Academy Award

If the average person were to be asked what Sir Kenneth Branagh had won an Oscar for, the vast majority would probably say “acting.” Then when told that, despite two Academy Award nominations, he has not been so rewarded, they might then assume that it’s his direction of such films as Henry V, Hamlet or Belfast that led him to take him gold. In fact, though, it’s his screenplay for the latter film that finally won him an Oscar in 2022, showing that Branagh is a true renaissance man; it is not for nothing that first theater company he founded was called the Renaissance. This summer has been, as usual, a busy and productive one for the actor-writer-director.

If anyone told you that Ron Howard was their favorite film director, you might be forgiven for laughing out loud. Yet on paper, Howard has had as successful a career as any other filmmaker working today. Of the twenty-seven pictures he's directed, there are Academy Award winners and nominees for Best Film, massive box office hits and several critically acclaimed pictures that show a degree of both eclecticism and an apparent ability to turn his hand to anything imaginable. There are few directors who have made everything from epic fantasy to gritty '70s-set dramas about the David Frost and Richard Nixon interviews.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.