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.
I read the book Dune, enjoyed the movie but you should really check out the SciFi TV mini-series Dune and Children of Dune. They followed the books pretty well and it’s much better than the movie (6 hours for each mini-series to flesh out the stories instead of 2 hours for a two 300 page novels)
King Kong and Vertigo should have been there too.
Imho, given the competition.
5.56mm
Yes. I posted a link to a wiki article about it somewhere in this thread.
Can't agree more...one of the few films I walked out of the theater pissed...
The ending was so over the top, weird, strange, bizarre, thing I have ever seen...
Steven Spielberg’s absolutely ruined the movie with his ET / Close encounter type ending...
I'm sure Stanley Kubrick was spinning in his grave...
1999 - Fight Club was about 1000 times better than lameass best picture winner American Beauty, but I really shouldn’t even talk about Fight Club.
I hated AI. I still have bad feelings from the crushing sadness of waiting 10000 years to have just one day with the mother who abandoned you.
He thought A.I. was the best picture of the last decade. Here.
Sometimes, it's a visual thing. A critic likes the cinematography and just ignores everything else.
I have never seen “Fight Club” but “American Beauty” was likely the worst movie I ever saw. It was even more stupid than “Dances With Wolves” and that is really, really stupid.
That’s an idiotic assumption to make of someone who saw it.
And opinions vary. Thanks for sharing yours. But I wouldn’t call it “idiotic” even if I thought it was...
I still have bad feelings from the crushing sadness of waiting 10000 years to have just one day with the mother who abandoned you.
Yeah, I'm watching the film and the the AI kids fall off the statue of liberty base into the water and sinks down to the bottom and sees a statue of the blue fairy ... and all of a sudden the movie cuts to a scene of flying gray aliens in a clear space ship, going to a archeological dig in a glacier (I guess)...
I'm thinking...WTH, did they screw up the film and got something mixed up in the projection room...
Second worst film ever made was "The Fountain"...
The only person in the theater who wasn't grumbling at the end was the down syndrome kid...who liked the colors and visuals...
Everybody else was "what in the hell did I just watch"
It was indeed the John Wayne one...I liked it. It reminded me a bit of “Lonesome Dove”, and I really liked the old guy and the indian. The thing with losing his teeth in a poker game was hilarious!
I don't think there are any flaws. I just remember seeing it in the theater when it was first released and thinking this is the greatest movie ever made! Then I watch it years, no, decades later with my kids and saying to myself, did I really think this was the greatest film ever made?
I think my worldview has changed since the sixties.
It's a good movie, just not world class, best movie caliber.
Just my opinion.
Well its regarded as world class, the world over. :)
A.I. was flawed but still a much better film than it was received as.
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