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Here’s a bold statement: Giving your children the chance to watch classic films can be just as vital as anything they learn in school. 

What happens after an actor or actress wins an Academy Award?   The assumption is that the performer’s career skyrockets. Offers come pouring in. The thespian’s price tag certainly rises. What had been the usual “on-and-off” career of the struggling working actor suddenly gets a lot more hectic; members of the paparazzi who may not have known him or her from Adam (or Eve) are suddenly camped out on their doorstep.  This is what often occurs when one of these statuettes ends up in your hands. But not always. 

It’s nearly impossible to discuss a truly great movie without mentioning its musical score. Can you  honestly ponder the Spielberg classic “Jaws” (1975) without hearing those relentless, alternating two notes (played on a tuba!) that announce the killer shark’s arrival? Or think of “Rocky” (1976) without remembering how Bill Conti’s soaring trumpet theme made your heart race? 

Peter Sellers was more than just funny; he was an astonishingly versatile actor. Even if you removed the bumbling, beloved Inspector Clouseau from his resume, he still had a remarkable list of roles to his credit, from the devious Clare Quilty in "Lolita" (1962), to his Oscar nominated turn as Chance in "Being There" (1979), to a variety of bullfighters, concert pianists, and nutty psychiatrists in-between. But Sellers, who would've turned 89 today, actually passed on the role of Leo Bloom in Mel Brooks's "The Producers" (1967). Brooks has gone on record saying that the role was his for the taking, and it’s never been explained why he didn't take the part. Little-known fact: Sellers would play an important and unexpected role in that movie's success. Brooks had approached Sellers to play the neurotic Bloom as early as 1964, when Sellers, The Beatles, and all things British seemed to dominate the entertainment landscape. How popular was Sellers that year? Well, he was the first man to appear on the cover of Playboy — how's that? According to Brooks, Sellers agreed to play the role but was never heard from again. That was Sellers — whimsical, difficult, and often erratic.

The phenomenon known as typecasting has been practiced in Hollywood since its earliest days. Stars who excelled in certain kinds of roles were usually offered those kinds of parts repeatedly. To risk-averse studios, this simply made good business sense.

Though we live in the era of the multi-hyphenate and multi-tasker, we still get a boot out of personalities we know for one function, showing up in a totally unexpected context, and in doing so revealing an otherwise hidden side—and hidden talents.  When a non-actor appears on-screen there is a moment of held breath. Will he or she be…good? After all, acting is hard. Acting takes sweat and years of training, whether in techniques by Stella Adler, Lee Strasberg, or doing improv on weeknights for decades, with no break in sight. And yet, from out of the blue, a soccer star, jazz musician, or gossip columnist will cruise onto the set and turn in the performance of a seasoned vet.

Going crazy in real life is about as glamorous as sleeping in a bowling alley, but going crazy on-screen? Plan your Oscar outfit early. There is scenery to be chewed, fits to be pitched on an epic scale, fantasies to spin, and a kind of canny brilliance to the crazy character’s lunacy.       Maybe we are drawn to movie crazies as a kind of proxy nervous breakdown, the one we’d like to have, if only we could spare the time. In the more extreme cases, such as director Alfred Hitchcock’s criminally insane killers in “Psycho” (1960) and “Frenzy” (1972), we are watching a bomb blast from a safe distance, marveling at the potential for distortion within the human mind. And then there are characters that are driven crazy, like Ophelia (Jean Simmons) in “Hamlet” (1948), or Jasmine (Cate Blanchett), the shattered widow of an unscrupulous New York financier, in “Blue Jasmine” (2013).

Over the years, the movies have offered up many memorable nerds. Highly intelligent, fascinated by history, science and technology, possessing fearsome powers of concentration, and able to recite astonishing amounts of data (some of it useless), the nerd is really just a hero just waiting for his chance to use his unique skills for maximum good.   Nerds are the inventors, researchers, tinkerers and experimenters. They are — almost by definition — obsessional. And they're often the characters with the best lines. After all, they've got the most developed vocabularies. Sure, they suffer abuse from the cooler types, but when a genuinely inspired idea is required, only a nerd will do.

Part of the thrill of film is the costumes that dress up the screen. But there's a clear distinction between standard costume pictures where clothes simply help evoke a period, and those indelible outings in which great clothes not only draw our eye to their design, but also inform character.  It is, in fact, more accurate to say “wardrobe” than costumes, and, as with our own wardrobes, there are standouts that we return to again and again. These are pieces that are stars in their own right: Edith Head’s dresses for Grace Kelly in “Rear Window”; Cecil Beaton’s black and white dress for Audrey Hepburn, worn to Ascot in “My Fair Lady”; Lauren Bacall’s check suit in “The Big Sleep”; and countless bias-cut crepe gowns, Technicolor satins, wide hats, snug corsets, and acres of rhinestones, beads, and feathers. When paired with crackling dialogue, powerful stories, and flattering cinematography, these signature looks create the models for our own evolution in style.  Why not slip into our own look at some of the movies’ most memorable fashion moments...