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Although occasionally some of us may have wondered "Good God, what were they thinking!" as the little golden men were handed out, there remain many more winners of the fabled statuette that have stood the test of time. We’re screening some of our favorite Academy Award winners in this series, including Best Picture recipients ON THE WATERFRONT, MIDNIGHT COWBOY, PLATOON and THE DEER HUNTER, with other Oscar champions WOMEN IN LOVE, BONNIE AND CLYDE, WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF?, A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, NETWORK and more!

Wednesday, February 11 - 7:30 PM

[Spielberg Theatre] THE STUFF DREAMS ARE MADE OF...OR WHY CITIZEN KANE DIDN'T WIN: SEMINAR Just in time for motion picture awards season, take this thought-provoking journey back in time to see who wins our most coveted of film prizes. What does it REALLY take to appeal to our most respected award juries to "win the gold"? What do the winners of the "best" film, acting, photography and design categories share in common? Before you cast your personal award show ballot, discover the real impulses that lead to award show victories! Thomas Ethan Harris instructs. Film clips will be used to inspire an open dialogue with the audience. Essential for all film lovers and award show junkies! This seminar opens a series of films that won Oscars in various categories. The Oscar Winners series starts February 18th. Thomas Ethan Harris instructs. Filmmakers and film lovers welcome! Tickets: $20 General Admission, $15 Student/Senior with valid I.D.; $12 Members of the Cinematheque.

Co-presented by Outfest

Best Actress Feature:

WOMEN IN LOVE, 1969, MGM Repertory, 131 min. With the tagline "The relationship between four sensual people is limited: They must find a new way," coming so soon after the Summer of Love, you didn’t have to drag people into the theaters. Director Ken Russell exploded on the international scene with this surprise crossover hit, reintroducing the world to what was previously, at least in America, one of the lesser known novels by D.H. Lawrence (LADY CHATTERLEY’S LOVER). It remains one of Russell’s finest accomplishments. In the British Midlands during the 1920s, Alan Bates is Rupert, a stand-in for Lawrence, portraying a free-spirit intellectual writer who becomes enamored of feisty schoolteacher Ursula (Jennie Linden). Bates’ best friend, rich coal-mining heir Gerald (Oliver Reed), is in love with Ursula’s sculptress sister, Gudrun (Glenda Jackson, Best Actress Oscar winner). While all four are able to throw off the shackles of conventional Victorian morality, only Rupert and Ursula enjoy a positive outlook. Gerald’s rigid autocratic nature and Gudrun’s cruel and amoral devotion to "art" send the couple spiraling off into self-destruction. "There are moments of astonishing beauty here: Ursula's sensual rendition of ‘I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles’ as Gudrun reaches for a tree branch; Ursula's nude scene with Rupert, the lovers gracefully circling in a field…that nude male wrestling match by firelight - a near-cinematic first, incidentally. The performances, too, are second to none…" – Ali Catterall, Film4.com (UK) Review | Trailer

Thursday, February 19 – 7:30 PM

Best Picture Double Feature:

ON THE WATERFRONT, 1954, Sony Repertory, 108 min. "I could’a been somebody … I could’a been a contender …" Winner of eight Academy Awards including Best Picture, Actor (Brando) and Director. Director Elia Kazan adapts Budd Schulberg’s grueling account of Hoboken dock-worker life, starring Marlon Brando in his most iconic performance as a washed-up prize fighter who falls in love with the sister (Eva Marie Saint) of the "stool pigeon" he set up for corrupt union organizer Lee J. Cobb (in one of the screen’s most convincing portraits of everyday human evil.) Rod Steiger delivers a wrenching performance as the older brother who helped betray Brando’s chances as a boxer, and Karl Malden is the tough working-class priest who serves as Brando’s conscience. More | Trailer

MIDNIGHT COWBOY, 1969, MGM Repertory, 113 min. Director John Schlesinger (DARLING) tracks naïve male hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) on his sordid adventures from 42nd sSreet peepshows to upscale parties with the Warhol crowd in this trailblazing, alternately shocking and poignant study of being down-and-out in the Big Apple. Dustin Hoffman as homeless thief Ratso Rizzo supplies one of the touchstone performances of the burgeoning New Hollywood. A masterpiece that won three Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director. Also starring Brenda Vaccaro, Sylvia Miles, John McGiver, Barnard Hughes and Jennifer Salt. More | Trailer

Friday, February 20 – 7:30 PM

Mad as Hell Best Actors Double Feature:

NETWORK, 1976, MGM Repertory, 121 min. Director Sidney Lumet (DOG DAY AFTERNOON) helmed this brilliantly vitriolic dissection of network television from Paddy Chayefsky’s Oscar-winning script. Peter Finch won a posthumous Oscar for Best Actor as Howard Beale, the fired news anchorman who goes mad on nationwide TV, threatening to kill himself on camera and utters the famous line: "I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!" William Holden is equally impressive as Beale’s old friend and boss, head of network news Max Shumacher. Faye Dunaway (another Oscar winner here for Best Actress) is the new creative honcho who angles to exploit Beale’s madness to garner skyrocketing ratings. Beatrice Straight won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar as Holden’s neglected spouse. "This iconic American New Wave renegade text is even more startling than it once was -- was Hollywood ever this cerebral, this caustic, this ethically apocalyptic? That 90 percent of NETWORK's satire has become fulfilled prophecy by now doesn't take the shine off of its broadsword. Reality-show whoredom, death TV, New Globalistic anti-humanism, audience as robotic consumer -- it's all here…It feels in the watching like a hilarious organic nightmare…" – Michael Atkinson, The Village Voice More | Trailer

WALL STREET, 1987, 20th Century Fox, 125 min. Ambitious, greenhorn stockbroker Bud Fox (Charlie Sheen) becomes the protégé of Machiavellian corporate raider Gordon Gecko (Michael Douglas, in an Oscar-winning portrayal), and things seem to be going swimmingly in the world of high- stakes risk-taking until voraciously unscrupulous Gecko takes his greedy aspirations too far. Unnervingly relevant to countless current headlines. With Martin Sheen, Tamara Tunie, James Karen. "As with PLATOON, Stone captures the horrific essence of an environment and transfers it to us without the need for prior knowledge. Dazzling filmmaking." – Angie Errigo, Empire More | Trailers

Friday, February 27 – 7:30 PM

Multiple Oscars Double Feature:

BONNIE AND CLYDE, 1967, Warner Bros., 111 min. Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway are lovers on the run in director Arthur Penn’s gritty yet lyrical 1930s gangster saga. The mixture of brash style, pan-sexual eroticism and blood-soaked violence helped kick-start the entire New Hollywood movement – and boosted producer-actor Beatty to prominence as one of the key figures of the next decade. Written by David Newman and Robert Benton, with dazzling supporting performances by Gene Hackman, Michael J. Pollard and Estelle Parsons (who won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar). Burnet Guffey won a well-deserved Oscar for cinematography. More | Trailer

PLATOON, 1986, MGM Repertory, 120 min. Oliver Stone brings his own Vietnam War experiences to the big screen embodied in Pvt. Taylor (Charlie Sheen) in what stands as one of the definitive portraits of men at war. Decent Willem Dafoe and demonic Tom Berenger are flipsides of the same coin, two feuding sergeants and elder brother role models who will take Sheen through his nightmarish trial by fire. Forest Whitaker is also among the ranks. Winning Oscars for Best Picture and Director, PLATOON was Oscar-nominated for Best Original Screenplay (Stone) and Best Cinematography (Robert Richardson) as well.  More | Trailer

Saturday, February 28 – 7:30 PM

Multiple Oscars Double Feature:

A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, 1951, Warner Bros., 122 min. Director Elia Kazan’s overpowering adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ classic play made Marlon Brando a household name practically overnight for his incendiary portrayal of working-class Stanley Kowalski, who collides headlong with fragile Southern belle Blanche DuBois (Vivien Leigh) when she moves in with her sister, Stanley’s wife, Stella (Kim Hunter). Brilliantly acted and mounted on every level, with Academy Awards going to Leigh for Best Actress, Hunter for Best Supporting Actress and Karl Malden for Best Supporting Actor. Brando ironically lost out to Humphrey Bogart, who won Best Actor for THE AFRICAN QUEEN – but after five decades, there’s no doubt who the award belongs to: Brando claims every square inch of it, body and soul, in one of the most electrifying performances in American screen history. More | Trailer

WHO’S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF, 1966, Warner Bros., 131 min. Winner of five Oscars, including Elizabeth Taylor for Best Actress and Sandy Dennis for Best Supporting Actress, director Mike Nichols and screenwriter Ernest Lehman adapt Edward Albee’s scorching play about a bitter, middle-aged alcoholic couple’s war of words. Taylor and real-life spouse Richard Burton play two people chained to their own mediocrity in the halls of academia. When they invite unwitting new professor George Segal and his naïve wife (Dennis) over for cocktails, the sordid game of verbal invective and elaborate emotional contortions begins, not abating until similar buried resentments are unleashed in the seemingly normal Segal and Dennis. More | Trailer

THE DEER HUNTER, 1978, Universal, 183 min. From the opening scenes of hunter Robert De Niro and friends Christopher Walken, John Savage and John Cazale stalking deer in the mist-shrouded Pennsylvania hills, to the shattering prisoner-of-war games in the Vietnam jungles, director Michael Cimino's masterwork is a sprawling, ambitious epic of men wounded by pride, country and friendship, struggling to drag each other back to a place of safety. Co-starring Meryl Streep. Winner of five Oscars, including Best Picture, Best Director and Best Supporting Actor (Walken). "Its feelings for time, place and blue collar people are genuine, and its vision is that of an original, major new filmmaker." -- Vincent Canby, The New York Times Actor John Savage and original story co-writer Quinn Redeker to introduce the screening. More | Trailer