your grandparents and relatives, your friends and loved ones, are dying alone in a hospital hooked to a ventilator, Gad Gadot singing something from Lennon means very little. But, admittedly, I looked over Turner Classic Movies and I can already tell I'll probably get the fever. I was watching "Rear Window" (1954) and researched just a bit on whether or not it received any Academy Award nominations. It did. No surprise, though, it didn't win any. As great a film as "Rear Window" is (this is my third favorite Hitchcock film after "Rebecca" and "Psycho"), for whatever reason the Academy just would not give him the Oscar. This film, I laughed at myself as I was so engaged and captivated by the film my eyes were glued to the screen while stuffing my face with a meal. It was the scene, of course, where Grace Kelly is in Raymond Burr's apartment right as he arriving back home after Stewart lured him to a hotel for fifteen minutes with a phone call about the murder of Burr's wife. Stewart, stuck in that damn leg cast and wheelchair with Thelma Ritter also watching helplessly, they could only hope the police could get there in time after Stewart called them with an assault claim. As someone who frequents the more provocative side of Reddit, voyeurism gets brought up a lot as a more prurient topic of interest by plenty of anonymous users of the site. In this film, Hitchcock is sure to touch on that provocative side with the inclusion of a flexible blonde (of course) studying to be a ballerina as her body moves about gracefully in such a small apartment across from Stewart's. That she's married to a short Army Phil Silvers lookalike just gave me such delight, considering how many "wolves" (as Kelly called them; I'm sure she knew plenty of them during her time in Hollywood before becoming Princess of Monaco) were courting her. It does get plenty unpleasant when the camera (or Stewart's eyes when he's looking out his window with binoculars or a very big camera lens) focuses on Miss Lonelyhearts (the ballerina blond was nicknamed by Stewart and Ritter as Miss Torso), a lonely redhead yearning for companionship, even shown at one point talking to a makebelieve visitor she pours wine for and makes a plate for at her table. When she goes out looking for a man, finds a young buck looking to score, and has to fight him off, voyeurism takes a dark turn. Granted, believing a jewelry salesman strangled and chopped up his invalid, very opinionated (and possibly degrading) wife, disposing of her in different parts of the East River is particularly a dark turn as well. Because Hitchcock's camera is so probing and curious, voyeurism could be seen in a whole bunch of his films. So "Rear Window" especially has its irony as a particularly voyeuristic Hitchcock classic. While I totally get why "Vertigo" is considered perhaps his greatest film, I watch it once every five or ten years (I hope that isn't the case after this year, as I have a plan to watch it quite soon). I watch "Rear Window" over and over because it is just so damn fun. This cast, too, just phenomenal. I had an amusing thought about Stewart getting to have these little romantic kisses with Kelly as Hitchcock put his camera up close...even if the kisses were "performance", at least Jimmy had a very prestigious privilege of such a rarefied air. The Academy Awards of 1955 were all the rage with "On the Waterfront", but you can follow every nomination in Hitchcock's career, and give every excuse...one of the all time greatest directors never even winning once is a bit bullshit. Not even the cinematography got the Oscar and I would think anybody might recognize that "Rear Window" has some of the very best camerawork in the history of film.