Actually, one can hardly tell which parts of movie making are rewarded. I can deduce that script doesn’t weigh heavily from the presence of a cliche-fest like Million Dollar Baby, but that’s about it.
I haven’t seen You Can’t Take it With You.
Seriously . . . Tom Hanks “funniest actor in a motion picture” for Forrest Gump?!!
Ok, it had some comic relief and fantasy, but it that movie was a drama and twice as sad as it was funny.
I don’t really see how It Happened One Night could be a screwball comedy . . . but the category I file it under - Capracorn - isn’t an officially recognized category . . . yet :D.
It Happened One Night is most definitely a screwball comedy.
The big dichotomy is this:
Nowadays, the big movies each year are aimed at teenagers (and younger).
The Oscar voters are adults. So they’re looking for more than flashy effects and a lot of action. They can enjoy mindless action films as fun, but they are not going to consider them great filmmaking.
Well, I, for one, like the Oscars. 
Ducks and covers…
Stop it, man. You’re killing me! Yeah, they reward the art of filmmaking. Right. Sure they do. Oh, my sides! I havent laughed that hard since I don’t know when.
It’s interesting how the criteria appear to have changed.
Imagine if Taxi Driver were released today. I can’t imagine there’s any chance that the Academy would nominate such a gritty film about isolation, despair, violence, addiction, etc. for four Oscars (actor, actress, picture, score). The most recent Best Picture winner with even remotely non-Disney-friendly themes was American Beauty, and the last truly great film to win it was (IMHO of course) Amadeus.
Ho hum. I have a friend who throws an Oscar party every year. We eat a lot of good food, drink a lot of beer, and talk about good movies, occasionally stopping to make fun of some pompous ass’s acceptance speech. That’s my plan for tonight.
I forgot that the on-line version of The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures includes recent features. And here is their genre listing:
Chicago (2002): “Musical comedy”
Chicago, based on the stage comedy Roxie Hart, treats subjects like murder in a comic way. You can call it a dark comedy, but comedy it is.
Jodie Foster was nominated for Supporting Actress.
How about the top five Academy Awards that went to the non-Disney friendly Silence of the Lambs in 1992?
Cisco writes:
> In what way were most of these comedies?
What constitutes a comedy for you? Is it only a comedy if it’s a laugh riot about teenagers who get drunk, stoned, and laid? There are comedies out there besides slapstick ones. Screwball comedies, musical comedies, black-humor (i.e., this means being pessimistic, not being about African-Americans) comedies, and comedies of manners are all part of the comedy tradition. Yes, the Oscars are slanted too much toward dramas. They don’t treat comedies, and particularly slapstick comedies, as well as they should. Comedies like Airplane!, Animal House, American Graffiti, City Lights, Duck Soup, The Gold Rush, The Great Dictator, Groundhog Day, MAS*H, Modern Times, Monty Python and the Holy Grail, The Princess Bride, Some Like It Hot, and This Is Spinal Tap should have received greater respect from the Oscars. They don’t reward comedies and particularly slapstick comedies as well as they should. Let’s not exaggerate though. They have given Best Picture Oscars to comedies, although never to slapstick ones.
Thank god you’re here.
That was eight years before American Beauty; as I said, AB was the most recent non-Disney-friendly winner.
Academy Award nominations:
• American Graffiti: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, Best Supporting Actress, Best Editing.
• The Gold Rush was released in 1925, before the Academy Awards were established.
• The Great Dictator: Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Original Score
•MASH: Best Picture, Best Director, Best Supporting Actress, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing.
• Some Like It Hot: Best Director, Best Actor, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Photography (b&w), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design.
No way is it a comedy? I guess everybody in the theater that laughed at it were seriously deluded…
How can the puppetshow song [where Billy holds her on his knee like a howdy doody doll and gives a press conference] that ends with the lawyer drinking a glass of milk that is patently obviously in ref to a lawyer putting words in his clients mouth to manipulate the press…
Or where she is just coming out of the examining room after ostensibly fainting, Billy asks the doctor if he will swear that she is pregnant, and then tells the doctor to do up his fly…
The scene where Billy is telling his dinner guests about his new case and describes how the man that the daughter of the ‘pineapple queen of hawaii’ when caught in bed with 2 women and says he is alone says ‘are you going to believe what you see or what I tell you’…
Obviously you have no sense of humor other than seeing the 3 stooges thwap each other and poje eyes out…there are MANY forms of humor that are fairly subtle, and you simply cant seem to see them. Poor Tracy. 
LOL, and mrAru thought I was the only one to refer to Capra’s flicks as Capra-korn…
But it fits the 30s definition of screwball comedy - patently absurd situations [the clothesline wall dividing the motel room] her hitching a lift for them by showing lots of leg, the overall situation [heiress trying to excape her parents to elope with an unsuitable man, and ending up falling in love with somebody else] are all classic ‘screwball’ comedy.
As I said, those are the types of comedies that should have received more respect. Yes, they did get a little bit of respect. Of the fourteen I mentioned, four of them received Best Picture nominations (and one was before the Oscars started, so it’s hard to tell how it would have been received). Those were the more-or-less slapstick comedies I pulled from a list I’ve compiled of the 250 best films of all time (using a compromise between popular and critical acclaim). All fourteen should have been nominated for Best Picture, and a few should have won Best Picture. The Academy should also have given more respect to foreign films, film noir, Westerns, horror/science fiction/fantasy films, and action/adventure films, and have given less respect to drama, costume epics, musicals, and boring, earnest films about whatever social problems it was currently acceptable in Hollywood to be concerned about.
Yeah, y’all are right. My selective film memory was focusing on Amos and the Hunyak and I totally blanked on the whole social satire that’s sort of the, uh, point of the musical. :smack: My bad, sorry!
Well, until tonight.
I never liked that they only pick one best each year seems like a bad way to do these things. In bumper years good films or actors lose out while in lean years unworthy films and acting are rewarding.
I’d like to see something along the line of the Baseball hall of fame. They become eligible 5 years after their release date and are eligible for a few years. Any nominees that got the thumbs up from some set number of voters gets in. Maybe they could even do the voting live. Think how exciting that could be. All the eligible actors sitting there as their names are read. The members whip out there cell phones or perhaps something provided by the academy and vote in their seats. We watch their percentages rise and fall. Will anyone even make it in this year?
Although I still wouldn’t watch it unless they put it on here (Hawaii) live. I hate the tendancy to tape delay everything here. Heck we’re closer to LA time the New York and they get it live.
The only thing you seem to get live in Hawaii is NFL football and only the Sunday games. I found that on a vacation and I woke up one morning to find the first games just ending.
And I live on the West Coast!
All the other award shows are tape delayed for the West Coast except the Oscars. There’s just no way it could be tape delayed in L.A. People care way too much about it here.
Not EQUAL weight, necessarily. A movie with a good script but no special effects is MUCH better than a movie with good special effects but no script. But special effects, costumes, makeup, sound editing, etc., are all part of the movie as a whole.
Does the post apocalyptic future love story also have cinematography, sound, makeup, etc, all just as good as the coming of age movie? If it has all of those and ALSO has amazing special effects and action sequences, and equally good acting and writing, well, then it IS a better movie, I’d say, and deserves to win best picture.
And the summer camp movie could easily still win screenplay and acting awards. Not to mention how rare it is for there to be a movie with lots of good SFX that actually has decent writing and directing. Lord of the Rings did, imho, and thus, I think ROTK deserved every inch of its Best Picture. So did Titanic, again imho, although of course many would disagree.