This year’s Oscars played out basically exactly how everyone thought that they would.
Sure, The Artist was sort of an underdog…but not really.
The Academy loves old-school.
If a movie reminds them of times gone by it’s bound to win lots of awards. You would think that the younger generation of Academy voters would take over as the older generation dies off, voting for more innovative and ground-breaking movies. It doesn’t seem like it, though.
They’re kind of like the Body Snatchers: Matt Damon will be an 80 year old man trapped in an 18 year old man’s body. (Will he ever age?)
Don’t get me wrong: The Artist is a great film and deserved its win, but the winner doesn’t always deserve it.
There are so many movies that were nominated for Best Picture that lost out to movies that have been forgotten with time.
We’ll keep watching these “losers,” though.
And we’ll always know how amazing they truly are.
Might as well start off with the big one, right?
Orson Welles’ undisputed masterpiece of filmmaking changed everything.
With his creative use of depth of field, camera angles, and story techniques basically anyone who saw the film on its release in 1941 knew that film would never be the same.
Everyone, apparently, except for the Academy.
They gave Welles’ film the Best Screenplay award and gave “Outstanding Motion Picture” to How Green Was My Valley.
A great film, no doubt, but nowhere near John Ford’s best and certainly not better than Citizen Kane.
In hindsight, I’m sure the current Academy would probably choose differently, but I have a feeling that the Academy of the time wouldn’t even apologize to the 27 year old enfante terrible that they had all learned to hate over the last few years.
Consider also the fact that he had royally pissed off William Randolph Hearst by making the film in the first place.
Hearst had control over basically every aspect of the media at the time and knew that the film was practically a biography of him.
He did everything he could to destroy this little upstart.
Unfortunately, it worked. The movie came and went without enough notice. (No matter how much the posters touted “It’s terrific!”) Welles would make great films throughout his career, but he would never have the control that he had on Kane.
His next film, The Magnificent Ambersons, was butchered by RKO. After that failure, Welles would lose his momentum, starring in the occasional hit (The Third Man), but rarely would his directorial efforts gain an audience. He had to scrounge for money any way he could to get projects off the ground, eventually starring in films like Transformers and Someone To Love in the last years of his life.
A sad end to one of the greatest (and most divisive) talents in the history of Hollywood.
PULP FICTION
Not quite as much of a travesty as Kane, but still a sore spot among film fans.
Pulp Fiction came out in 1994 and, like Welles before him, writer/director Quentin Tarantino took Hollywood by storm. He made the town his own, really.
Suddenly, every other movie was a crime film with wise-cracking, philosophical hitmen, tough dames and kinetic editing/storytelling.
It’s a film that you can still watch nearly 20 years later (wait…WHAT?!) and see something different or notice a little detail that you never saw in the 15 times that you’ve seen it before.
Yes, he took things from his favorite films and mashed them all into his own story, but he used them the same way a novelist would use a literary allusion. His stories come across as new even while he’s borrowing from Scorsese, Woo, Peckinpah and all of the other greats.
What won that year?
Robert Zemeckis’ history of America through the eyes of a dullard, Forrest Gump. Now, before I get into this, I have to tell you that I really like Forrest Gump a lot. It’s a great film. It’s epic, sweeping and sweet in every way. The performances are great all around and, yes, Tom Hanks probably deserved his win for Best Actor. It probably also deserved some technical awards because of all of the digital work it took to get Hanks into his Zelig-like predicaments. Yes, it really looked like he was chatting with JFK.
BUT…it is not a better film than Pulp Fiction.
With its bouncy writing and pretzel-logic storytelling, Pulp Fiction was one of the best films of the 90s and for the Academy to snub it is a snub to young filmmakers everywhere. It basically said, “No matter how awesome you are or how perfect your film is, you will never win this prize. It will always be someone of the old school.”
Of course, this has never hurt Tarantino. He went on to make more films, re-release some of his old favorites and basically spear-head an entire movement of filmmaking that is still going today.
He may not have hit the highs that he once had with Pulp Fiction, but he’s never lost his footing.
I think his loss of the award bugged his fans more than him.
Good for him.
RAGING BULL
When Martin Scorsese won Best Director and Best Film for The Departed in 2007, it was like a vindication for 70s filmmakers that was a long time coming.
Sure, Coppola had won twice for The Godfather movies, but those were still pretty old school films. Scorsese was a little bit more on the cutting edge of things in the 70s.
With gritty films like Mean Streets and Taxi Driver (his first to be nominated for Best Picture), the older folks in Hollywood weren’t really sure what to do with him.
When they finally realized that he was great in 1980, they decided to nominate him for Best Director and Best Picture.
Raging Bull is absolutely one of the best films of the 80s. It takes a typical Hollywood subject (boxing) and turns it on its ear by making it more realistic and gritty than audiences at the time were ready for.
The stark black and white photography was the antithesis of what was going on at the cinema at the time…although fellow Best Picture nominee The Elephant Man was also shot this way. (This was the year of The Empire Strikes Back…not nominated, which is also a crime.)
Of course, the Academy decided to go with Robert Redford’s Ordinary People for Best Picture and Best Director. The story of a young man’s psychological troubles was somehow much more interesting than the troubles of an unlikable boxer and his family. (Robert DeNiro did manage a well-deserved win for Best Actor. His performance is still a high watermark.)
As with most winners, Ordinary People is a fine film and Robert Redford has directed some great films. But Raging Bull is among the best of all time.
When was the last time anyone really thought about Timothy Hutton’s teen angst?
SAVING PRIVATE RYAN
The greatest war film of all time?
I tend to think so.
It’s visceral, heart-wrenching and absolutely the most harrowing and realistic look at WWII.
Steven Spielberg, already a master of action/adventure films, took on WWII for the fourth time, but it was the first time that he filmed actual battle scenes. He took to it better than just about anyone before him. If only for the first half hour of the movie, Saving Private Ryan should have taken the trophy home.
Then he upped the ante for the last half hour.
What won instead?
A brilliantly written piece of fluff about William Shakespeare writing one of his most overpraised works.
Shakespeare In Love is nice, romantic and fun…but it’s no Best Picture.
Honestly, it’s the one of the five nominated films that I would have cut from the program to find a stronger film. This is actually the one time that my theory doesn’t completely work.
Private Ryan is not only the best choice, but it’s the most conventional choice. It’s about a subject that the Academy loves (WWII), it’s directed by someone they love and it’s a fairly conventional film…except for the gore.
And I think that’s where the problem came from: Saving Private Ryan is full of limb-losing, blood-tossing gore. It shows the horrible side of the last war that everyone in America was able to get behind. They would probably be more inclined to give the award to The Thin Red Line even with its poetic ramblings on the foibles of war.
Instead, the three WWII films split their votes (Life Is Beautiful was also nominated) and that left the brilliant Elizabeth and the eventual winner to take the spoils.
Sad, really.
BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN
Of all of the modern Academy Awards ceremonies, this was probably the most political.
Brokeback Mountain was, as far as I know, the first film to be nominated that was explicitly about a couple of grown men exploring their sexuality in what ended up being one of the saddest and most romantic films of the year.
It was certainly the best film of the year.
Ang Lee’s film about two cowboys with no inclination towards homosexuality until they met each other and fell in love on Brokeback Mountain broke hearts all around the world.
The performances of Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal were pitch perfect.
Instead of going with that, the Academy saw fit to give the award to an overblown bit of “can’t we all just get along” filmmaking called Crash.
The performances were sometimes very good (Matt Dillon was positively frightening as a racist cop) and sometimes shrill (Sandra Bullock did her best with an over-written role) and the whole movie smacked of politics. Not to mention the fact that any film with Ryan Phillippe should not even be considered for inclusion on the list of winners.
As much as I agree with the sentiments behind the film, I thought that the film itself was just overwrought and…well…not very good.
Brokeback Mountain had a much more lasting effect on people who saw it and tackled basically the same issues in a much more graceful and interesting way. Hollywood may have been “a little ahead of the curve” on some things (as George Clooney said), but they were a little behind the curve here.
