Sport and Cinema.com

Baseball’s Midsummer Classic returns to Anaheim Tuesday for the third time since the All-Star Game began in 1933, but the event has changed quite a bit since the city first hosted the exhibition (in 1967 when the NL won in dramatic fashion on a Tony Perez home run in the 15th inning).

Staging its first film festival and in such historic settings as Grauman’s Chinese and Egyptian Theaters along Hollywood Boulevard now through Sunday, Turner Classic Films, the American broadcast authority on classic cinema, is celebrating some of the best movies ever made.

In a role that carries the ball forward in a picture based on a true story, Sandra Bullock’s performance as Leigh Anne Tuohy, a gutsy, self-confident, well-off Southern woman with hyper-protective instincts garnered her an Oscar as Best Actress at the 82nd Annual Academy Awards held Sunday.

As we begin 2010 it is time to consider which is the BEST sports movie from the first decade of the 21st Century.

There are some very good choices. Documentaries, by the way, like “Dogtown and Z-Boys” deserve their own column.

Here is the Top Ten:

And the winner is… that popular phrase is something that remains to be seen after Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences Presdient Sid Ganis announced at a press conference last week, the board’s decision to expand the number of films nominated in the Best Picture category from five to ten.

“The Italians are coming!”

On the heels of the Giro d’Italia, we’d like to remind our readers that one of the great sports movies in Hollywood history revolved around the story of a talented young Indiana cyclist’s escape into a world of Italian bicycling.

Robert Redford stars in this inspiring fable as Roy Hobbs, a man determined to fulfill his childhood dream of success playing baseball and being known as “the best there ever was”.

As a young teen, Hobbs begins his journey by fashioning a powerful bat from a fallen oak tree. His talent for the game soon captures the attention of scouts and sportswriter Max Mercy (Duvall), who eventually becomes instrumental in Hobbs’ career. However, a fateful encounter with a mysterious woman (Barbara Hershey) shatters his dream.

The last time Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman worked together on picture with a sports backdrop, both won Academy Awards.

In a genre dominated by testosterone, sports movies certainly have plenty of room for the ladies. As a matter of fact, down through the years Hollywood has produced some terrific titles with women at the center of the story. With a little luck we will see more make it to the silver screen. In the meantime, in chronological order, here are the lucky 13.