The Nighthawk Awards: 1927-28

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  There are the categories, followed by all the films with their nominations, then the Globes, where I split the major awards by Drama and Comedy, followed by a few lists at the very end.  If there’s a film you expected to see and didn’t, check the very bottom.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  But remember, there were only a handful of Oscar categories in this, the first year of the Oscars.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Sunrise
2. Metropolis
3. The Man Who Laughs
4. The Circus
5. 7th Heaven

 

Who are You Again?: The Ten Best Directors Ignored by the Academy*

The great Fritz Lang never so much as sniffed at an Oscar.

So here is the explanation behind the asterisk.  Because it would be too long to fully qualify this list in the title.  Here is the real list: The Top 10 English-Language Directors Who Have Never Been Nominated for An Academy Award Nor Had Any of Their Films Ever Nominated for Best Picture.

So here’s how we get that list.  We take every director who’s ever got any award points, any director who has ever made a film to show up on the Top 1000, every director who’s ever made what I consider a **** film and any director that I give points to for their direction for a particular film (the starting point for my update of the Top 100 Directors of all-time).  That leaves us with a list that has approximately 700 names on it.  First, eliminate the 210 directors who have been nominated at some point for Best Director at the Academy Awards.  Then eliminate the 72 directors who have had one of their films nominated for Best Picture but not but nominated for Best Director.  So now we have a list that is a little over 400 long.

Now, the Academy is primarily an American organization and though it does occasionally nominate Foreign films for Best Director (or Picture), it is still not all that common.  So, we can start getting rid of the directors at the top of the list that it would be unreasonable to expect the Academy to ever nominate.  So we can say goodbye to Eisenstein, Buñuel, Yimou, Juenet, Tarkovsky or Leone (his films were primarily made in Italian even if they were dubbed into English).  We can also eliminate Griffith and Von Stroheim because their careers were pretty much done by the time the Academy came around.

 

The Best of the Nighthawk Awards: The 1930′s

The animated film that really started it all: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs

Before diving into the Best Pictures of 1939, I’ll cover the decade at a glance with my own awards.

1930 – 1939

Total Films I’ve Seen:  460

Films That Make the Top 5 in a Category:  35

Best Film Not to Make the Top 5 in Any Category:  Scarface

Film of the Decade:  The Wizard of Oz

Worst Film of the Decade:  Oliver Twist (1932)

Worst Best Picture Nominee of the Decade:  Cleopatra

Worst Film of the Decade made by a Top 100 Director:  Jamaica Inn

 

The Best of the Nighthawk Awards: The 1920′s

One of the amazing surreal scenes in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari (1919)

As I have gone through each year in film, both in covering the year, and later, in covering the Oscar nominees for Best Picture, I have included very little of my own nominees.   Partially it’s because I don’t want to throw too much of my own stuff in these and partially because I included all of my own nominees in my History of the Academy Awards series as I covered each category.

But, as I finish each decade, I’d like to take a look back and cover the best of each decade in each category.  So, I’ll go with each current Oscar category (other than documentaries and shorts) and I’ll list my top 5 covering an entire decade (in this case, covering all of film history up until 1929).

Because I’m covering a whole decade at a time, I am doing away with my requirement to keep to Academy eligible years and I just go with the original release date.

 

The Year in Film: 1937

My Top 10:

My winner for 1937 of Best Picture, Best Actress (Janet Gaynor) and Best Actor (Frederic March): A Star is Born

1. A Star is Born
2. You Only Live Once
3. The Awful Truth
4. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs
5. Shall We Dance
6. Make Way for Tomorrow
7. Stage Door
8. The Lower Depths
9. Lost Horizon
10. La Marseillaise

 

The Year in Film: 1932 – 1933

My Top 10:

Peter Lorre in Fritz Lang's brilliant M

1. M
2. King Kong
3. Duck Soup
4. I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang
5. The Invisible Man
6. The Blood of a Poet
7. The Mummy
8. Little Women
9. Dinner at Eight
10. The Private Life of Henry VIII

 

The Year in Film: 1927 – 1928

My Top 10:

Fritz Lang's 1926 visionary film: Metropolis

1. Metropolis
2. Sunrise
3. The Last Command
4. The Circus
5. The Cat and the Canary
6. Seventh Heaven
7. The Man Who Laughs
8. Laugh Clown Laugh
9. The Lodger
10. The Cameraman

 

The Year in Film: 1912 – 1926

My Top 10:

1. The Battleship Potemkin
   

   The Battleship Potemkin (1925)

2. Greed
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Birth of a Nation
5. The Gold Rush
6. The Phantom of the Opera
7. The Hunchback of Notre Dame
8. Foolish Wives
9. The Last Laugh
10. The General

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Director (2010 update)

John Huston directing Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948)

If you’re interested in Great Directors, for the next year, every few days or so I will be covering the 100 Greatest Directors of Alltime.  Check back starting a few days after the Oscars.  (Yeah, that whole series was finished back in October and you can see the complete list here which links to all the individual posts).

There was a loose connection between Best Director and Best Picture right from the start, with at least two of the Best Picture nominees getting a Best Director nomination, but it took off in 1932.

From 1932 to 1943 (the era of the 10 Best Picture nominations) only two films were nominated for Best Director but not Best Picture, both of them oddities. One was Angels with Dirty Faces, which was one of two nominations for Michael Curtiz that year. According to Inside Oscar (on page 1015), the next year they changed the rule to only allow one nomination for a director in any given year (so I do what I do with the acting and if a Director has two worthy films, I list it as “also for”).

 

“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.