It’s that time of year again and Oscar buzz is exceedingly loud! Why not take a break from discussions about snubs and who will wear what on the red carpet to dig a little deeper with the AAPB? Check out these interesting deep dives related to some of this year’s nominees:
Maestro
In 1998, the great conductor Seiji Ozawa, who passed away on February 6, 2024, was interviewed for the American Masters special Leonard Bernstein: Reaching for the Note. In this raw footage of the Ozawa interview, the venerable conductor talks about the influential role Bernstein played in his life and work, describing their first meeting and Ozawa’s first visit to America (Summer 1960 at Tanglewood!).
Rustin
Colman Domingo was nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role for his portrayal of Bayard Rustin, the gay civil rights activist who was one of the organizers of the 1963 March on Washington. In this 1979 interview with Rustin for America, They Loved You Madly (a first attempt by Blackside, Inc. to make a documentary about the Civil Rights Movement that evolved into the seminal Eyes on the Prize), the discussion centers on the Brown v. Board decision, the reasons for increased civil rights activism after World War II, and Rustin’s work with labor and civil rights activist A. Philip Randolph to organize the March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom.
Barbie
Twenty-five years into the doll’s tenure on toy shelves, the local program Front Street Weekly from Oregon Public Broadcasting aired a retrospective. This segment from the 1984 episode provides a complex look at Barbie from the perspective of the 1980s and includes an interview with the lead designer of the original doll.
American Fiction
This best picture nominee is based on the 2001 novel Erasure by Percival Everett. In 2009, Everett participated in a panel discussion called “Fairly Unbalanced: Writing Political Satire in the 21st Century,” which was hosted in Cambridge, Massachusetts, by Cambridge Forum and PEN New England and presented online by WGBH Forum Network. In his opening remarks, Everett talks about his work in the context of satire and shares his thoughts regarding panels!
Oppenheimer
Presented by National Educational Television in 1963 and hosted by Dave Garroway, the series Exploring the Universe looked at theories and advances in science at the time. In the last episode of the series, entitled “The Scientists and Their Values,” Garroway talks with Nobel Prize-winning physicist Dr. I. I. Rabi and Dr. J. Robert Oppenheimer, former director of the Manhattan Project’s Los Alamos Laboratory (portrayed in the Oscar-nominated film by David Krumholtz and Cillian Murphy respectively), who describe the first experiences that brought them into the field of science.
Elemental
Everyone now recognizes Pixar as a CG animation powerhouse, but even they had to start somewhere (as anyone who has witnessed that animated baby in their 1988 Oscar-winning short Tin Toy can attest). This 1996 episode of Wall $treet Week with Louis Rukeyser from Maryland Public Television includes an interview with Steve Jobs, who bought the nascent animation house from George Lucas in 1986. Broadcast in the year following the release of the studio’s groundbreaking full-length feature Toy Story, this segment kicks off with a brief history of Jobs’s involvement with the future animation juggernaut.
And one more…
We’ve all got our opinions on movies that we feel are woefully underrated, but Pulitzer Prize-winning critic Roger Ebert created an entire film festival devoted to the notion! Ebertfest (originally called The Overlooked Film Festival) is now in its 25th year. In this April 2000 episode of Focus 580 from WILL Illinois Public Media, Ebert discusses what was at that time the second annual event, as well as the classic movie palace in which it continues to be held to this day.
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