The Year in Film: 1929 – 1930

My Top 10:

The final poignant moment in All Quiet on the Western Front

1. All Quiet on the Western Front
2. City Girl
3. Arsenal
4. Hell’s Angels
5. The General Line
6. Under the Roofs of Paris
7. The Great Gabbo
8. Anna Christie
9. Blackmail
10. Diary of a Lost Girl

 

Great Director #29: Luis Bunuel

Luis Bunuel

Luis Bunuel's The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972)

• Born: 1900
• Died: 1977
• Rank: 29
• Score: 644.20
• Awards: 2 NSFC / NBR
• Nominations: 2 Oscars (for Screenplay) / BAFTA
• Feature Films: 30
• Best: The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• Worst: The Adventures of Robinson Crusoe

Top 10 Feature Films:

1. The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie – 1972
2. Belle de Jour – 1967
3. That Obscure Object of Desire – 1977
4. L’Age d’Or – 1930
5. The Exterminating Angel – 1962
6. Los Olvidados – 1950
7. The Phantom of Liberty – 1964
8. Viridiana – 1961
9. Simon of the Desert – 1962
10. The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz – 1955

Top 10 Best Director Finishes (Nighthawk Awards):

• 1952 – 9th – Los Olvidados
• 1965 – 6th – Simon of the Desert
• 1967 – 8th – The Exterminating Angel
• 1968 – 5th – Belle de Jour
• 1970 – 4th – The Milky Way
• 1972 – 5th – The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
• 1977 – 5th – That Obscure Object of Desire

 

The History of the Academy Awards: A Guess at Best Picture 6-10

Almost Famous (2000)

With the recent change in the Academy Awards, upping the number of Best Picture nominees from 5 to 10, it calls for a look at Academy history. The first thing to remember is that the number of nominees fluctuated in the early years. It started with 3 (plus 3 for Best Production), then went up to 5 the next year, changed to 8 in 1931-32, went up to 10 the next year, up to 12 the year after that, stayed 12 in 1935, then went back down to 10 where it stayed until 1943. In 1944, it went back down to 5 and has stayed like that ever since.

Of course, the number of Best Director nominees will be staying at 5, so there will be guesses as to what “the real 5 are,” but for now, we are back to 10.

So what about the years between? If it had been 10 this whole time, what would the other nominees have been? I have taken my best stab at this for all the years in between and I tried to keep it as objective as possible. So, I set a few rules.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Foreign Film

Rashomon (1951): one of the earliest and most deserving Academy Award winners for Best Foreign Film

The Academy has a long history of flirting with the foreign film industry. As early as 1932, the Academy was nominating foreign films in technical categories (A Nous La Liberte, nominated for Art Direction). In 1938, Grand Illusion became the first non English language film to be nominated for Best Picture. With the intervening war and the presence of foreign films greatly reduced, there wasn’t a need to do anything more, but after the war, with the resurgence of a world cinema, the Academy had to do something more than just nominating films for their scripts (in 1946, both Children of Paradise and Open City), so in 1948, the Academy started giving a special award to one foreign film. This was just a placeholder until 1956, when the category of Best Foreign Film was finally established as a competitive award.

 

“It’s Great Not to Be Nominated”: The 100 Best Films Not Nominated for an Academy Award (Revised Version)

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.

 

Outside the Scope of AFI: The 100 Best Foreign Language Films

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.