Members' bonuses. Caligula.

A thought or two on the "Brit Thing". If you had run this kind of poll about 30 years ago for men, almost all of the top vote getters would have been from the Isles. In those days, people considered the classically-trained actors to be the great ones, so the ballots would have included O'Toole, Burton, Harris, ..... I suppose Brando would have been the only American among the winners. This is really a matter of the style and conventions of the times. If you look back at some of their performances, you'll see that they were more in love with the sound of their own voices than with conveying the depths of their characters. They were often better at oratory than drama. Burton, in particular, was dreadful in some of those movies where he was Oscar-nominated. Burton and Harris were especially unbelievable when they played contemporary roles, because we know how modern men speak, and that ain't it! But that's not my point. My sub-point is that the times have changed. The naturalistic acting styles took over, Stanislavsky and Strasberg had their way, for better or worse, among male performers. Great American actors from Deniro and Dustin Hoffman to Edward Norton rewrote the rules of male movie performing, and the awards started going to quiet, realistic mumblers instead of the great stentorian orators. In our "best young actor poll", the list was dominated by Yanks. With a few notable exceptions like Branagh, the new non-American leading man seems to be in the Roger Moore mold, not an actor at all, but a charming handsome guy who always plays himself, ala Pierce Brosnan, Mel Gibson, and Hugh Grant.

And even Branagh seems to play every movie as an American now! (Celebrity, the Gingerbread Man, Wild Wild West).

OK, be patient, I'm finally coming to the point. Although the style in male acting has evolved, we still place the non-Americans on a pedestal in the female category. We still seem to think that any woman who doesn't pronounce her "r's" has some talent. I don't mean this to slight Emily Watson, who is a glittering talent and probably deserves her overwhelming victory in this poll, but some of these women aren't that good. Most of the women who score high are those who either are non-Americans or those who often try to act like non-Americans. Even Flockheart tried to act like a Brit in "Midsummer ..." Y'know, I'm not that impressed with most of these women. They are so .... I think the word I'm looking for here is "affected". They still tend to act in the pompous style that male actors abandoned thirty years ago. Give me Mena Suvari over most of these women. Even Rose's McGowan's performance in the grade-b "Southie" and Suvari's in "American Beauty" seemed much more realistic and raw and real to me than the kind of twitty performances that always get nominated for Oscars. In a way it is sad. We have decided that we want to see real men up there on the screen, accompanied by fantasy women. I guess that is cool. We want to see Nolte get Angelina Jolie. I guess we figure if he can, we can.

I vote to make a new Oscar rule. No woman can be nominated for a role in which she uses the emphatic "so", and she is banned from all future nominations for life if she uses "ever so" as in "Oh, I do so like it ever so much". I'm kidding but you know what? That rule would produce better nominations.

Members' bonuses. The Runner.

The babe from the past is Vanya, 3rd of October, 1977.

Bouns, some 800x600 Page Three Wallpapers (#1 #2 #3 #4)

Playboy would have you believe that this lady is Helen Cooper in its "Sexy Girls Next Door" issue, April 1998. Well maybe, if you live next door to the O'Farrell Theater in San Francisco. Most folks know this lovely lady as Tanya Danielle, stripper supreme and favorite model of Photographer Ken Marcus. In fact, when Ken Marcus did his landscape photography for Yosemite National Park, he parked a nude Miss Danielle in the middle of every scene. The fact that Ken Marcus did her "Amateur" photos for Playboy should have given someone a clue. Frodo

(#1, #2, #3, #4, #5, #6, #7)