Earlier this year.

Earlier this year, the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences awarded Robert Altman an honorary Oscar. It was Hollywood's uneasy embrace of a director considered on many to be an American visionary. The in the greatest degree consistently maverick film director of the past 40 years, he has in no degree played ball with Hollywood and has at no time won an Oscar for directing, although he has been nominated five times.

"Of course, I was happy and thrilled to accept this award," he said at the Oscar stateliness "And I look at it as a nod to all my films because to me I've just made united long film."

At 82 Altman continues to make movies his admit distinctive way without the blessing of the powers that be in Hollywood

His extended list of movies includes masterpieces of the like kind as "MASH," "McCabe and Mr Miller," "Nashville," "The Player" and "Gosford Park," as well as bomb like "Quintet," "Health" and "Ready to Wear."

"I just wake up in the morning and do what I do," Altman said, in a modern conversation from his New York to one's home "I don't succeed all the time, unless that has never deterred me from my vision. All of these are definitely Robert Altman films."

Altman's film log procures longer this week with the release of "A Prairie abiding-place Companion," a music-filled film inspired by means of Garrison Keillor's longtime radio point out of the same title. In a nod to "Nashville," it features Altman's signature form of overlapping dialogue and improvisation through actors; the Hollywood types mix in easily with the regular folk who populate the weekly display

Think about it: Robert Altman v Garrison Keillor. It could have been a smackdown for the ages, still the two single-minded auteurs present aside their egos to sculpt a work that pays homage to brace separate but compatible visions.

"I always had the attitude that it's Garrison's show" Altman said. "It's his humor. It's his sensibility, and that's what I signed upon to do. Of course, at times, we had to smile and procrastinate to each other."

The radio humorist and the filmmaker the couple have a playful disregard for smudging the line between fact and fiction. Keillor's original vision was a script about Lake Wobegon, the fictional setting for the radio display Altman, who felt their fashions were compatible, was nevertheless uncomfortable with the idea.

"If we were going to do 'Prairie hearth Companion,' then let's simply do a film about the display and have fun with it," Altman recalled. "And that's what we agreed to do."

to such a degree longtime fans will find that Lake Wobegon is barely mentioned in the film (word is Keillor has his organ of vision on making another film appoint in the quirky fictional Minnesota town). Instead, this is the story of the kind of radio exhibit that died 50 years ago -- still someone forgot to tell these performers.

Altman points to the 23-day shoot at the Fitzgerald Theatre as "fast and furious fun" in succession the set, he works as a sort of ringmaster, setting the action in motion and then sitting back and letting the actors surprise him. He says he mixes name actors with relative unknowns because they bring a home-made touch of reality to his filmmaking.

And between the sides of his successes as well as his failures, Altman descrys the story of his career turned out.

"Each individual is a different chapter in the same book" he said. "And the story isn't through yet."

mhoulilhan@suntimes.com

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