And on the other hand, I think Manchester by The Sea was quite obviously the Best Picture that year. It affected me quite deeply and I would have been appalled if anyone other than Casey Affleck won the Best Actor that year.
Good call!
j
Predator merely got a nomination for best visual effects and lost to Innerspace. McTiernan’s next movie, Die hard, got nominated for 4 Oscars but won nothing.
More generally, McTiernan’s first movie was small budget Nomads then the next movies he made were Predator, Die Hard and The Hunt for the Red October in a fucking row and only won best sound editing for Red October.
Jacob’s Ladder deserved something too but it’s the opposite of Oscar bait.
ETA: I see I’m not alone. Check out this scene and tell me it’s not effective as horror: Scariest Jacob's Ladder Deleted Scene (1990) HD Movie - YouTube Too bad they deleted it for being too horrific in a horror movie.
Goldner and Turner, authors of the 1976 book The Making of King Kong (Goldner was one of the effects crew on the 1933 movie) titled one of their chapters “Remember cavalcade?” Most people don’t, of course – Cavalcade won the Best Picture Oscar for that year. It was based on a Noel Coward work and the second most popular film that year (and King Kong wasn’t even in the running)
Nevertheless, the King has stood the test of time, had innumerable re-releases, and arguably saved the studio from bankruptcy.
A better example is Spielberg being given the Irving Thalberg award recognizing achievements in movie production in 1986. Spielbergs production credits at that time included such gems of the cinema such as:
The Goonies
Young Sherlock Holmes
Gremlins
Twilight Zone: the Movie (a production which killed a few people, recall)
Continental Divide
Used Cars
I Wanna Hold Your Hand
The best non-Spielberg directed film of all his pre-1986 productions was likely Back to the Future, a fine film but not one worthy turning the above list into Oscar gold.
The 1979 movie Time After Time about H.G. Wells chasing Jack the Ripper in modern day San Francisco was brilliant and should have been Oscar nominated.
Oi - are you dissing The Goonies and Gremlins?
It was a decent film, even a good one, but “brilliant” may be overselling it. I do like a bit of David Warner villainy though.
And The Winner Was… American Beauty, a film with no staying power and zero lasting impact on cinema or the culture!
In terms of historical impact, it’s between The Matrix and, maybe, The Sixth Sense, neither of which were particularly “deep” films but both of which had a huge influence on later work. In terms of engaging with important cultural issues of the time, The Cider House Rules and Boys Don’t Cry both have it all over the maudlin idiocy of American Beauty, and that’s just looking at the films which won other awards.
1999 was a ridiculously rich year in cinema. And a ridiculously bad year for the Academy getting its head out of its ass.
(Also: Best Actor Kevin Spacey won’t come back to haunt them not one tiny little bit.)
At the time, the Academy had no category for best foreign film; the category didn’t exist until the next year. It did pretty well in Japan on first release – #3 on the box office list of the year. But the running time is over three hours, which probably means that few of the younger generation have seen it.
Same here. I barely finished the film, and I thought Affleck’s performance was really one-note.
Eh. Despite his extramural activities Spacey is a talented actor and American Beauty had several visually notable moments. And Hollywood does love pretending that trivial sentimentality is really profound wisdom, which is the whole freaking theme of the film (and as films with this theme go, AB was one of the better ones). I don’t find the film deeply moving but it’s not without merit either.
But I’ve long since given up any assumption that the Academy Awards are driven by any reasonable qualitative criteria. In a world where image is everything, the story they tell by the awards they give is more important than actually giving awards to the best pictures and actors for the year.
Limitless was an engrossing 2011 technothriller. I was surprised that it wasn’t even nominated for anything - yeesh. Nothing! In my personal alternative reality, Bradley Cooper would have won Best Actor (playing, in one movie, a schlub of a writer, a Wall Street hotshot, a junkie in withdrawal and a rising politician), Robert De Niro would snag Best Supporting Actor, and the movie would’ve won Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Special Effects and Best Score.
Er, yes, I like the movie a lot.
Every decade since 1952, film magazine Sight & Sound has had the longest running international poll of The Greatest Films of All Time. Remember when Citizen Kane had the reputation of being the “best” for many decades? That was largely because of the S&S poll.
So for the latest version (surveyed and compiled in 2012), here’s the breakdown of the Top 50 films listed and their Oscar histories.
American films on the list that are also Oscar winners:
Apocalypse Now, Citizen Kane, The Godfather (I & II), Some Like It Hot, Sunrise, 2001: A Space Odyssey
Foreign-language films on the list that are also Oscar winners:
The Bicycle Thief, La Dolce Vita, 8 1/2, Rashomon
American films on the list that were nominated for Oscars but lost:
Mulholland Dr., Psycho, Singin’ in the Rain, Taxi Driver, Vertigo
Foreign-language films on the list that were nominated for Oscars but lost:
The Battle of Algiers, The 400 Blows, The Seven Samurai, Ugetsu
American films on the list nominated for zero Oscars:
City Lights, The General, The Searchers
Foreign-Language films on the list nominated for zero Oscars:
Andrei Rublev, L’Atalante, Au Hasard Balthazar, L’Avventura, Breathless, Close-Up, Contempt, Gertrud, Historie(s) du Cinema, In the Mood for Love, Jeanne Dielman, La Jetee, Journey to Italy, Late Spring, Man with a Movie Camera, Metropolis, Mirror, Ordet, Passion of Joan of Arc, Pather Panchali, Persona, Pierrot le Fou, Play Time, The Rules of the Game, Satantango, Shoah, Stalker, Tokyo Story
To be fair, The General (1926) was released prior to the Academy Awards first official nominating year (1927).
The Academy had strange eligibility windows back then, but its first screening in the US wasn’t until early 1927, so I erred on the side of caution by including it (which is why I didn’t include Potemkin from 1925, which was also in the S&S top 50).
any of the original star wars trilogy ….
The original won more Oscars than any other film that year: sure, Alec Guinness only wound up with a nomination for Best Supporting Actor; but nobody was going to deny that John Williams hit it out of the park with the music, for the movie where actors in the best costumes hung out on sets with the best art design while the best special effects took center stage, and so on, and so on.
Mr. Deeds Goes To Town
The Grapes of Wrath
Mr. Smith Goes To Washington
Citizen Kane
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Ace in the Hole
Shane
12 Angry Men
Elmer Gantry
The Misfits
Birdman of Alcatraz
A Child is Waiting
A Clockwork Orange
The Last Detail
Network
The Elephant Man
What is the purpose of this list???
Gantry won 3 Oscars. Network won 4. Deeds and Smith both won one each. Etc.