Posted on 03/01/2014 7:11:00 PM PST by SeekAndFind
Anytime you’re tempted to care too much about what’s going on with the Oscars, consider the list of great movies that should have won Best Picture yet weren’t even nominated in that category.
The landmark in special effects and fantasy captivated the imagination and heralded a new era in which anything anyone could dream up became a cinematic possibility. The closing line was so perfect that Peter Jackson couldn’t resist using it again in his remake seven decades later. But Oscar was obsessed with historical sweep at the time, and gave its top award to the generational family saga Cavalcade.
Sure, it won an honorary Oscar, because even the Academy couldn’t ignore how Walt Disney devised a richer, more mature approach to animation that captured the shivery drama and the atavistic appeal of fairy tales. The winner was one of those noble but stiff historical pictures, The Life of Emile Zola.
This time Disney conjured up a deep, dark vision even more unsettling and morally and Biblically grounded. It was to be the finest animated film he ever made. Hitchcock’s Rebecca, the winner, is also a classic and perhaps the top romantic noir of the era but the little wooden boy should have won by a nose.
Like such contemporaries as Billy Wilder and Ernst Lubitsch, Preston Sturges had a cynical take on everything that feels very modern, but in this fable of a wealthy Hollywood director (Joel McCrea) who thinks he’s going to find the real America by becoming a poverty tourist (inspired by a novel called O Brother, Where Art Thou?) Sturges aimed higher and delivered a dark comedy with uncommon wisdom. The winner was instead a teary piece of wartime propaganda about plucky Brits holding up their end, Mrs. Miniver.
Bing Crosby’s warm and funny Going My Way was the big hit of the year and not a terrible choice for the top Oscar, but the musical that brought Vincente Minnelli and Judy Garland together is the kind of family-friendly joy bomb that can be (and should be) re-watched every holiday season.
Hollywood’s intellectual inferiority complex was never more apparent than when the Academy chose starchy, stagey prestige over grand entertainment and selected Larry Olivier’s Hamlet over Howard Hawks and John Wayne’s Red River. John Ford was said to have seen a whole new side of his frequent collaborator, saying of Wayne, “I didn’t know the big son of a bitch could act!”
Possibly the most boneheaded move ever made by the Academy was ignoring the single greatest musical comedy ever in favor of one of the most rancid pieces of melodramatic garbage ever to even be nominated for best picture, the brainless circus melodrama The Greatest Show on Earth.
A straight-up shot of intoxicating Billy Wilder, this hilarious, wised-up comedy-mystery about a cynical POW played to perfection by William Holden was decades ahead of its time and far superior to a much soapier and more on-the-nose approach to WW II, From Here to Eternity.
Acclaimed by a recent Sight and Sound poll as the greatest film ever made, this psychosexual Hitchcock freakout was simply too bizarre for its time and can’t fully be absorbed on a first viewing, so the top nod went to the colorful, cute Gigi.
By this point Billy Wilder had built up such an impressive body of work that the Academy felt like blessing his second-tier romcom The Apartment over Hitchcock’s unforgettable thriller.
Brawny all-American action pictures never stand much of a chance if they’re up against costume pieces featuring lots of British accents, and so the Academy went with the now-forgotten comedy Tom Jones.
As a new generation was coming of age, the old guard resisted (the previous year, Bonnie and Clyde and The Graduate lost to the mediocre police and race drama In the Heat of the Night). In ‘68, the G-rated singing orphan show Oliver! was the inexplicable big winner. From this point forward, though, Hollywood became considerably less obtuse, and the following year reversed course to give top honors to the X-rated Midnight Cowboy.
Cameron Crowe’s strange, enticing, big-hearted memoir is a one-of-a-kind treat, whereas Ridley Scott’s Gladiator is glossy entertainment that simply put a fresh coat of paint on Spartacus.
Stanley Kubrick and Steven Spielberg’s Pinocchio update was mind-blowing sci-fi that was ten times as interesting as Ron Howard’s hokey one-twist redemption drama A Beautiful Mind.
The Passion should’ve won in 2004. It’s the best, most important film of the 21st Century. It’s just that Hollywood’s anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity that kept it from even being nominated.
No “Dude, Where’s My Car?”
I pretty much agree with the list except I haven’t seen a couple of them and “2001” was just plain awful to me.
Wilder's best film IMHO was "One, Two, Three"....Pure comedic genius, and one of the all-time great comedy performances from James Cagney.
Almost Famous???? What a drag of a movie.
OTTO E MEZZO
The Passion should’ve won in 2004. It’s the best, most important film of the 21st Century. It’s just that Hollywood’s anti-Semitism and anti-Christianity that kept it from even being nominated.
lol. Most of Hollywood is Jewish so hardly anti-Semite. The movie was ok but Son of God is 100 percent better.
Uh, no.
Truly cringeworthy melodrama.
A.I. was one of the most comically horrible movies ever made, like Al Gore meets L Ron Hubbard. (It also stole mercilessly from Bladerunner, but Bladerunner was such a better film, I won’t compare it.) And that’s one of only two from my middle-aged lifespan.
The Jews in Hollywood are like the Jewish leaders in the Warsaw Ghetto, sending other Jews to their deaths to keep the national SOCIALISTS from picking them.
While there are some good movies on this list, it just proves once again that one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. Personally, I think anybody who sat through Kubrick’s turgid “2001, etc” without falling asleep half way through should get some kind of award.
Number 14. Nope. I really wanted to like that movie. It has great special effects and interesting story, but it just didn’t do it for me. There is a reason it’s so cheap wherever you find it.
Son of God? Really? The liberally white-washed TV show being released as a movie?
Well, I know it’s not what the usual would expect, but really I thought The Haunting of Hill House, 1963, really should’ve won an Oscar.
The supposed scary or horror films have never reached it’s level, yet.
A psychological thriller is what they called it. I am still afraid to watch it, but it was wonderfully done.
Beat me to it.
Reruns of “A Snooze Odyssey” helped insomniacs for a couple decades, as it showed up ad nauseum on late night television.
I watched it with my pastor and a bunch of other members of my church. I was the only one that did not like it. As a matter of fact, it disgusted me. Watching a remake of my savior getting tortured is not only not entertaining, it is not even educational. The movie creeped me out on many levels, not least of which the concept of Christians intentionally watching their savior be tortured and killed.
I just don’t get the concept.
It came out last night so unless you went yesterday or today you cannot say a word. Sorry but until your answer you are just spouting air.
Looks like we’re in agreement on that one.
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