News from the Boston Becks

The Academy started to honor music in 1934, when they added both Best Score and Best Song. The eligibility of various songs over the years has always been a little hard to figure out. For a lot of information on eligible songs, I have relied on Inside Oscar. Also, from 1958 to 1979 there were long-lists: a group of 10 semi-finalists before they announced the actual nominees (those long lists can be found below). For that info, I have to thank Scott Bettencourt from filmscoremontly.com.

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From Here to Eternity (1953) - on my point scale, the most successful film in Oscar history

The first thing I want to point out is that I am no way affiliated with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. “Oscar” and “Academy Awards” are registered trademarks of the Academy.   ALL THE NEW THINGS ARE IN GREEN – with things that have changed, I have tried to cross out so the old info is still visible – new stuff will simply be in green

I am, however, obsessed with them. Part of it is being interested in film for a very long time. I have seen well over 5000 films, including over 78% 93% of all the nominated films, accounting for 90% 96% of all the nominees. That combined with list-making and OCD makes me the perfect person to write about all things Oscar.

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Max Von Sydow and Bibi Andersson in Ingmar Bergman's The Seventh Seal (1957).

In 1957, Kirk Douglas and Burt Lancaster introduced the Best Actor nominees with a song called “It’s Great Not to Be Nominated.” And if you look at this list, you might agree, because this is a great list of films and none of them received even a single Academy Award nomination. They all were completely shut out.

To show how much the Academy got it wrong I list each film, complete with the year it was eligible, and then list all the awards I would have nominated them for (I put the category in bold if I would have given them the Oscar). I played fair to the Academy and only list categories that existed in the respective year to each film. I also only include films that I have been able to verify were eligible (either through official lists, or counting on the research of Inside Oscar). And I give them the nominations I thought they deserved that year – which is why some films lower on the list I nominate for Best Picture, and others that are higher are not — some years are tougher than others.

2010 Update:  (1 Feb)  I am going to type everything I update in green, which for this is not much, but will be hopefully quite a bit with all the History of the Academy Awards series starting tomorrow.  For most of the last year, I have tried to see more of the Oscar nominees that I haven’t seen, so there aren’t very many truly great films I’ve seen that I hadn’t seen before and weren’t nominated for any Oscars, but there are three that I want to mention.  I’m not revising the list, just adding these three as an addendum.  This is also a dry run to see how well it works to re-post things at the top.  So, click on through.

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Well, my assumption that Thomas would pick up using the potty as soon as he had a few successes has been proven wrong. We’ve gone the last week with no pull-ups (only ‘big boy pants’) and he just isn’t taking to it. He’s had some success at school, but is still coming home with two or three wet outfits. And he isn’t going at home at all. He wet himself this morning at around 9:30 and then just went again all over a chair a few minutes ago (about 2) despite being put on the potty every half hour and being two feet away from the potty chair when he went. Feeling pretty discouraged. I don’t want him to hurt himself by holding his pee all day, but I’d hate to go back to pull-ups when he is having a little success at school. And I really wish we still had our own washer and dryer.

Ed Wood and Bela Lugosi creating utter dreck.

“Oh my God, you’re getting the worst film ever made,” the circulation clerk at the Tufts Media Center told me as I checked out Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salo or 120 Days of Sodom.  I countered that I had seen films that were probably worse, including Caligula and Human Highway.

The clerks had never heard of Human Highway, so I described it to them.  They then looked it up, were dismayed to find out that Tufts doesn’t carry it and asked their boss why not.

It reminded me of my friend Curtis, who, with a bunch of friends, every year on New Year’s Eve watches a truly awful film.  I recommended Human Highway to them, if they could find it, right after they had just watched The Star Wars Holiday Special (which isn’t in this list for the fact that it’s not a feature film). (more…)

We received this message from Thomas’ teacher today.

“I just wanted to write to let you know what an amazing day at school Thomas had today. He was in a great mood all day (although a little tired by the end) and was interacting with his teachers and peers beautifully. There was no peeing in the potty, but he was almost totally independent with the other aspects of bathrooming. It was a great day!”

The #1 Romantic Drama (#3 overall).

Here it is: the final AFI list. It is also the sparsest, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I’ve been busy trying to get my Academy Award posts ready for later this month, because it takes forever to do the links for a list this long, and because I’ve been working at Borders a lot to make up for the fact that my job for AAS no longer exists. So, with no links or quotes or descriptions, I simply give you the 100 best dramas.

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Ingmar Bergman directing Fanny and Alexander, one of his 16 films on the list.

One more genre after this and that’s Drama.  This list is outside the scope of AFI’s lists, of course, because these are Foreign Language Films.  This is the list in fact I said I would do months and months ago.

Since it takes forever to do the links (that’s why the last few lists have taken so long), I’ve just linked the directors, and only on their highest-ranking film.  I’ll eventually do the 100 Best Directors list, but it won’t be until after the Academy Awards because from the nominations to the awards I’ll be doing a daily post on each Oscar category. (more…)