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Zellweger, Gere, Zeta-Jones, and Latifah: ten years later, Chicago cast to be reunited at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, Renée Zellweger, and Richard Gere, who starred in director Rob Marshall's 2003 Best Picture Oscar winner Chicago, will join forces once again -- but as presenters at the 85th Academy Awards ceremony next February 24. Show producers Craig Zadan and Neil Meron announced the latest additions earlier today. (Pictured above: Zellweger, Gere doing a dance number in Chicago.) Remember that the 2013 ceremony is supposed to revolve around a Hollywood Musical theme, and that a decade ago Chicago became the last musical to win the Academy's Best Picture accolade. And here's a curious coincidence: It has also been a whole decade since a Directors Guild of America Award winner failed to also win the Academy Award in the Best Director category -- something that is bound to take...

The big question about Chicago (1927), the first version of the famous play which later gave us Ginger Rogers as Roxie Hart and, ahem, some other people in a musical, is, "Did credited director Frank Urson really direct it, or is producer Cecil B. DeMille the film's true controller?"

I'm inclined to credit Urson, although I haven't seen any of his other fourteen films (he never made it into talkies, dying in 1928 just as the writing became visible on the wall, and the actors started reading it aloud). Possibly because the film's too good. But it certainly has a DeMille touch about it too, notably a reveling in sinful excess, followed by a bludgeoning morality play ending. Anybody who's enjoyed the crawling hypocrisy of a DeMille bible story will recognize the same mentality in Jazz Age drag.

Phyllis Haver is Roxie Hart, the most convincing if not the most charming embodiment of that particular fictionalized person.