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.
Never seen it before...:)
Just make sure it is the real JOHN WAYNE version, and not one of the later poor quality made for TV versions.
You don’t like Paths of Glory or The Killing?
2001 had the content to justify the reputation though. And keep in mind it was not well received at the time. It’s reputation went up as the years went by.
Yes that reality that Jesus was whipped, crowned with thorns, and nailed to a cross probably could get in the way of your fantasy world...
I definitely think you should stay far away from the Passion of Christ because you will have a heart attack seeing what Jesus went through on that one.
To be blunt, it was the equivalent of a modern movie showing a full xxx bedroom scene while an older movie would present the same raw information with innuendo. It was gratuitous violence. I read the book. I know what happened. I don’t need to be treated to a full on re-enactment of my savior being tortured.
Really? I think A Clockwork Orange still looks great.
Paths of Glory was good. Never saw The Killing.
Yep, I agree with your statement.
It’s mind-numbing.
Pinocchio creeped me out as a kid. Still don’t like it.
Or were smoking pot.
The Haunting is masterful!!! No ghosts are seen. Give it a try.
I'm thrilled about this. It took a long time for Vertigo to rise in the all-time rankings.
It's one of my all-time top ten, along with "2001," another movie on the list.
Although I think the idea behind "2001" is, well, stupid, the film-making itself was revolutionary, and on that basis alone, the movie is one of very few that transcends the medium.
Another movie on my top ten that isn't on this list, and should be, is Welles', "The Trial." It has recently been restored. It is another film that transcends the medium, and was considered by Welles to be his best movie. Lost footage was recently found, and the movie has been almost fully restored. It's full of unforgettable images, and it captures the horrors of Modernism with the logic of a nightmare.
Why is it that great comedies are almost never nominated? Billy Wilder’s 1959 “Some Like It Hot” was a terrific showcase for Tony Curtis, Jack Lemmon and Marilyn Monroe. Jack Lemmon was nominated for best actor but the only Oscar received was for costume design. Tony Curtis certainly deserved an Oscar not only for his drag performance as Josephine but his dead on imitation of Cary Grant. If you’ve never seen it, you’ve missed Marilyn Monroe at her sexiest and Lemmon and Curtis at their funniest.
cuban leaf:Actually, no. I’m quite aware it happened. I just don’t feel the need to be entertained by watching a re-enactment.
That's an idiotic assumption to make of someone who saw it.
That is the reality and nobody is entertained by it. There is nothing wrong, however, with knowing the price that was paid for our sins and understanding the full horror of what our sin is and what it costs.
And if that includes seeing what Jesus REALLY went through to REALLY pay for our real sins, so be it.
Scripture tells us that He was unrecognizable at the time of the crucifixion. IMO, the movie did not do justice to the reality of the beating Jesus took on our behalf.
If you think people are being entertained by that, you have some real problems......
Why was Midnight Cowboy x-rated?
I have watched it many times...did they cut a bunch out of the film for DVD release?
2001 would have been great if you could understood what it was about (I didn’t)
I loved 2010.
Wasn’t the book written after/during the movie? I think I read that somewhere once.
Ahhh...earlier post confirmed!
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