Cinema lost one of its giants this week. On Monday evening, I was reading in Sight & Sound about the London screening of a restored version of The Seventh Seal when I found my mind wandering about the 89-year-old director’s inevitable death, and what would happen in response. (Would there be retrospectives? Would there be a greater interest in his immense body of work? Would there be any revelations about his professional or personal life? Would it be difficult to find copies of the few of his Criterion DVDs I hadn’t acquired?) I don’t usually ruminate about “celebrity,” or death, or celebrity death for that matter. But the mind wanders, like it or not.
The next morning at the breakfast table, as I read a section of the previous day’s paper (this says a lot about me) and Maggie opened up the current one, she made that kind of noise you make when something sad yet inevitable is revealed, and immediately said “Ingmar Bergman died.” Now, I’m not placing any metaphysical significance on my morbid thoughts and their likely proximity to his time of death, but there was a fleeting creepy vibe. What I find harder to explain, though, is why I still feel a bit sad days later. There is no need for sadness, though. When it comes to achieving immortality (putting aside spiritual belief), I think filmmakers pretty much have it made.
In honor of Ingmar Bergman, I am getting around to doing something I have wanted to do since starting this site: re-publishing an article I wrote for the “Romance” issue of TENbyTEN magazine on Bergman’s last film, Saraband. I am proud to say that this article, as best as I can tell, was the first print review of Saraband. The article hit newsstands several months before the U.S. and worldwide theatrical release of the film. 
Here are this morning’s Oscar-nominated films, alphabetically. The nominees for foreign language film and documentary feature are compiled at the end of the list. (Short format nominees are listed in a 
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