Tell us why Movie X should have won the Best Picture Oscar (rather than the one that actually did.)

Cafe Society
1

That’s pretty clear, I think. Only three rules:

  1. The movie you choose to as Movie X must not, in fact, have won the Best Picture Oscar, but it doesn’t matter how many other Oscars or other awards it won.

  2. Optimally you should be comparing it to the movie that actually won the BP that year.

  3. Don’t just name a movie; that’s lazy. Give your reasons. And no, “Jodie Foster was naked, so obviously NELL is the greatest movie ever made!” is not an acceptable reason, though I can’t actually stop you from saying that.

Anybody?

2

2005: Brokeback Mountain should have won over Crash. I’m not one of the people who thinks Brokeback is the greatest movie ever, but it was pretty damn good, and it was important. Crash was dull, ham-handed, and forgettable, pretty much the epitome of a mediocre movie that was trying way too hard to win Oscars.

3

1994: Pulp Fiction should have won over Forrest Gump. So should Quiz Show. Even Shawshank Redemption was arguably a greater film. It isn’t even a matter of hindsight showing us that Pulp Fiction was one of the most influential films of the last 20 years; it was obvious at the time. Love it or hate it, Tarantino’s style instantly made Lethal Weapon-style crime and action movies look dated in the same way Nirvana did to hair metal. Forrest Gump was a fun movie, but it was facile, had a crummy message, and its win made the Academy look old and self-absorbed.

4

1996 – Apollo 13, or alternatively, Il Postino should have taken Best Picture ahead of Braveheart.

Apollo 13 was a gem of a film, with great performances, especially from Kevin Bacon and Gary Sinise (that Hanks kid was pretty good as well). Ron Howard, who sometimes displays a tendency to pound you into submission with lack of subtlety, tells a simple story simply, with (relatively) little over-dramatization.

I thought Il Postino was a brilliant little love story, well-written and well-acted, but it had the twin disadvantages of being 1. a small film, and 2. a foreign film.

Braveheart not only ignored the actual history of the story it told in favor of traditional action-movie tropes (the hero is ideological, but becomes fully committed to the movement* only after his wife is raped and she and his children are killed by the brits for apparently no other reason than to drive the plot forward). And of course the British king is portrayed as a prancing fop, so Wallace gets to impregnate the queen the night before his execution.

It’s a standard-issue Mel Gibson revenge fantasy, dressed up in period clothes with the names of historical figures pasted over the names Riggs and Murtaugh.

*for all of his cries of “FREEDOM!” Wallace’s goal in the film seemed to be to have Scotland ruled over by a Scottish overly-inbred monarch rather than by a British overly-inbred monarch.

5

2001, LOTR: FOTR should have won over A Beautiful Mind.

Of all the awards given out on the night, B. Picture is the only one that is not an artistic award and is not given to artists. It’s a business award that is given to producers for coordinating all the financial and artistic elements into a financially* and artistically successful film.

The realization of a story into cinema, coordinating all the artistic, financial, and production elements needed to make the film, is far greater for a film like LOTR than it is for ABM, especially given that ABM was, really, just another biopic while LOTR:FOTR was the creation of something new and unseen. Doing what has already been done before, regardless of how well it was done (ABM) is nowhere near the sort of achievement that was represented by LOTR:FOTR.

1998: Shakespeare In Love was a fine movie with great writing. On the other hand, no film nominated was as effective and as meaningful as Saving Private Ryan. Was SPR without flaws? No, but again, it’s the coordination of all production elements into an artistic and financial triumph that B. Picture represents, and none of the other films nominated came close to its level.

To comment on a couple of others…

1994: I think it’s a toss-up. The book Forrest Gump was a rather unlikeable story with an unlikeable character. The fact that the producers took that book and made one of the weirdest Hollywood films in history, and made it the biggest movie of the year, was just as amazing as Tarantino, Bender, etc taking their gangster tribute to French New Wave cinema and making more than $100m domestic.

Agree with 1996.

Though it hasn’t been mentioned yet, let me go ahead and defend 1997: Titanic should have (and did) win B. Picture. Again, the other films might have had elements that were “better” than Titanic, but, like I said, the coordination of all those elements in a production as vast as Titanic and making a very financially successful film out of it made it the slam-dunk obvious choice for B. Picture.

*No B. Picture winner has ever lost money. Only 1 B. Picture earned less than the average film released that year (2007’s The Hurt Locker.) From 1980-2007, over 80% of all B. Picture winners come from the top-two grossing films within the category (this changed when the # of nominees went to 10, btw).

6

1999 was the show where all the other nominees should have beat the winner. Also the year where 3 nominees were WW2 and 2 were Elizabethean.

Winner: Shakespeare In Love - OK, but only OK. A solid 6/10 on my ranking.

Losers:

Saving Private Ryan - Awesome movie and was the favorite. Won Best Director. 9/10

Elizabeth - Not a perfect movie, but a solid period piece. 7/10

Life is Beautiful - We may laugh at Benigni winning Best Actor, but the movie is actually quite good. I’d give it a 7/10

Thin Red Line - A solid war movie. Not as good as Saving Private Ryan, but solid. 8/10

7

It looks like when people are saying “1996” they mean the movies of 1995?

My four nominees (having not seen Il Postino) would be:

Leaving Las Vegas
Heat
Twelve Monkeys
The City of Lost Children

The winner would be:

The City of Lost Children

Heat, Twelve Monkeys, and The City of Lost Children each has its own unique style of storytelling. Apollo 13 and Braveheart are told in a fairly generic way with fairly generic cinematography (only the battle scenes in Braveheart were impressive, when it was released). I doubt that Babe was pioneering a new road in storytelling.

Apollo 13 is somewhat meaningful in that it relates to us a true story that is worth knowing about. But it doesn’t really teach us anything, based on that knowledge. It basically doesn’t tell us more than, “Coming near death is scary!” Leaving Las Vegas, Heat, and The City of Lost Children each have a message that is poignant, fully brought to fore, and which doesn’t slap us in the face.

Nicolas Cage’s acting in Leaving Las Vegas is some of the best ever on screen. Ron Perlman’s performance in The City of Lost Children and Val Kilmer’s in Heat both top out anything in either Apollo 13 or Braveheart (and presumably Babe).

All four of my nominees are much more cleverly written and intriguing to the brain than Apollo 13, Braveheart, or Babe.

In terms of creativity, skill, depth, and entertainment, I’ve got to go with The City of Lost Children. Leaving Las Vegas is a bit overly depressing and single-topic. Heat ends poorly, because the dynamic between the cop and the robber never quite fully gels into the emotional powerhouse that the director intended. Twelve Monkeys is interesting, but suffers a couple of overly hammy performances and has no strong message to tell us.

8

I hadn’t commented on 2001 because I had my own issues with the LOTR films. But A Beautiful Mind pushed all of the wrong buttons for me:
[ul]It whitewashed John Nash’s life in order to make the character more sympathetic;
[li]It completely failed at explaining how Game Theory actually works;[/li]and (worst of all) it portrayed true love as a cure for schizophrenia, suggesting that all that Nash had to do all along was to [del]click his heels together[/del] ignore all of the bad hallucination people who were leading him astray – reinforcing the general attitude so many people have about mental illness, that the afflicted need to get over themselves and just ignore all of the bad impulses their brain is sending them.[/ul]

9

Correct. Pictures from 1995, competing in the 1996 awards ceremony. If you say “the 1996 Oscars”, that’s for the films released in 1995. It’s just one of those things that can get confusing when talking about the Oscars… unless you’re an Oscar nerd like me who is used to these sort of mental gymnastics. :slight_smile:

10

Totally agree, but I think they were going to award ROTK as an Oscar for the whole trilogy. When Two Towers got the nomination, I also saw it as honorary until ROTK was released.

11

In 1983, Gandhi won against Missing, The Verdict, E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial and Tootsie.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen Missing, and have only seen The Verdict a couple of times. But either E.T. or Tootsie would have been a better choice than Gandhi. Tootsie, especially, was a great comedy and that’s tough to do.

12

Citizen Kane should have won instead of How Green Was My Valley. Kane was breakthrough filmmaking. Who even remembers Valley anymore? And the ending of the latter pissed me off, with the protagonist choosing a life of drudgery instead of escaping while he had a chance.

And don’t even get me started on Around the World in 80 Days! Every single other movie that came out in 1956 was more deserving.

13

Around the World in 80 Days is one of the weaker movies ever to win Best Picture. Giant on the other hand was a powerful film with phenomenal acting.

Grand Hotel is interesting in that it was only nominated for one category - Best Picture - and I suspect it won as an ensemble piece but I would have gone for What Price Hollywood? instead. Better story that latter would be redeveloped as A Star is Born. Constance Bennett was worthy of a nomination for Best Actress and Lowell Sherman should have won Best Actor. I suspect it was dismissed by the Academy as it showed the darker side of movie making.

I never got the appeal of The Apartment. Seemed like a bunch of losers and the whole concept of borrowing a lowly peon’s apartment in the city? Acting was OK but certainly not Lemmon, MacLaine, MacMurray’s best. Now compare that to Spartacus, or BUtterfield8 as a drama or even Please Don’t Eat the Daisies or Ocean’s 11 as light-hearted comedies. Any of these were better but I think Spartacus was the best of that year in terms of acting, story and just the overall epicness of the film.

14

The Greatest Show on Earth is not a great picture. Who’s bothered to watch it in the last twenty years? But it won the Best Picture Oscar for 1952. I think people were looking for a non-controversial movie and they figured they owed Cecil B. DeMille for his earlier work.

High Noon was nominated and it’s clearly a better picture. It had a message that was very relevant to its time and which still holds up today. It’s a movie that means something. And just considered as a story and a film, it’s better made than The Greatest Show on Earth.

15

I thought either Traffic or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon should have one best picture over Gladiator. Gladiator, to me, was an okay film but it wasn’t anything special. I thought that Traffic was the more interesting film because of the four different storylines and how they intersected with each other and subtle visual techniques like the different color tones of each segment.

Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon was an action film like Gladiator but I thought it was something more unique to US audiences than what we saw in Gladiator. It was more poetic and the story stays with you.

16

Obligatory Link: Every Oscar Best Picture Winner from Worst to Best (through 2009)
Includes their opinions on which movie should have won, and why.

17

[Hijack]
Talk about mileage varying. I’m of the very vocal opinion that the Academy fucked that one up royally, and that the should take steps to recover that Oscar (side note: I’ve long suggested that, every year at the Oscars, they should revoke one that shouldn’t have been awarded. Kim Basinger, Renee Zellweger, etc).

In my opinion, the Oscar that year should have went to Sean Penn for Dead Man Walking. The Academy tried to correct that error when they later gave him the award for Mystic River, which was a very over-the-top performance, and that award should have went to Ben Kingsley for House of Sand & Fog.
[/hijack]

18

I will go along with this. If Brokeback Mountain had won best picture it would have been one of the least deserving movies to ever win it. However it would have been far more worthy than Crash which is the worst movie in living memory to even be nominated.

19

That was the year I was going to mention. Gandhi won because it was epic. The scale was huge and the story was socially important. But The Verdict was a better movie and Paul Newman’s subtle and nuanced performance outshines Ben Kingsley’s good performance. For director I would have picked Wolfgang Petersen for Das Boot. Gandhi was a good film and an impressive accomplishment but in hindsight it was not the best film of the year.

20

So, basically, an exactly dead-on AMPAS nominee? (Heyooooo…!)