Ring Lardner Jr. was the blacklisted writer who won an Academy Award for the 1942 Tracy-Hepburn film Woman of the Year, then had to work largely sans credit until the 1970 movie of M*A*S*H, for which he won another Oscar. A bio-pic of another blacklisted writer, Dalton Trumbo, is up for some Oscars on Sunday and James Lardner (son of Ring Jr.) has some notes on what is right and wrong with Trumbo.
I admired Trumbo but — and I know this is a minority viewpoint — felt bored by a lot of it. I thought The Front covered much of the same ground more effectively and that Trumbo was a little too foreseeable, going as it did exactly where you knew it would go. That's a problem with any historical drama but in the best of them, you get insights along the way and many opportunities to say, "I didn't know that" and you see analogies to larger issues. I'm afraid I didn't get enough of that from Trumbo. Bryan Cranston was sure perfect, though. I doubt he'll win Sunday night but it would not be wrong if he did.