In my comments about the February 18 crossword, I explained why the Academy Award is called an "Oscar." Go look!
http://www.cruciverb.com/index.php?topic=106638.0We are three days away from this year's Academy Awards ceremony and C.C. Burnikel's crossword in today's
Los Angeles Times pays tribute by including the names of four Academy Award-winning films. One of the answers is BESTPICTURE and the first word of each of the theme answers is the name of a movie which was honored as best picture:
Mighty clash: TITANICSTRUGGLE
Intensive study program: CRASHCOURSE
2014 WNBA Finals runner-up: CHICAGOSKY
It's the opposite of a flying one: ROCKYSTART
Titanic, written and directed by James Cameron, was released in December 1997 and became the first movie to gross one billion dollars worldwide. It was nominated for 14 Academy Awards and won 11.
Crash was a 2005 film co-written and directed by Paul Haggis and depicted two days of ethnic clashes and racial clashes in Los Angeles.
Chicago (2002) starred Renée Zellweger, the answer to the trivia question "What actor has a name with six E's and no other vowels?" Her character shoots a man and then hires a slick Chicago lawyer to represent her. She hopes to become a celebrity like a nightclub singer whom she admires.
Chicago was first filmed in 1927. Another version, titled
Roxie Hart, came out in 1942 and starred Ginger rogers.
Rocky, a 1976 film which inspired five sequels, starred Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa, a small-time boxer who winds up fighting Apollo Creed, the defending heavyweight champion. Stallone reprised his character in the 2015 movie
Creed.
"Classic laundry soap" is RINSO. In 1837, Robert Hudson began grinding bars of soap into flakes and selling the "dry soap powder" at his store in West Bromwich, England. He called the product Hudson's Soap. Lever Brothers (now Unilever) bought the manufacturing rights in 1908 and renamed the soap Rinso. For many years it was Lever Brothers' best-selling brand but sales started to decline in the 1950s after Procter & Gamble introduced Tide. Unilever still manufactures Rinso soap for Asia and Central America but no longer sells it in the United States. Old Rinso packaging and advertisements can be seen at
http://www.vintageadds.co.uk/rinso-soap.html 
