24 January, 2011
the men at the Post: Dustin Hoffman, Robert Redford, Jason Robards, Jack Warden and Martin Balsam in All the President's Men (1976)
My Top 20:
19 January, 2011
Jack Nicholson took home Best Actor. This is one of his quieter moments in One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975).
The 48th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 1975. The nominations were announced on February 17, 1976 and the awards were held on March 29, 1976.
Best Picture: One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
Most Surprising Omission: Amarcord
Best Eligible Film Not Nominated: Monty Python and the Holy Grail
Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years: #19
18 January, 2011
"You're gonna need a bigger boat."
My Top 20:
9 January, 2011
Jack Nicholson and Faye Dunaway in Chinatown - the best film of 1974, or almost any year
My Top 20:
25 August, 2010
Tom Jones won Best Picture in 1963 and made Albert Finney a star.
The 36th Academy Awards for the film year 1963.
Best Picture: Tom Jones
Most Surprising Omission: Hud
Best Eligible Film Not Nominated: The Great Escape
Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years: #78 (more…)
23 March, 2010
My Top 10:
the main title for The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) - the Best Picture choice for pretty much everyone, including me
2 March, 2010
Spencer Tracy might have won the Oscar for Boys Town, but it's one of nine films that were nominated for Best Picture that he was in. They all lost.
First, the status update. Starting the day after the Oscars, in addition to getting back on a more regular schedule with The Year in Film and The Top 100 Novels, I will also be adding in The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture. I will be doing a breakdown year by year, looking at each individual film. To get some better perspective on this I will be re-watching every Best Picture nominee. This is badly needed, since it’s been 20 years since I’ve seen some of these films.
The first thing this means is that I will not be updating my Best Picture ranked list. I will wait until next year, after I have re-watched every film and gotten a better perspective before adding any updates. The only changes I will make to the list this year is to add in this year’s nominees and the four films I hadn’t seen at this point last year. But next year, I will do a completely new list, starting from scratch.
The second thing is that while I will be starting with the first Oscar year (1927-1928), I also want to catch up with the Year in Film. So, when I do 1956, I will do both things – Best Picture and The Year in Film. I will bounce back and forth between moving forward with the years and catching up with the first 30 years that I’ve already covered in The Year in Film.
There will be some random trivia about Best Picture nominees after the jump. (more…)
2 February, 2009
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. (more…)
