Much of this year's Academy buzz seems to surround relative newcomers named Benicio, Kate, and Javier. But also notable among the celebrated are a few seasoned masters who have never won an Oscar but whose brilliant behind-the-scenes contributions are nominated once again. Reintroducing...
DEDE ALLEN
It wasn't her age — 77 — that almost ended Dede Allen's film-editing career. It certainly wasn't her credits, which include 1975's Dog Day Afternoon and 1981's Reds (for which she received Oscar nominations), as well as Bonnie and Clyde, The Hustler, Serpico, and The Addams Family. It was that after 25 movies and a seven-year stint as a Warner Bros. production executive, Allen had refused to learn to type. Says the woman who got her break when most of Columbia Pictures' sound department went off to World War II, ''I never wanted to be seen as a secretary.''
She can probably relax now. This year Allen is nominated for her third Oscar, for Wonder Boys, a project she landed only after agreeing to director Curtis Hanson's demand that she learn to use a keyboard and edit on an Avid, the computer system that has largely replaced the Moviola. ''I gave up on winning an Oscar a long time ago,'' says Allen. Besides, she adds, ''Everyone thinks I won one already.''
She's certainly won her director's respect. ''Dede is a performance editor,'' says Hanson, ''and that's why I wanted her.'' Adds director Arthur Penn, who worked with Allen on six films, ''Dede can spot the moment in an actor's performance that is the exquisite moment. [And] she works until a lot of other people would have dropped.''
''I missed a lot of parties because of work,'' concurs Allen, who has two children with her husband of 55 years, writer Stephen Fleischman, ''and it came at a great cost to my family.'' But oh, the stories she can tell. On Bonnie and Clyde: ''[Studio head]Jack Warner thought the movie was the biggest piece of s--- he'd ever seen.... I got thrown off the picture, and Warren Beatty picked me up out of his own pocket.'' On The Breakfast Club: ''[One executive] hated the picture. He called it The Group Therapy Session.''
When asked to explain how she has been able to charge through a male-dominated field, Allen says, ''As a woman, you always threaten men, but people liked working with me.
''Or maybe,'' she adds with a laugh, ''I just wore them out.'' — Rebecca Ascher-Walsh
ENNIO MORRICONE
Ennio Morricone has created more memorable strains of movie music than just about any working composer, but the strain he's feeling these days isn't musical. Despite writing some 400 scores in 40 years (that's an average of 10 a year), despite searing the sounds of the Clint Eastwood-Sergio Leone spaghetti Westerns into the greater pop consciousness, and despite winning Golden Globes and British film awards and countless other glitzy doorstops, the man has yet to bag an Oscar. He's been nominated five times — for Days of Heaven (1978), The Mission (1986), The Untouchables (1987), Bugsy (1991), and now for the moving score that flows through and around Giuseppe Tornatore's swoony melodrama Malena.
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