I am still bitter about **Fargo **losing Best Picture to The English Patient.
I’ll stick up for Rocky. Sure, the rest of the series were just movies, but Rocky was a near-perfect film. It really resonated with the spirit of the times, and it was the perfect dark horse win.
I agree. Its lustre has been dimmed by its sequels. If it had been left as a stand-alone movie I doubt anyone would begrudge Rocky its Oscar.
Nuh-uh! SPR was garbage.
As we descend into the Bottomless Pit Of Arguing Over Taste, please keep your hands and arms inside the railing at all times.
I saw Out Of Africa the night before the Oscars and was staggered at the gong-tastic success it achieved. Such a syrup drenched, rose tinted, naked attempt to tick all the boxes as I have ever seen. Simply awful. The only thing missing was some form of handicap.
While it must be Sidney Pollack’s most successful film, I think it’s his worst.
Others may disagree of course. (Shakespeare in Love is an almost perfect film for me btw)
MiM
Why are you guys giving The Thin Red Line so much credit? Believe me, saying it was boring and awful is overpraising it. It was either a direct FU to everyone who understands narrative and even cause-and-effect, or it was an educational warning film on how the easy availability of drugs can totally destroy a Hollywood director.
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I will never understand why Terrence Malick is such a critics’ darling. His films, I will grant, are visually stunning, but he has not a clue about narrative.
Maybe he should have been a cinematographer.
That one’s my biggest gripe.
To change it up a bit, I’m going to say that a huge oversight was 1997’s Best Original Song for That thing you do.
This song had to accomplish three things
- it had to sound as if it came from the band the Oneders
- It had to sound authentic to the era
- It had to not be annoying the seventy billionth time you heard it in the movie.
It nailed all three. But they gave it to Andrew Lloyd Webber because he’s Andrew Lloyd Webber.
- It had to sound realistically written at the slow tempo and realistically better at the fast tempo.
or a direct FU to anyone who wants to see the same old conventional Hollywood war-film narrative.
Since when was Malick considered a Hollywood director anyway? Badlands and Days of Heaven were hardly crowd-pleasers.
Or a direct FU to anyone who wants to see, you know, a MOVIE, with a coherent STORY.
there’s certainly a coherent story there. I’m just not willing to limit “movie” to a linear plot with wearyingly familiar characters and ideas.
One good book to check is Alternate Oscars by Danny Peary.
While he also agrees with the 1977 Oscar going to Annie Hall over Star Wars :dubious:, he does mention that the worst thing that year was the snub of Close Encounters of the Third Kind by not being nominated for BP.
My Favorite Snub from the book was from the 1932-1933 Oscars.
The best picture was won then by Cavalcade… you do remember that one huh?
It won over:
A farewell to arms, 42nd Street, I’m a fugitive from a Chain Gang, The Private life of Henry VII (But Charles Laughton’s definitive portrayal of Henry the VII won him the Oscar) and a few others.
Ten movies were nominated then, still (!) there was no room to include:
Duck Soup, Dinner at Eight, Queen Christina, Trouble in Paradise, The Mummy, The Invisible Man and..
[QUOTE=Danny Peary]
.. the greatest, most popular, most entertaining, most influential, most fascinating horror-fantasy film ever made.
(The original) [King Kong]. Because of its genre it was snubbed by the elitist Academy – a Kong size blunder.
[/QUOTE]
Speaking of, Madonna not getting a nomination for her portrayal of Eva Peron was a snub. Normally I think Madonna is about the worst actress out there, but I found her to be amazing in Evita.
And looking at the book I mentioned, I noticed this outrage from 1968:
BP Winner then:
Oliver!
The other nominations: Funny Girl; The Lion in Winter; Rachel, Rachel; Romeo and Juliet.
The one that was not even nominated:
2001: A Space Odyssey.
Many disagree.
I think the point that Malick was making was that a real war (and real life in general) doesn’t have a narrative storyline. The narrative is just something we impose on a bunch of random events after the fact.
If that was his point, he seems to be making it in all of his movies. 
Maybe he’s just not a good storyteller.
I’m hoping Oliver! in 1968 is one miss most people can agree on. If you don’t like 2001 there’s The Producers,Night of the Living Dead,Rosemary’s Baby,If…
And I say The Thin Red Line is a poor (very poor) imitation of 1945’s A Walk In The Sun, so it’s not challenging anything “old”.