Unofficial Academy Awards Discussion Board

Jackie Cooper was a little bit younger than Wallis is now by the time both Skippy and The Champ were released, but I do not know when the nominations for the films were announced.

Is Quvenzhene Wallis the youngest person to appear in TWO Best Picture nominees?

But this all goes back to the idea that two completely different version of a film could have conceivably been nominated in one category versus the other. I'm curious if any of the major 60's and 70's films were re-edited before they hit U.S. shores since the foreign film category is the only one that really has the potential of differing versions being nominated.

The version now available of The Act of Killing is also substantially shorter than the version first exhibited, isn't it? But, there, everyone seems to think the original was too long and this represents inmprovement.

dws1982 wrote:Supposedly the 108-minute US version is a completely different assembly than the 130 minute Hong Kong version--re-edited from the ground up. (Probably to make it more in line with Weinstein's wishes.)

Harvey is usually a shrewd business man, but this was just an incredibly stupid move. He should have known THE GRANDMASTER was not going to be a mainstream hit like CROUCHING TIGER, HIDDEN DRAGON or HERO. This was an art house film made by a director beloved in art house crowds. I was excited to see THE GRANDMASTER on the big screen, even with the good-not-great reviews. However, once I heard about Harvey cutting the thing up so horribly, I actively boycotted it. I bet many others loyal to Kar Wai Wong likewise avoided the film as well. Meanwhile, those cuts never helped it breakout with the multiplex crowd, so what exactly did he gain?

Supposedly the 108-minute US version is a completely different assembly than the 130 minute Hong Kong version--re-edited from the ground up. (Probably to make it more in line with Weinstein's wishes.)

We're not talking about adding subtitles or whacking off a couple of minutes. The Grandmaster shown in Hong Kong was 130 minutes. The U.S. cut is 108 minutes. That's almost 30 minutes cut out...that's a LOT of editing. That's why they call him Harvey Scissorhands.

In a way, just about every film nominated for Best Foreign Film is different from the version shown in the U.S. in that versions shown here are almost always either dubbed or shown with English subtitles, neither of which are part of their home country showing.

This is a rather unusual situation and I'm curious if it's ever happened before.

The rules for Foreign Language Film require the version shown in the country of origin is the one submitted for and nominated for the Oscar. The rules for the regular categories are that the version that plays in the U.S. must be the one nominated in those categories.

While it didn't exactly happen this year with The Grandmaster, but the U.S. version is much shorter than the Hong Kong version, so had it been nominated for Best Foreign Language Film, we would have had a situation where the version nomintaed in that category was different than the version nominated in Cinematography and Costume Design.