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Please welcome new contributor Nick Taylor who is providing us with extra Supporting Actress pleasure inbetween the Smackdown events.

How close was Hector Babenco’s Pixote to an Oscar nomination for Best Foreign Language Film in 1980? Or rather, why was it disqualified? Already lauded in Brazil for its unflinching, documentary-style depiction of the country’s unique epidemic of child criminality and the institutions benefitting from it, the film got axed for doing test screenings outside The Academy’s allotted time frame. That sounds as "necessary" as many of their eligibility nitpicks. Disqualified from consideration for 1980, Pixote became fair game upon its U.S. release in 1981, winning most of the critics prizes for Best Foreign Language Film and scoring a Golden Globe nomination over Oscar’s eventual winner, Hungary's Mephisto.

Pixote also won Best Film from Boston, who took a page from the National Society of Film Critics and gave Marília Pêra their Best Actress award.

Reaching for the Moon director Bruno Barreto: "Héctor’s greatest film 'Pixote'. Poetry and violence fill the screen in a ruthless way." Photo: Anne-Katrin Titze

Héctor Babenco died on July 13, 2016. His adaptation of Manuel Puig's Kiss Of The Spider Woman, screenplay Leonard Schrader, starring Raúl Juliá, William Hurt and Sônia Braga, received four Oscar nominations - Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay with Hurt winning Best Actor.

Tom Waits was in two of Babenco's films, William Kennedy's Ironweed, starring Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep (both Oscar nominated) and the adaptation of Peter Matthiessen's At Play In The Fields Of The Lord, screenplay by Babenco, Jean-Claude Carrière and Vincent Patrick, starring Tom Berenger, John Lithgow, Daryl Hannah, Aidan Quinn and Kathy Bates.

"One of the greatest scenes in the history of cinema - Fernando Ramos da Silva (Pixote) is nursed by Marília Pêra (the...

Marília Pêra: Actress starred in Brazilian movie classic 'Pixote.' Marília Pêra: Brazilian film, TV and stage star Remembering Brazilian stage, television, and film star Marília Pêra, whose acting and singing career spanned more than five decades. Pêra died of lung cancer on Dec. 5, '15, in Rio de Janeiro. Born Marília Soares Pêra on Jan. 22, 1943, in Rio, she was 72 years old. 'Pixote' prostitute Internationally, Marília Pêra is best known as the loud, vulgar prostitute Sueli, who becomes acquainted with São Paulo street kid Fernando Ramos da Silva in Hector Babenco's well-received social drama Pixote / Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco (1981),[1] a fierce indictment of Brazilian society's utter disregard for its disadvantaged members. In one pivotal – and widely talked about scene – she lets the titular character (da Silva, at the time 12 years old)[2] suckle her breast. In another, she pulls down her panties and sits in...

Marjorie Lord actress ca. early 1950s. Actress Marjorie Lord dead at 97: Best remembered for TV series 'Make Room for Daddy' Stage, film, and television actress Marjorie Lord, best remembered as Danny Thomas' second wife in Make Room for Daddy, died Nov. 28, '15, at her home in Beverly Hills. Lord (born Marjorie Wollenberg on July 26, 1918, in San Francisco) was 97. Marjorie Lord movies After moving with her family to New York, Marjorie Lord made her Broadway debut at age 17 in Zoe Akins' Pulitzer Prize-winning adaptation of Edith Wharton's novel The Old Maid (1935). Lord replaced Margaret Anderson in the role of Tina, played by Jane Bryan – as Bette Davis' out-of-wedlock daughter – in Warner Bros.' 1939 movie version directed by Edmund Goulding. Hollywood offers ensued, resulting in film appearances in a string of low-budget movies in the late 1930s and throughout much of the 1940s, initially (and...

Marília Pêra: Actress starred in Brazilian movie classic 'Pixote.' Marília Pêra: Brazilian star and National Board of Review Best Actress winner dead at 72 This article is being revised and expanded. Please check back later. Actress Marília Pêra, a top Brazilian stage, television, and film star whose acting and singing career spanned more than five decades, died of lung cancer on Dec. 5, '15, in Rio de Janeiro. Pêra (born on Jan. 22, 1943, in Rio de Janeiro) was 72 years old. 'Pixote' prostitute Internationally, Marília Pêra is best known as the loud, vulgar prostitute who becomes acquainted with São Paulo street kid Fernando Ramos da Silva – who suckles her breast in one pivotal scene – in Hector Babenco's well-regarded social drama Pixote, a fierce indictment of Brazilian society's utter disregard for its disadvantaged citizens. Although Pêra's screen time is relatively brief, she made enough of an impact to be...

Tom Shone calls Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant "a visceral, immersive, man-against-the-wilderness tale with full metaphysical reverb: Jack London by way of Terrence Malick." Also in today's roundup: New books on Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, David Lynch, Frank Sinatra, James Dean, Mickey Rooney and Douglas Fairbanks, memoirs from Patti Smith, Debbie Reynolds and Drew Barrymore, an interview with Brillante Mendoza, an assessment of the work of Jean Rollin, Federico Fellini's last works, remembering Marília Pêra—and more. » - David Hudson...

Tom Shone calls Alejandro González Iñárritu’s The Revenant "a visceral, immersive, man-against-the-wilderness tale with full metaphysical reverb: Jack London by way of Terrence Malick." Also in today's roundup: New books on Marlene Dietrich and Leni Riefenstahl, David Lynch, Frank Sinatra, James Dean, Mickey Rooney and Douglas Fairbanks, memoirs from Patti Smith, Debbie Reynolds and Drew Barrymore, an interview with Brillante Mendoza, an assessment of the work of Jean Rollin, Federico Fellini's last works, remembering Marília Pêra—and more. » - David Hudson...

Pixote: a Lei do Mais Fraco (Original Release Date: 5 May 1981)

Hector Babenco's Pixote is a movie about kids trying to survive in a world that doesn't seem to want to let them.  Outside of a documentary short like Ciro Durán's Gamín, my guess is that era reviews didn't have much to compare Pixote to beyond Luis Buñuel's Los Olvidados or Charles Dickens's Oliver Twist. I'd also guess that not all of these comparisons were flattering. Babenco's direction here lacks the visual punch of Buñuel's, and his characters are nowhere near as well-formed as Dickens's. With any Buñuel comparison, one must contend a sophistication that, to this day, leads people to argue over how much of the work is earnest, and how much of it is ironic or parodic. (This excludes film students.  I'd say film students still love to debate whether Las Hurdes is a...

A champion of the film might respond to the last point by saying that's the point.  This champion might go on to say  Babenco doesn't fail to reach any sort of visual punch or character development goal because he doesn't aim for them. And it's true that Babenco would go on to show his versatility as a director with movies such as Kiss of the Spider Woman and Ironweed. Here, he has a diffent aim.  His focus is on achieving what film critics usually classify as neorealism (simply put, the attempt to achieve authenticity). It might be more accurate to call Pixote neo-Naturalist (meaning it attempts to portray the authentic while also imposing a political [usually leftist] agenda), though, as the aggressiveness of its look-how-bad-things-are-on-the-streets-of-Brazil agenda blows the air of authentic neorealism is supposed to observe out the window. (I say this knowing full well how easy it is for me to...

Directed by Allan Fiterman, and written by Marcelo Florião, Aloysio de Abreu, and Laura Malin, the Brazilian comedy Now Boarding will be screened at 6 p.m. on Sat., Feb. 6, at the Egyptian Theatre in Hollywood. Special Free Tickets are available. See below. According to the film’s press release, Now Boarding stars stage, screen, and TV veteran Marília Pêra as "an eccentric airport supervisor who secretly dreams she is Rita Hayworth." City of God’s Jonathan Haagensen plays "an outcast dreamer who tries to escape as a stowaway on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to New York." Not surprisingly, things don’t go quite as planned. Also, the Now Boarding soundtrack includes "New York, New York," "Volare" and "Brazil." [...]...