Preface to Oscar Shouldabeens

The Original BJ
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Post by The Original BJ »

Thanks, Magilla. Your song lists are lots of fun to peruse.

Part of me wishes I had been alive during the era of the great musicals. The Original Song category is one of my favorites . . . fifty years ago. Today, it's one of the most inane categories, made even more insufferable by the fact that the performances of the nominated songs hog up so much of every Oscar ceremony.

The sad thing is that, with the exception of most of the 2004 nominees, the recent selections have typically been some of the best songs of their years. It's just that pickings are so slim these days.

I think it was a step in the right direction to limit the number of nominees to three if there are only so many worthy songs in a given year. The next step should be to stop disqualifying worthy songs based on technicalities (Come What May, A Love That Will Never Grow Old), although in the latter's case I sort of understand the ruling, because the song does only last for about five seconds in the film.

The next step should be to find composers and lyricists more original than Diane Warren to write movie songs, but I think this one might be too much to ask.
Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

I've updated my awards to include best song nominees and winners from 1934 through the present. This was a daunting task for many reasons. The scores from films of the 1930s and the 1940s offered more than one possibility for each score but the competition was so vigorous that I kept the nominees to one song per score until 1975. This usually resulted in my agreeing with the Academy's choice of best song from a particular score, but not always as you will find.

By 1975 the choices were so abysmal that I could no longer ignore good songs from bountiful scores while nominating dreck to fill the five slots so I included three songs from Nasnville. The other two nominees were good songs from crappy films.

Original film songs reached their nadir in 1983 when I was forced to nominate not one, but two songs from one of the crappiest films of all time (Flashdance) and give the award to one of them for lack of competition.

Nashville and Beauty and the Beast are the only scores thus far to garner three best song nominees.

I also updated my nominations and awards in other categories to coincide more closely with Oscar eligibility rules. This remains a sore subject with me, though, as not all films are easily perched in a particular year. Queen Christina and The Importance of Being Earnest, for example, are in a gray area but until I find conclusive evidence to the contray I will consider them to be eligible in 1933 and 1952 respectively.
Big Magilla
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Post by Big Magilla »

BJ, I don't think there's anything wrong with changing your picks as your tastes change. God knows I've done that often enough, though I usually end up coming back to my original choices. The problem I have is that if you're going to criticize Oscar's picks, which is what my awards are intended to do, I think it's only fair to do so in the context of the times.

For example, Invasion of he Body Snatchers, The Searchers, Touch of Evil and Vertigo were films that many critics of the mid-50s, as well as AMPAS voters, were too myopic to see as the masterpieces they are now regarded. However, when I saw these films on their initial release, I agreed with the few critics who saw them as masterpieces, so I include them among my nominees. I do hedge a little by including All That Heaven Allows among my nominees. While Agnes Moorehead campaigned hard for a supporting actress nomination that she didn't get, the film itself did not garner serious critical attention until years later when the career of director Douglas Sirk came in for re-evaluation.

On the other hand, films like Once Upon a Time in America, now considered a masterpiece after its reconstrucion, was a mess in its truncated U.S. release version. To say that the Academy should have been clairvoyant to realize it was a masterpiece in 1984 is just plain silly.

As for films and performances that I no longer consider award worthy, Dances With Wolves and The Godfather Part III come quickly to mind. Yet, at the time of their release, I enjoyed them.
The Original BJ
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Post by The Original BJ »

Big Magilla wrote:My awards try to correct these inconsistencies as well as undo many of Oscar’s wrongs. By wrongs I don’t mean revisionist history. I mean denying awards to films and performances that were recognized in their own time, not films that have since been discovered to be overlooked masterpieces. To that end, I’ve gone back and corrected numerous revisions of the last few years, deciding to reinstate nominations for several films and performances I no longer consider particularly award worthy. Ironically, these are primarily films and performances produced since 1990.

Magilla, as I have said before, I love your (and everyone else's - Reza, Damien, Precious Doll, etc.) Oscar Shouldabeens. They offer such great ideas for viewing older films beyond the obvious classics, most of which I have seen by now.

I would love to eventually make my own lists for pre-2000 years, (even as I'm in the process of revising the last six years) although I sort of have been debating whether or not I should begin with 1999 and go backwards or start with 1927 and go forwards. Or maybe I should just hop around and start with my favorite years (1940, 1944, most of the 1950's, and of course, 1939). I've got an awful lot of movies to see, though.

I'm also wondering if you might explain the above comment a little more. Which films & performances do you award that you no longer consider award worthy? And is there anything wrong with revisionist history? I'm discovering that a number of my picks over the last few years that I liked at the time don't hold up as well. Shouldn't we update our awards based on our changing tastes?
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Post by Big Magilla »

I was 8 years old when I first heard of the Academy Awards. My grandmother was taking me to see The African Queen, a film for which she told me Humphrey Bogart had won the Best Actor Oscar. As I watched the film I couldn’t understand how Bogie could win while Katharine Hepburn, who I perceived even at that young age to be better, could lose. Over the next few years I was perplexed by the failure of James Stewart and Thelma Ritter to be nominated for Rear Window, for the film itself to be ignored as a Best Picture contender, for East of Eden not to be nominated for Best Picture, for Marlene Dietrich to be snubbed for Witness for the Prosecution, for Spencer Tracy to be nominated for The Old Man and the Sea instead of The Last Hurrah, for Wendy Hiller and Peggy Cass to be considered better than Gladys Cooper and Coral Browne in Separate Tables and Auntie Mame respectively, and so on.

Finally, with the failure of two of my favorite 1960 films, Home From the Hill and Psycho, to land Best Picture nominations, I decided to make up my own awards. In the next few years, I decided not only to give awards in the top six categories (Best Picture, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress and Director) for the current year but to go back in time and retroactively give out awards since the inception of the Academy Awards in 1927/28. At the time there were no books on Oscar history, the winners only were published in almanacs, so putting together awards for years prior to 1960 was pretty much a crap shoot. I had no idea how close my nominations came to the actual ones put out by AMPAS.

Eventually I found that many of my choices were indeed Oscar’s and I was happy to know they got a lot right, as well as a lot wrong. One of the cruelest oversights, I’ve always felt, was the failure to honor supporting performances prior to 1936. While supporting work in silent films may have been scattershot at best, there is no excuse for not recognizing the sterling contributions of supporting performers from at least 1929/30, six years before the Academy chose to do so.

In recent years, thanks primarily to release date information available on the internet, I’ve learned that the eligibility rules in the first few years of the Academy Awards were puzzling to say the least. In the first five years, the eligibility period ostensibly ran from August 1st through July 31st of the following year, and in the sixth year, the eligibility period ran from August 1st, 1932 through December 31st, 1933. Complicating matters further, for several years the eligibility period ran to January 12th of the following year so that films that opened in December in New York could qualify after their early January opening in Los Angeles. This produced the singular peculiarity of In Old Chicago being eligible in 1937 even though the film wasn’t seen anywhere until 1938.

With the help of the IMDB (Internet Movie Database) and the New York Times’ reviews, it is now possible to ferret out the opening date of every film in New York and many in Los Angeles. As a result, eligibility for my awards is based on the earlier of a film’s opening in either New York or Los Angeles with the exception of my newly added category of Best Foreign Film, which is based on the year of first showing in the country of origin.

Because country of origin is often in dispute, the award for Best Foreign Film goes to the director rather than a particular country. Films nominated for Best Foreign Film may compete in other categories in the year in which they are first shown in either New York or Los Angeles.




Edited By Big Magilla on 1156710731
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