Best Picture Oscar Winners : The Good, The Bad and The Really?

Hey , it' s just like when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on Don Corleone's birthday. They didn' t know it was his birthday. Don't take it personally. Crappy movie though.
My birth year is 1956. Best picture was ' Around The World in 80 Days ' and it's crappy too. Coulda been ' The Ten Commandments ' ! But no !

 

The common denominator here is that time often reveals qualities that are not immediately evident. Since so many of these award bait movies are released at the end of the year, there often isn’t time for a true critical evaluation.
So, the easy answer, which could also make a buttload of money for the Academy and the networks, is to have a couple regular Oscar Anniversary ceremonies each year. They could do a twenty year show during May sweeps and a ten year show in November. Imagine the discussions as they face off once again.

 

Around The World In 80 Days must have been very very impressive in 70mm, 30 fps, and on the giant Todd-AO curved screen.

It definitely was the PRODUCTION of 1956 and the audiences flocked to it.

Unfortunately it can no longer be seen in that format.

Likewise it doesn't hold up as well as others on home viewing and is little remembered today.

Great score though.

 

The Academy is often guilty of picking sentimental favorites and rewarding directors, producers, and actors for years of great work by giving them an award for a current (not so great) film. Look at the 1983 Oscar nominations for Best Picture:

Gandhi
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial
Missing
Tootsie
The Verdict

I'd argue that Gandhi was by far the most boring of all of these films, but it won because... Richard Attenborough. More than one observer has said that E.T. losing the Oscars was jealousy against Spielberg, because the film "had made too much money." Being too commercial is kind of the antithesis of art to some people, and backlashes like this are frequent. Tootsie and The Verdict are also very good films that hold up OK over the years.

Something similar happened the year before in 1982:

Chariots of Fire
Atlantic City
On Golden Pond
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Reds

I've said for years that I thought Chariots of Fire, while not an awful film, was one of the most boring, forgettable films of that era. I'd watch On Golden Pond or Raiders ten times before I could see Chariots again just once.

 

Yeah, our host @Steve Hoffman has said many times how he saw the deteriorating film elements of 80 Days in one of the Warner Bros. vaults decades ago, and the studio just couldn't be bothered to save it. Fox did save the Todd-AO negatives and intermediates of their films (at least for Oklahoma, Carousel, South Pacific, and so on), but only because the Rogers & Hammerstein estate had an iron-clad contract about preservation.

It's odd how certain films just fall through the cracks and get little or no attention from the studios in terms of preservation and restoration. What I've seen before is that some films get saved because a handful of executives (or even just one guy) makes a case for spending the money for the digital work, and the studio goes along with it. Some fairly famous 1970s and 1980s films either have fallen apart or are in the process of falling apart, and a lot of that has to do with there's no "champion" to try to save them. TV shows, too.

 

I used to follow the Oscars religiously when I was a kid, from about 11 to 18 or so, but it became apparent to me the more I dug into movie history and the more movies I watched that the Academy Awards are a terrible measure of quality. I now believe they are largely a reflection of the political nudging and string pulling behind the scenes, plus a certain amount of sentimentality and the weird way Hollywood views itself, how it congratulates itself on being cutting edge or relevant by rewarding certain films. The whole idea of Oscar bait movies and performances has sullied the whole thing for me. Now when I see a film sometimes I'm so aware that it's been made just to get certain people Oscars that it just takes me out of the experience. Black Swan was like that for me. From almost the first trailer all I could think was, "Well Natalie Portman wants an Oscar and this is how she gets it." The machinations behind it all seemed so obvious to me that watching the film in the theatre was like looking at a schematic.

Raiders and ET being passed over for Best Picture really taught me a lot about what the Oscars were. Both incredibly entertaining, successful and expertly made films that advanced the art of movie making, but because they weren't "serious" enough, the award went to other movies.

 

ill defend Ordinary People! the academy loves when an actor turns director and is successful first time out (dances with wolves with whats his face) you got a real affecting turn from a newcomer (timothy hutton) and a heel turn by a legend (MTM) and great work from judd hirsch and Sutherland. heartfelt story, good score. great movie for it time! (maybe should've been RB but I don't think they blew it too bad)

true...the ending was also a headscratcher and some of it (the brando stuff) was seen as ill conceived (I like it but....it is flawed)

 

I like Ordinary People. It's a very well directed film and I saw it as a teenager so I connected with Hutton's character. Mary Tyler Moore was excellent in this film. I think if she had submitted for Supporting, she could have won. But she was up against Sissy Spacek in Coal Miner's Daughter.

I actually love all of the Best Picture nominees that year - Ordinary People, Raging Bull, Coal Miner's Daughter, The Elephant Man and Tess. I still watch these films regularly. They hold up almost 40 years later. So any of them winning would have been fine with me.

 

Yeah, there's a lot of truth to that. And in the 1930s and 1940s, when studios employed many thousands of worker -- most of whom were in the Academy -- they were ordered by their bosses to vote for their company's films, because it was "good for business." That was one way MGM dominated the awards in some categories. It was very political back then. I think the Academy got much better over time, but nowadays you hear complaints when women or minorities are left out of a category. I have mixed feelings on that, but sometimes they have a point.

 

I will say this about the Academy. Back in 1970 my father asked me what I thought about the Academy awards. I replied that it was about what I expected...giving the best actor to an old guy like John Wayne. He said what about giving the best picture award to Midnight Cowboy.

 

Charlie Chaplin never won an Oscar for best picture, directing, writing or acting. Why should I pay any attention to such an academy?

 

The only thing I remember about Chariots of Fire is the music.

 

The same with Nicholas Cage in Leaving Las Vegas and Marky Mark in Boogie Nights. Sometimes all it takes is a good director to get a great performance out of a mediocre actor. Even Adam Sandler was good in Punch Drunk Love.

 

Seems to me that nearly everyone in Hollywood is on the same page as DeNiro politically. They probably snubbed him because he hasn't done a good movie in 20 years. His performance in The Irishman is as wooden as it gets, although that was probably the director's intent.

 

He did win an Academy award in 1973 for best musical score for the re-release of “Limelight”. He was nominated for best actor for “The Great Dictator” in 1940 (James Stewart won for “The Philadelphia Story”). They gave him a lifetime achievement award in 1972

 

The Oscars didn't exist when he did his most memorable work. I wouldn't be surprised if the academy overlooked City Lights and Modern Times because the industry was trying to move past silent pictures.

 

True story-

When I bought my first DVD player, the store I got it from was including a free DVD with each purchase. For whatever reason I decided to get a copy of the Pearl Harbor DVD as the bonus. Oof.

 

You know, I remember that year telling everyone I thought Quiz Show deserved the nomination and they thought I was crazy. (I wasn't saying it should win, but everyone I knew didn't even understand what it was even on the list.)

 

" Oof" , indeed.
I have to ask...what were the other available titles?

 

Apparently for his 1928 film “The Circus” he was nominated for best picture , best director, comedy, best actor and best original story. For some reason the Academy decided to remove these and give him a special award for writing, acting, directing and producing it{. Why they did that, I have no idea.

 

Honestly it was so long ago that I can't remember.

 

I used to watch them mainly for the cleavage... now I watch them completely for the cleavage.

 

Would love to know how drunk you were when you wrote that.

 

I think what attracted Folks to Gump was how it managed to compress and portray an entire era from the outside position of Gump and it did resonate with many people who lived through that time frame (it also provided a nice summation of the period as well). I think it hasn’t aged all that well for me and I wasn’t a huge fan when I saw it (I liked Zelig better) either. There were better films that year.

Apocalypse Now should have been the choice for best picture. While I enjoyed Kramer vs. Kramer, it wasn’t best picture by any stretch of the imagination.

 

I should have been born in the 60s. Screw GIGI!!