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One Day Before Oscars 2019(for 2018) : Hitchcock, The Oscars, and Psycho

posted 6 years ago by ecarle (14979)
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As I post this, the 2019 Oscar show for 2018 Oscars is about to broadcast tomorrow. Boy have there been stumbles getting there; word is that the show is actually pretty hyped now as we see if without all the things they tried to do and failed: giving out cinematography and film editing during the commercials; not letting last year's four acting winners(generally not big movie stars) give out the awards to this year's four acting winners; a "Best Popular Movie" category that came and went; and for the first time in a long time...no host.

About that one. I've been watching the Oscars for decades, and I remember one where they passed off the hosting duties (in segments) to some pretty big stars...Jane Fonda handing off to Walter Matthau handing off to...Richard Pryor?(Or maybe I'm mixing years up.) Alas, we don't HAVE a lot of big stars today. Not sure how they are going to do that.

The value of the Oscars has often been graded against those acting greats(like Cary Grant) and directing greats(like Alfred Hitchcock, Howard Hawks, and Stanley Kubrick) who never won competitive Oscars, though Hitchcock was given the Thalberg. Hitch famously offered no clips from his movies and gave no wonderful wry and puckish speech. "Thank you," he said, "thank you very much indeed." And then walked off the stage. (He'd been given the Oscar by Robert Wise, the director of West Side Story and The Sound of Music, the kind of movies you DO win Oscars for.)

Honestly, Alfred Hitchcock not winning at least three or four Best Director Oscars(I think that's how many John Ford won) is not only a travesty, but an indictment of the Oscars themselves: an Academy of "Motion Picture Arts and Sciences" that didn't honor one of the greatest "artists and scientists" in film history.

Weirder still: Hitchcock managed to get Best Director nominations for Rear Window in the fifties, and Psycho in 1960, but neither of those great films also got a Best Picture nomination. Indeed, I'm pretty sure that NO Hitchcock movie got a Best Picture nomination after 1950. Maybe Spellbound 1945 last?

The Academy was sparing in even nominating Hitchcock for the Best Director Oscar. Only five times: Rebecca, Lifeboat, Spellbound, Rear Window, Psycho. Great, fine(and reflecting the "stunt" of Lifeboat, I'd say.)

But Hitchcock WASN'T nominated for Best Director for Shadow of a Doubt, Notorious, Strangers on a Train, To Catch a Thief, The Man Who Knew Too Much '56; and the twin outrages of Vertigo and North by Northwest, neither of which got a Best Picture nomination , either.

Its possible that after Psycho in 1960, Hitchcock wasn't at his best and didn't merit Best Picture or Best Director nods after then(he didn't get them anyway), but I'd say that both were in order for The Birds(1963) and Frenzy(1972). Frenzy cadged some key Golden Globe nominations -- Picture, Director, Screenplay and Score -- but bupkus at the Oscars. Likely because of its brutal take on sexual murder, but still: it wasn't FOR it.

As for some of the nominations that Hitchcock movies DID get, here are some winners:

Joan Fontaine, Best Actress, Suspicion.

To Catch a Thief, Color Cinematography(much deserved, for the outdoor French Riviera shots, the colors of a fireworks pageant and a costume ball, and the crystalline green-blue tinge to the nighttime rooftop scenes.) Robert Burks, Hitchcock's longtime DP, probably did his most beautiful work on To Catch a Thief....other than that for Vertigo in San Francisco and environs.

The Man Who Knew Too Much '56: Best Song, Que Sera, Sera. Irony: the Master of Suspense cadges one of his few Oscars for a SONG. But a great song, and one of the comparatively few Best Songs that really MATTERED to its movie. It became Doris Day's theme song(even though she didn't much like it when she first sang it, she thought it was for children). And it rather encapsulated the bleakness of Hitchcock's universe: "The future's not ours to see...what will be, will be." (Marion Crane and Arbogast might agree.)

There is this embarrassment: the screenplay for North by Northwest was nominated for Best Original Screenplay(not a very packed category; most scripts are from books, plays or short stories.) But it lost....to....the script for Pillow Talk(which is certainly funny and rather sophisticated, but not structured for wit and theme like that for NXNW.)

And then we come to Psycho.

It was a huge, huge hit in 1960 so the Academy could hardly ignore it. And as Hitchcock movies did in his "Golden Era" period for nominations, it did the best, even with only four nominations. Because it got Hitchcock one of his rare Best Director nominations, and it got the first nomination for acting in a Hitchcock picture since 1946: Janet Leigh for Best Supporting Actress.

The other two nominations were in "hardly packed, fish in a barrel" black and white movie categories: Black and White Cinematography; Black and White Art Direction(The House!)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And...Psycho lost in all four categories. In three cases(Director, B/W Cinematography, B/W Art Direction) to Billy Wilder and The Apartment. In one case -- Supporting Actress -- to Shirley Jones for her "about-face as a trollop" in Elmer Gantry.

Some irony on the Shirley Jones thing. Janet Leigh beat Jones as Supporting Actress at the Golden Globes(a lesser award back then if a little better now.) And Shirley Jones was up for Marion Crane(she's one of the few on the list -- which included Lana Turner -- who fit as well as Leigh.)

To me, the real irony is that Janet Leigh should not have been nominated in the SUPPORTING category. She's a lead. She may leave the movie at the 47 minute mark, but she is in every minute before then, and she haunts the movie after she's dead.

Had Leigh been nominated for Best Actress, maybe she would not have beaten winner Liz Taylor(for a movie Taylor hated, Butterfield 8), but she would have been more properly honored.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Now, as Oscar NOMINATION snubs go, Psycho probably got the most snubs in the most significant "movie history" categories in Oscar history. Consider:

No Best Picture nom. What movie is more famous from 1960 and more important to film history from 1960, than Psycho?
(Not The Apartment, which won -- though it is very fine indeed.)

No Best Actor nom for Anthony Perkins. One of the greatest movie characters of all time, and the one of the most shocking characters of all time. Poor Anthony Perkins, he told the press he thought he WOULD be nominated ("and Janet, too.") Oops. Spoken too soon. But Hitch sent him a telegram: "I am ashamed of your fellow actors." Hitch knew the score. And movie history would, too.

No Best Score nomination for Bernard Herrmann. Herrmann got snubbed for ALL his Hitchcock scores , and with Psycho, Vertigo, and NXNW, it was a crime against art and against history. But especially for Psycho -- the screeching murder violins would become the most famous movie music motif of all time(with Jaws running second.) But to be fair -- the Academy didn't know that would be the case at the time. The rest of the score is great, too -- the three notes of madness that end the film(after occurring all through it); the credit music, and the musical suites attendant to such things as Norman's clean-up and burial of Marion; Arbogast's walk to his doom; Lila's climb up the hill....etc. All spectacularly moody. No nomination, no win.

No Best Film Editing nomination for George Tomasini(a movie guy recruited to work with the TV production crew on Psycho.) I mean , the shower scene is probably the most famous example of film editing in movie history(though it was perhaps topped by the attack on Tippi in The Birds and much of The Wild Bunch.) And scary "jagged" editing makes the Arbogast murder and the fruit cellar climax that much scarier -- Psycho doesn't cut smooth -- perhaps that's why film editors snubbed it.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

No Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for Joseph Stefano. Now, Best ADAPTED Screenplay is a very packed category -- most screenplays ARE adapted. And I suppose the Academy found the novel Psycho to be too trashy to be honored with a screenplay nod(way out in 1998 when reviewing the Van Sant, snooty LA Times critic Kenneth Turan said "in 1960, we didn't much care about the screenplay of Psycho" -- he wasn't impressed by its line-by-line return.) Still, even in 1960, Joe Stefano got a Screen Writers Guild nomination for Psycho, and won the Edgar Allen Poe award for the screenplay(whatever that is.) And if there is one thing that IS great in Psycho, it is all those great, witty, macabre lines that Stefano wrote for the screenplay -- 90% of which were NOT in Bloch's novel: "Mother's not herself today," "We all go a little mad sometimes," "A boy's best friend is his mother" "I'll replace that money with her fine, soft flesh," "If it doesn't jell , it isn't aspic, and this ain't jelling," "It would be cold and damp, like the grave -- the light would go out" "Its sad when a mother must speak the words that condemn her own son," "Why, she wouldn't harm a fly." And on and on and on.

No Best Supporting Actor nomination for Martin Balsam. That category was crowded in 1960, but Chill Wills ran an atrocious campaign for his nomination for The Alamo...put Balsam in there instead, and you remove that embarrassment. Could Balsam have beaten the winner, Peter Ustinov in Spartacus? Probably not, but he merited a nom, for the Method improvisational tempo he brought to the role, for how cool he was, and for his gripping, terrifying facial acting when Mother slashed him good in the face. In her book on Psycho, Janet Leigh said Balsam should have been nominated along with Perkins.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

I don't think it is a "fanboy" stretch to say that Psycho deserved to win not only in all four categories for which it WAS nominated, but for the categories in which it was not, which would have given the film this many Oscar wins:

Picture
Actor (Perkins)
Actress (Leigh)
Supporting Actor (Balsam)
Director(Hitchcock)
Score(Herrmann) -- and hey, 15 years later, Jaws won in this category.
Screenplay(Stefano)
Editing(Tomasini)
Cinematography(John L. Russell, in for Burks)
Art Direction(THE HOUSE! Inside and out.)

That's ten. That's a big number -- Ben-Hur big, West Side Story big -- but every win would have been well deserved.

But...nope. No dice. The Academy couldn't see their way clear beyond four noms for Psycho. Some of it was jealousy -- Hitchcock was too rich, too famous, and too involved in TV series work. Some of it was anger: the actors voting branch didn't like being called "cattle." Some of it was contempt for the horror genre in which Psycho was set. But none of it tracked with what Psycho had in spades: historic, history making CHANGE. And great craftsmanship. And great writing. And great acting. And great music.

After Psycho, only one Hitchcock movie got another nomination: The Birds, for Special Effects. Which should have been a 'no brainer" win, given the history made THERE(and they showed the attack on the schoolkids on the Oscar show; I remember seeing that) -- but no -- they gave it to Cleopatra instead.

No wonder Hitchcock barely showed up for his own Thalberg.

I can't say that many of the films up for Oscar tomorrow night carry any of the weight of Psycho -- or Vertigo, or NXNW, or Read Window for that matter -- but the Oscars never much connected with what those great films are about anyway.

So we will leave it at that.

For this year.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Grrrr, I have no TV channels this week for technical reasons, so I'm following the Oscars by online text summaries.

So far the big surprise, mind-numbing award is Green Book for Original Screenplay. That's *insane* against the competition of The Favorite (which I was sure would win), Roma, First Reformed (which was my long-shot outside chance). I haven't seen Vice but I wouldn't mind betting that its script is superior to GB's too. Wow, what a screw-up. This may mean further nasty surprises ahead for anyone not on Team GB. :(

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Ugh, well I called it after the Orig. S/play shock: Green Book, in the grand tradition of Driving Miss Daisy and The King's Speech, a truly slight film wins Best Picture.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Sorry about that, swanstep.

I must admit, I was thinking about you when the screenplay award was announced, and I was REALLY thinking about you when it took Best Picture -- without even the Director award attached.

I think what's interesting is that with all the changes they have made to Academy membership in recent years -- younger, more diverse -- it still votes like "in the old days."

1967:

The hip Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde on one side.
The square Guess Who's Coming to Dinner and Dr. Doolittle on the other.
"Down the middle winner": In the Heat of the Night.

1970:

The hip MASH and Five Easy Pieces on one side.
The square Airport and Love Story on the other.
"Down the middle winner": Patton.

Now, '67 is more on point with 2018, because In the Heat of the Night dealt with racial issues. The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde were WHITE hip movies.

And I think from here on out,at the movies, that's the way its going to be at the Oscars. Tonight, some movies were black, some were white(British and American white), and some were Mexican. (Rich Crazy Asians didn't make it.) The melting pot is no longer melted and in the US, we're at a cultural crossroads.

That's OK. Societies change all the time.

Back around 2004, I travelled to South Korea. The movie "Collateral" was out, starring Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx. I saw it, and liked it, at home in the US. In Korea, it was playing -- but all the billboards, and the bus signs, only had Tom Cruise on them. It was as if Jamie Foxx did not exist. I guess in that country, he doesn't.

America's different, and is going to be different. It will be very interesting on the one hand, but on the other, c'mon -- "In the Heat of the Night" versus "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner"(with Poitier in both of them) had some of the same racial-movie conflicts (incendiary vs conciliatory) which haven't gone away, 51 years later. Now, its "Black KKKlansman" vs "Green Card" where once it was "In the Heat of the Night" vs "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner."

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

"Green Book" meets the criteria of banishing "Oscar so white" of two years ago -- but so would have Black Panther and so would have Black KKKlansman , in different ways.

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On to other comments:

"Psycho" got two commercials. One was crystal clear: shots of Janet Leigh driving up to the Bates Motel while checking her Google phone or whatever it was. (Similar clip commericals used 2001, Scream, and Jerry McGuire -- but Psycho made the grade.) A less "spot on" commercial gave us the build-up to the shower scene "from Mother's POV," creeping up to the shower, and on the woman screaming, a CUT to a "voice artist"(black) screaming for the white woman in the shower. (Look at that, I again must take note that a racial component was added to the Hitchcock nostalgia.)

So Hitchcock got two references in the COMMERICALS! No, wait, THREE. Another commercial was cued to a girl singing "Que, Sera, Sera" -- from The Man Who Knew Too Much '56.

And during the "In Memoriam" segment, Barbara Harris was shown as Madame Blanche.

So Hitchcock, and Psycho, at the Oscars....still abide.

(Oh...Tab Hunter's "In Memoriam" clip was from "Damn Yankees" and they had a commercial for the completed mini-series on Gwen Verdon and Bob Fosse -- so "coverage.")

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I was struck again how resolutely "movie starless" the show was. I counted three: Samuel L. Jackson, Barbra Streisand, and at the very end, Julia Roberts to present Best Picture (and to adjourn the host-less show.) Oh, they had lots of Marvel movie stars(but no RDJ), and Daniel Craig(the current James Bond, but no movie star beyond that) and Charlize Theron(OK, I'll count her) and Brie Larson(a Best Actress winner about to be a Marvel star) but...slim pickings. And they had people introducing clips like Trevor Noah(the less successful host of The Daily Show, after Jon Stewart) and an African-American congressman.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Movie stars missing, none of these people showed up: Jack, Meryl...Al, Bobby....Warren, Dustin(persona non grata these days)...J-Law(J-LO was there, but she has a cancelled TV show now.) Denzel. Mark. Brad, Leo, Matt. Ben. George. Jeff. Kurt. Will. Mel.Johnny(oh, he's persona non grata, too.) Margot Robbie. Not to mention The Highest Paid Star in the World Right Now...The Rock(who was offered the hosting gig, but had to turn it down over scheduling.) I guess the "Planet Hollywood trio" of the 80's(Arnold, Sly, Bruce) are has-beens now. They weren't there, either. Nor Clint, still a star in the year of "The Mule." (And Burt was buried in the MIDDLE of the In Memoriams, before far less starry people -- haven't they ever heard of a curtain call?)

I supposed I've become "old man" enough to not recognize a lot of the celebrities who DID come on stage, but they aren't established stars, that's for sure. The show seemed on a mission to celebrate international film, many languages, and to set the stage for 2020 in America. Fair enough, that's what Hollywood is, now. That's the mission it has. (I like Michael Douglas comment a few years back when he attended; and HE was a no-show this year, too: "We have plenty of conservative industries. Why not have one liberal one?")

On the whole, the Oscars were no better or worse than they've been the past few years. The show has a different role to play in the 21st Century than it once did.

I'm still watching.

PS. Glenn Close losing struck me as another big upset.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

One more point about the Green Book win:

It reflects the Oscars as "the Rotary Club" of Hollywood. The Academy has a long history of giving awards to movies that "are good for you," and "have something to say." Green Book did. And in the preferred Academy way: non-threatening.

Meanwhile, the same weekend I thrilled to the Coen Brothers entertaining and eccentric "Buster Scruggs" and I realize now: the Coens are "genre auteurs" much in the tradition of Hitchcock, and also contemporaries that way of QT. The Coens won the Oscar for No Country for Old Men, but not much else(some Fargo awards, I think.) QT has won a coupla of screenplay awards and acting awards for Chris Waltz, but not much else. And yet I'd rather enjoy a QT or Coen Brothers movie than most "Oscar bait" health food.

And I think the Oscars Academy would understand. They don't need the likes of me.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I realize now: the Coens are "genre auteurs" much in the tradition of Hitchcock, and also contemporaries that way of QT.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

And not just them: obviously excellent and influential directors like Wes Anderson & David Fincher & PTA & Chris Nolan & Edgar Wright are somehow always too popular or too genre-beholden or too idiosyncratic or too pleasureable or too disrespectable for the Academy.

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There you go. Its that "Rotary Club" thing again. Hitchcock experienced this with Vertigo, NXNW and Psycho. And for 2018, Black Panther got its seat at the Oscar table because it was a Marvel movie with an African-American backdrop to it. They weren't going to nominate "Ant Man and the Wasp."

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Only the Mexican director-bro's have cracked the Academy's code!

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Well, the "battle lines" are drawn on the Mexico/US issues..cinematic representation is necessary. I suppose the always-charming Del Toro managed, with The Shape of Water, to get a genre win backed by a cultural positivity.

I know this "racial" breakdown is its own sensitive thing, but I am being analytical about how the Academy seems to function right now. Also, three of the four Oscar acting winners were playing gay characters, yes?

For all of this "doing of the right thing," the attacks remain fierce within the political ranks of the Academy. And so we get the news of Spike Lee protesting Green Book's win.... and attacks on Congressman John Lewis for introducing the Green Book clips.

But I "lost the lede." If, back when the Academy was an "all white affair," it was still favoring movies about social issues over genre entertainments(when it wasn't favoring musicals or epics), the diversity issues of the 21st Century are still being plugged into the "serious movie versus genre movie" template. Nobody's nominating Samuel L. Jackson when he plays Shaft again later this year (A Shaft...not THE Shaft.. though this one has the cool Richard Roundtree as the original in "grandpa" mode -- Sam's his son, and there's a 20-something grandson on the case with his peeps.)

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

..and I return to note that, OK, maybe there were a few more movie stars of a certain magnitude there than I noted above. Mostly if they were nominated...

Bradley Cooper. Christian Bale. Amy Adams (aren't Bale and Adams often nominated in the same movie? Don't they just kind of keep coming back and showing up? And weren't Cooper, Bale and Adams in American Hustle together? With the night's big no show, J-Law?) Melissa McCarthy (who got the funniest bit of the evening as a presenter even if it wasn't as funny as her recent SNL appearances.)

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Only the Mexican director-bro's have cracked the Academy's code!
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Well, the "battle lines" are drawn on the Mexico/US issues..cinematic representation is necessary.

For me the code Cuaron, Del Toro, and Innaritu have cracked is that, almost alone, they've been able to get medium to big (if they use stars) budgets for *highly original scripts* with *spectacular* but middlebrow & genre-friendly premises then execute with true flair mostly leading to $$$. Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant, Shape of Water are all technically superior, legitimately very well-directed, middlebrow popular successes. Roma - the fifth Best director award in 6 years for these guys! - is the outlier. It's the sort of boundary-pushing personal film that Hollywood only occasionally makes, and getting Oscar love for those when they come from very acclaimed director-stars is almost its own special Oscar-track in my view: Kazan's America America in 1963 didn't win much but it got lots of top noms, same for Malick's Tree of Life, and Linklater's Boyhood.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Thinking more about America America & 1963...The big winner that year was Tom Jones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Academy_Awards
The cool kids at the time doubtless voted for Fellini's 81/2 which got director and writing noms but only won for Foreign Film & Costume Design (B&W).

Bunches of noms for Lilies of The Field and The Cardinal (Preminger) and Love With The Proper Stranger (Mulligan) none of which I've seen & which have mostly disappeared from film-history. Cleopatra & How The West Was Won had lots of noms too & both are still watched with an eye mainly to their spectacle. Hud got a bunch of top noms, a supporting actor win and a Cinematog (B&W) win... but now looks like the one real American classic in the bunch. (Similarly in UK film, This Sporting Life & Billy Liar tower over Tom Jones.)

Charade & The Birds each got 1 nom, for song and sfx respectively. Neither won.

What does posterity say? Hud, 81/2, Charade, The Birds together with relative obscurities like Billy Liar, Contempt & The Silence, plus It's A Mad Mad Mad World & The Great Escape for pure pop-culture laughs and thrills win 1963.

Probably posterity's take on 2018 will be just as distant from last night's ceremony's.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

Actually, digging a little deeper into 1963 there are many juicy, highly rewatchable films well below Oscar's radar:
The Haunting (pretty damn good from Wise)
From Russia With Love (Good and gritty Bond)
Shock Corridor (excellent Fuller asylum thriller)
Nutty Professor (best Jerry Lewis by miles)
The Leopard (stately Visconti that I should revisit)
Jason and the Argonauts (great sfx inspired generations)
X: The Man with X-ray Eyes (Corman's best with Milland)

Honestly, if you were a kid in 1963 you probably saw It's A MMMM World, Jason & The Argonauts, Nutty Professor, Great Escape, and if you were brave The Birds & The Haunting and X-The Man With X-eyes. Maybe you saw Charade, Hud, and/or From Russia With Love with your parents. That's a pretty good movie education across a wide range of genres. You didn't miss much by avoiding the year's Oscar worthies, and you've got the rest of your life to catch up with 8&1/2, Billy Liar, Shock Corridor, Contempt, etc..

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Honestly, if you were a kid in 1963 you probably saw It's A MMMM World, Jason & The Argonauts, Nutty Professor, Great Escape, and if you were brave The Birds & The Haunting and X-The Man With X-eyes. Maybe you saw Charade, Hud, and/or From Russia With Love with your parents. That's a pretty good movie education across a wide range of genres. You didn't miss much by avoiding the year's Oscar worthies, and you've got the rest of your life to catch up with 8&1/2, Billy Liar, Shock Corridor, Contempt, etc..

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1962 and 1963 were in the thick of my childhood and I recall great importance being placed upon The Birds, Jason and the Argonauts and How the West Was Won in my viewing life. The former two were "fantastical" and HTWWW was both an introduction to American stars for me(Wayne, Stewart, Peck, Fonda) and a great experience in Hollywood seeing it in Cinerama(the runaway train and shootout finale is perhaps a pre-cursor to The Wild Bunch for "most exciting ending to a Western," without the bloodshed.)

Charade came out at the end of 1963 and was in the news into 1964. Thanks to a "Mad" magazine parody that spelled out the grim murders in the film, I rather stayed away from Charade, seeing it as a "Psycho" type bloodbath that I wasn't allowed to see, and didn't particularly want to see. It was funny, as part of my "child development about movies" to reconcile Cary Grant and Audrey Hepburn with a Psycho-type movie I wasn't supposed to see.

But in 1965, my parents took me to see Mirage. Which was pretty bloody and violent in its own way. The second feature was Charade -- which I was suddenly excited to see -- but my parents had already seen it and so we came in for the last 15 minutes of Charade(I learned who the killer was -- damn) and then watched Mirage.

The Birds and Charade and Mirage were the thriller entertainments of the early 60s with a "Hollywood pedigree," but plenty of Psycho knockoffs were coming out as B's around that time, too.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

As for Its a Mad Mad World, though that had a 1963 release date, it spent much of 63 and 64 in one theater in LA -- The Cinerama Dome in Hollywood -- and for some reason my parents held out on seeing it until it reached " a theater or drive-in near us" around 1966. (This was a corollary to Psycho coming out in 1960, 1965 and 1969 -- instead of re-releases, movies like Mad World simply played for YEARS and never went out of circulation.)

In any event, when I first saw Its a Mad Mad World, I was enthralled -- the cliffhanger climax literally exhilarated me -- and I had a "favorite movie " of all time until I saw North by Northwest on TV a year or so later(with ITS great climax.)

The Great Escape was good, but too "real and adult" to capture my imagination as the fanciful films did. Nonetheless, I remember seeing it with my family. And From Russia With Love, too, an eye-opener for the sexy stuff and the brutal mano-y-mano twixt Connery and Shaw. As I recall, my parents figured out that these Bond movies weren't family entertainment, and Goldfinger was forbidden to the kids, but they relented for Thunderball. I saw that at a matinee with other kids.

OK, knocking off the personal stuff, but there is this: when you are that young, the movies you CAN see are ones you'll never forget(Jason and the Argonauts, with the huge bronze warrior who came to life and tracked the Argonauts down like The Terminator), the ones you CAN'T see have to be tracked down over the years(Psycho, Charade), and the movies themselves are magical, bigger than life, best-thing-in-life experiences. I miss that era for many reasons, but its nice to re-visit in mind and on DVD.

And no, it doesn't have much to do with the movies that got the Oscars that year...

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

What does posterity say? Hud, 81/2, Charade, The Birds together with relative obscurities like Billy Liar, Contempt & The Silence, plus It's A Mad Mad Mad World & The Great Escape for pure pop-culture laughs and thrills win 1963.

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That's a good mix. I would say that both the Hollywood genre hits AND the notable foreign films of the time have to be taken into consideration. The "Rotary Club" Oscar movies are often forgotten. (Speaking of Rotary Club films..they go way back: The Lost Weekend(alcoholism), Gentlemen's Agreement(anti-Semitism) ..maybe even The Best Years of Our Lives...but those were all stirring stories, too.)

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Hud is a special case. Director Martin Ritt said something like "we thought we were making a movie about a hateable, self-involved heel...but young people made a hero out of him." It would be hard to decide when younger generations started really digging "rebels" not just for being rebels, but for being "a-holes," but it certainly seems to be something that developed over the decades. You can see it on the internet chat boards -- and I'm not necessarily using the word "a-hole" in a derogatory way. Simply: angry, cynical, untrusting. I can't say its a bad thing as much as its just a thing.

I'd also say people are very self-centered -- until they are not. Every emergency and disaster of recent years has shown me -- personally in some cases - that people may be snarky when things are OK, but they are very, very good when the chips are down and others need help.

Back to Hud: its director, writers and star(Paul Newman) regrouped 4 years later to make "Hombre," which got no Oscar love(too "Western") but certainly seems to have outdistanced Hud over the years as a pop classic loved and quoted everywhere.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Probably posterity's take on 2018 will be just as distant from last night's ceremony's.

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Perhaps. But there's so little memorable on the entertainment side of 2018 to remember. I'm clinging to Mary Poppins Returns and The Ballad of Buster Scruggs as movies that entertained me with "some meat on the bones" that made them memorable.

But what of The Avengers? I thought of something funny when I recently saw a commercial for a new Spider-Man movie coming this summer. Its about "Spider Man in Paris" with his classmates. But here's the thing: Spider-Man DIED in The Avengers, given perhaps the most moving of the multiple deaths that ended the film. And yet, before we even get the final Avengers chapter...where Spidey will likely come back to life...he's already advertised for a SEQUEL?

My point is that a comic book series that kills off and resurrects its characters with no real respect for death is...nothing. The many deaths in Buster Scruggs (other than the comical ones in the title segment) feel quite real, quite grim, quite sad -- even if that film is an entertainment, too.

I dunno...maybe 2018 will be found so fallow in "regular entertainment movies" that the Oscar list will dominate the memories. A Star is Born and Bohemian Rhapsody at least(neither of which felt really like Oscar material to me.) And Black Panther. But he was in The Avengers, too!

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

My point is that a comic book series that kills off and resurrects its characters with no real respect for death is...nothing.

Yes, this is a problem. Wider problems of unreality ramify too: furious action without known physical consequences is pointless. I watched Into the Spiderverse recently and found a lot of it unintelligible. There's lots of crossing and falling between alternate universes going on and this is seen to involve city-shaking and -destroying releases of energy. Yet somehow everyone can just go magically home to their own universes and all the wide-scale destruction unleashed is undone or never really happened or something. The film was interesting looking and had some good sequences but huge chunks of it defied rational explanation: if you freeze the picture & try to explain what you're looking at, what *is* the hero standing on, etc., you can't do it.

[–] swanstep (2715) 6 years ago

I dunno...maybe 2018 will be found so fallow in "regular entertainment movies" that the Oscar list will dominate the memories.

Maybe. I'm *sure* that over time things like Hereditary, First Reformed, Paddington 2 (Best Wes Anderson movie not made by Wes!), Leave No Trace (superb indie), manic black (in all senses) comedy Sorry To Bother You, and cool Asian films Burning and Shoplifters (which I've yet to see) and Mirai (an anime that I liked a lot), and maybe even Mission Impossible 5:Fallout for its action sequences, and doubtless a few other things I've forgotten right now (Madeline's Madeline was quite off-putting & flummoxing first time through - but it felt like the sort of thing that might become very influential, that posterity might smile on) are going to become at least as synonymous with '2018 in Film' as the big Oscar films.

Obviously too, posterity is going to have to reckon with the wider phenomenon of superhero films: not exactly loved by anyone, Aquaman still made over $1 Billion in 2018, ditto for Venom's $800 Million. The superhero film economy & the shared wish-fulfillment & desire for TV-like continuity & repeatability & anti-drama it represents dwarves the rest of movies combined. Posterity will have to say something about that on a decades+ level I suppose.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Thinking more about America America & 1963...The big winner that year was Tom Jones:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/36th_Academy_Awards
The cool kids at the time doubtless voted for Fellini's 81/2 which got director and writing noms but only won for Foreign Film & Costume Design (B&W).

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It would be interesting to detect when -- likely in the 60's -- Oscar went "international and indie" in certain ways. Given this year's "all over the globe" nominations and wins, I'm reminded that Hollywood gossip queen Hedda Hopper, in the last years of her career(and her life) railed against how many BRITISH movies, actors and actresses were winning and getting nominated at the Oscars(Room at Top, Tom Jones, Julie Christie -- even Lawrence of Arabia.) I think Hopper passed away before the veddy British "A Man for All Seasons"(albeit directed by yank Fred Zinneman) best Virginia Woolf at the Oscars.

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[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Bunches of noms for Lilies of The Field and The Cardinal (Preminger) and Love With The Proper Stranger (Mulligan) none of which I've seen & which have mostly disappeared from film-history.

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Lillies of the Field did the appropriate thing of finally winning Sidney Poitier the Oscar, and all that he represented. The movie itself is cute but very, very slight. And Poitier's character, while funny and "rough around the edges" as a handy man(not a handyman) helping some Arizona nuns build a desert chapel...isn't particularly activist.

As for The Cardinal, its funny. One of my "non-guilty pleasures" is what I call "Otto Preminger's b/w American institutions trilogy" -- Anatomy of a Murder(1959), Advise and Consent(1962) and In Harm's Way(1965.) Only the first one got top reviews and Oscar love; but all three captured (wonderfully, I thought) "how institution work and how professionals get the job done." (The courts, the Congress, the military.) But I've never seen The Cardinal, which is in color and which Otto did in between those others. The institution is the Catholic church, abortion is an issue(Otto made sure to put something controversial in each of these films) and I've read that The Cardinal is the most soap operaish and least successful of these "institutional" Preminger films. (Putting Tom Tryon -- very John Gavin-ish in looks and failed career -- in the lead evidently didn't help.) Its like something has been deemed wrong with it. I can't recall seeing it available on TCM, the other three are.

[–] ecarle (14979) 6 years ago

Only the Mexican director-bro's have cracked the Academy's code!
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Well, the "battle lines" are drawn on the Mexico/US issues..cinematic representation is necessary.

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For me the code Cuaron, Del Toro, and Innaritu have cracked is that, almost alone, they've been able to get medium to big (if they use stars) budgets for *highly original scripts* with *spectacular* but middlebrow & genre-friendly premises then execute with true flair mostly leading to $$$. Gravity, Birdman, The Revenant, Shape of Water are all technically superior, legitimately very well-directed, middlebrow popular successes.

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Ah...OK..I misunderstood. Thinking more about "Roma" and the "Mexico-specific" film.

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Roma - the fifth Best director award in 6 years for these guys! - is the outlier. It's the sort of boundary-pushing personal film that Hollywood only occasionally makes, and getting Oscar love for those when they come from very acclaimed director-stars is almost its own special Oscar-track in my view: Kazan's America America in 1963 didn't win much but it got lots of top noms,

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Kazan's America America? Is he related to Zoe Kazan? (Just kidding).

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same for Malick's Tree of Life, and Linklater's Boyhood.

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Well, the Oscar ceremony has adapted over the years to take in all manner of films that don't get much love at the box office but make all sorts of statements "in town": about issues, about personal lives, about personal history...