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.
2001 could have been a good movie but wasn’t..
They took a wonderful basic plot and made it a sci-fi soap opera..
When it could have been cutting edge “proto-Star-Trek”..
with “Star Wars” ruminations.. and insinuations..
and “Alien” prognostications..
Instead they milked “HAL” when HAL should have been merely a plot twist.. a flea on the dog in the fight..
Unimaginative... it could have been good..
Still could be.... re-done under another name with much expanded plot..
You must be thinking of some other movie. Stalag 17 is a classic....hardly melodrama or cringeworthy....
1. The tunnel.
2. Sgt. Schultz.
3. The secret radio and antenna (as volleyball net).
4. Escapes and returns.
-PJ
I agree with your choice of Mr. Roberts. Debbie Reynolds should have won best actress for unsinkable Molly brown instead of Julie Andrews in that awful film Mary Poppins.
2001 was cutting edge. There was nothing like it before..neither in scale nor in the sophistication of the special effects.
I am sure you are aware the Bible states that Jesus was scourged beyond recognition.
You are 100% correct. Conservatives are a horrible ornery bunch. A fussy whining bunch, too. One comma out of place, one line that is not purist in every nuance, conservatives pout and stay home. Bizarre behavior. Conservatives are their own worst enemy.
At the time, Andrews had been passed over for the lead in My Fair Lady (even though she originated the part on Broadway). It was widely ‘rumored’ that the Julie Andrews award was to slap the film producers for picking the non singing Audrey Hepburn for the role of Eliza Doolittle.
Made sense then, still makes sense.
Loved Debbie in the Unsinkable Molly Brown
I would love to see a group of conservatives at least create some internet-based films and programs. If you have seen fan-made stuff like “Star Trek Phase 2” then you know that good quality stuff is possible.
2001 was cutting edge. There was nothing like it before..neither in scale nor in the sophistication of the special effects.
Could be why there was no there................. there..
Actually it was about something. It just told the story in an abstract and elliptical way.
I saw the movie before the reading the book. Dune, the book, is fantastic, really top notch. The movie is okay. They don’t really have much to do with each other.
...“2001” was just plain awful to me.
*********************
I never watched the whole thing. It was so boring that I found myself falling asleep without anything like Ambien within about 10 minutes. Horrible movie, based on the little bits of it that I saw.
Isn't that frustrating!! Sorry I can't help you. But I think a thread about "lines I remember from movies I forget" would be at least as worthwhile as this critique of old Best Picture awards.Your example sounds interesting. My example, from the world of political theory, would be the movie I saw that was set in an Islamic country in the Middle Ages. In it, two counselors to the ruler see two young princes having at each other - and one of the counselors remarks, "They fight as only half-brothers can."
Which is what I think of whenever I discus The Road to Serfdom and its comparison of Stalin's "Communism" with Hitler's "National Socialism." FA Hayek makes clear in the book that they were fighting as much because of their similarity as because of their difference.
No luck trying to Google it . . . sigh.
The scene where everyone is sitting in the same room and the unseen ghoulies start banging on the walls outside in the hall and they get closer and closer and then when they get to the door it gets quiet and the door slowly creaks and bends inward!
I had the wife and daughter watch it for the first time and they shut it off after that scene.
One of the scariest scenes every made and you see no monster, no blood, no gore and everyone has their clothes on!
To wit, the lead paragraph of Wikipedia’s description:
“Son of God is a 2014 American epic biblical drama film based on Mark Burnett and Roma Downey’s ten-hour miniseries The Bible. The film will feature selections of the miniseries as well as deleted scenes cut from the miniseries.”
What do I mean by white-washed? For instance, any scenes with the devil have been removed.
I loved “Dune”. Still do.
Loved the book also.
“Dr. Strangelove” was a work of genius and “A Clockwork Orange” is one of my favorites. Apart from those two, I didn’t much care for his other stuff.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.