Actually no, it wasn’t.
:rolleyes: Sorry, but that is just ludicrous. SPR was “prowar propoganda?” For one thing, just about everyone in the west was pro-our involvement in WWII. Second, after seeing the ABJECT HORROR of the D-Day scenes, how can you call it “pro-war propoganda?” That’s just incredibly, incredibly silly of you.
I think the answer to “How in the Hell did it lose the Best Picture Oscar to Shakespeare in Love?” is a simple one.
The acting branch of the Academy is by far the largest percentage-wise of the various disciplines. And SiL is a valentine to the acting community. It enshrines the process of acting as a difficult, often thankless, but ultimately ennobling one. For the actors in the Academy, that probably resonated more than the visceral abstractions of “War is Horrible”.
Also, don’t forget that The Thin Red Line was also up for multiple Oscars that year, including Picture, so the “War is Horrible” vote was likely split a bit. Although Elizabeth was also up for Best Picture that year, its similarities to SiL end with the period setting. One’s an intelligent comedy, the other a political thriller in historical trappings.
Given the choices available, I’d say the right film won.
I read that Judi Dench herself was astonished that she won for that role. I think the Academy was actually rewarding her for past work that *should * have won, as sometimes happens.
I think Dench benefitted from two things: (1) She steals every scene she’s in. Given the quality of the cast around her, this is no small achievement. She’s also throughout the film so it feels like she has more screen time than she actually does–less than 10 minutes in actuality, IIRC; and (2) She was not up against very stiff competition. Her main threat, Kathy Bates, already had an Oscar. Two others (Brenda Blethyn, Rachel Griffiths) were from obscure British films many Academy members may have missed, and the last (Lynn Redgrave) was seriously overshadowed by her nominated co-star Ian McKellen. If anyone was going to remember G&M, it would be for his performance, not hers.
Plus, Dench lost Best Actress to Helen Hunt(!) the previous year.
Dench is also likely to get her 5th nomination this year, once again for lead.
The loss to Helen Hunt the previous year was exactly what I was thinking of. The Academy kind of owed J.D. one.
Yes, yes it was. SPR doesn’t suck you in…it just sucks. Tripe and manipulation, pure and simple. Just like every other Spielberg movie in the last 20 years. Sorry, but the man is a hack. A very talented hack, but he wouldn’t know an original thought if it clubbed him over the head with a tire iron.
No, no it wasn’t. I won’t respond to the rest of your post, as it was nothing but anti-Spielberg drivel that didn’t approach within ten miles of objectivity or fact.
This is how religious wars start! 
Luckily for us, they make enough movies by enough different directors that everybody can have their own opinions without bloodshed. Much.
Maybe for the first 20 minutes or so and then it could have ended. After that pretty bad. For starters, an 8-man squad doesn’t fight its way several miles through enemy held territory. To fire a weapon under such circumstances is disasterous. For another thing, Hanks needed to start with four more men so that he could have sent that constant complainer back under arrest with a three man escort and have the fourth as a replacement.
Agreed.
BTW, who’s John Wayne?
I am shocked (shocked!) to hear of a movie director appealing to emotion!
Thank goodness the folks who brought us Shakespeare in Love were above that sort of thing.
Nope. No brazen appeals to emotion in that picture at all.
(And of course, Shakespeare himself would have never thought of such a thing either.)
Look, I actually think Shakespeare in Love was an excellent film and deserved the Oscar over Saving Private Ryan, but you’re going to have to come up with a better criticism of SPR than the one you’ve offered. (What is an “unnecessary” appeal to emotion, anyway? I think the bookend scenes of SPR are excellent, and serve their purpose well – to remind us that those who fought the war still walk among us, and still carry the emotional scars of the experience.)
In my own view it’s just a shame that these two fine films, and for that matter the also-excellent film Elizabeth, came out in the same year. Any one of the three would have beaten the pants off of Titanic or Gladiator or A Beautiful Mind, in my opinion. Just poor timing, really.
I can’t tell you how glad I am to hear you say that. He richly merits being forgotten.
I saw and enjoyed both movies the way God intended–in the movie theater. If you saw one at home and the other in the theater, you can’t compare them, not fairly, anyway. That said, while I loved them both, my vote goes to SIL for a more clever plot and fantastic dialogue. It was simply the more creative movie.
:rolleyes:
Amazing how this topic brings out all the nutty opinions.
I’m another person who wasn’t that impressed by Saving Private Ryan - the Normandy beach scenes in the beginning were amazing. But after that it was a pretty standard war movie - a small squad of men on a mission to rescue one man. The same story has been used a hundred times before and Saving Private Ryan didn’t add anything new to it.
That said, I haven’t seen Shakespeare in Love, so I can’t compare the merits of the two films.
I personally think SPR lost because of the handheld camera shots. When people are getting motion sickness from a movie and have to sprint to the head halfway through it, that’s not a good thing. I enjoyed SPR greatly. At least the parts that I could watch. I had to wait to see the ending when it came out on DVD, and even then it still made me queasy from the motion sickness.
Those handheld shots won Janusz Kaminski his 2nd Oscar, so there were obviously enough people in the Academy who thought the cinematography was more than just nausea-inducing.
As I said later on in the very same post you quoted, SPR does have some significant script problems, the unlikelihood of a rifle squad traipsing about the countryside that soon after D-day being one of them. The problem could have been solved any number of ways - just make it two months after D-Day, when the front is more opened up, and that alone would make the scenario likelier. I don’t have that much problem with Edward Burns’s character though; if they’d all been compliant little soldier boys it would have been boring. Besides, I was in the Army. Every eighth guy is a whiner.
Obviously the various political explanations for why one movie got the Oscar over the other are probably more likely than any technical examination of the two films, but I’m just saying that I don’t see how, honestly, you can make a call. They have different strengths, because they’re different kinds of movies.
First of all, the final sequence renders the entire rest of the movie propaganda. The first 98% = “war is hell.” The final 2% = “but MAN is it worth it!” The greater the hell portrayed, the more heroic the warrior.
Besides which, it’s pretty rare that you can call right or wrong on the interpretation of a movie. But as far as that’s possible, turns out this time YOU’RE wrong.
One of the all-reruns cable channels (TNT? USA? I fergit) recently showed SPR like 3 times in a row. All the ads finished with the announcement that the presentation of the film would be SPONSORED BY THE U.S. ARMY.
Now I don’t know how you could come any closer to an objectively irrefutable definition of propaganda.