The History of the Academy Awards: Best Director (ranked #75 – 51)

Director #57 George Clooney and #56 Alexander Payne on the set of The Descendants.

And now we move on to part 7, all of whom, in theory will be in the 3.0 Top 100 Directors of All-Time List.  Whether that happens in practice, or whether some alterations will happen to how I compose the next version of the list is not yet decided.

So, again, we have the ranked list of every director who has ever been nominated for an Academy Award for Best Director.  If you somehow missed the first several parts of the list, you can find them at various points here, with an introduction here that explains the project and the scoring system.  After only getting through three of these in all of 2012, this is the third one to appear in 2013 because I want to finish the list before another Oscar season arrives and the list changes again.

As with several previous posts, there is a theme here.  But this theme is produced by where we are on the list, rather than any coincidences.  These are the directors who haven’t made as many films.  There are 25 directors on this list.  Of those 25, four of them (Michael Curtiz, George Cukor, Joseph L. Mankiewicz, George Stevens) are old pros, coming out of the Studio Era.  They directed a combined 194 films, of which I have seen 161 (so, I am missing 33).  Those four directed an average of 48.5 films (though Curtiz, with 100, has the bulk of that).  Of the other 21 directors on this list, they have combined to direct 163 films, of which I have seen 161.  So, the other 21 directors have averaged directing 7.76 films.  And if we take out a few more (Alan Parker, Milos Forman, Alan J. Pakula, Jonathan Demme, Bernardo Bertolucci), we are left with 16 directors who have only directed a combined 90 films (or 5.63 films per director).  They are here because, for the most part, they haven’t made any bad films yet (or just one) and they don’t have the weight bringing down their handful of good or great films.  There are only 7 directors, however, who have managed to get into the Top 50 while not yet having directed 10 films, so most of the remaining newer directors are gathered here in this post.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture (ranked – 2013 version)

Still one of the best openings ever. Oh, and still the best film ever made and by default, the #1 film on the Best Picture list.

Back in 2009, I did a long series of histories of all the Academy Awards categories (you can find a full list here).  The final thing I did was a ranked list of all 468 Best Picture nominees.  When I revised all those posts in 2010 I only added in the 2009 Best Picture nominees to the ranked list rather than redo the list.  There was a reason for that – for a long time, that one post was by far the most popular thing I had ever put up.  There were stretches where it accounted for almost 20% of the hits on the entire site.  But that changed drastically with Google’s changing of how images come up.  But still I didn’t revise it, because by then, I was in the middle of a project that began on 9 March 2010 and only finished on 6 March 2013 – a year by year look at Best Picture in every year.  So I wanted to wait until the project was done.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – the years (ranked)

2002 – the Best year for Best Picture in Oscar history

Here we have 85 years of the Academy Award nominees for Best Picture.

This list covers a complete ranking of all 85 of those years, from the very worst to the very best.  This was preceded by a ranked list of all 86 winners (because there were two in the first year) and will be followed by a complete ranking of all 503 films that have earned Best Picture nominations (not including the 3 that can’t readily be seen).  Now, in this list, there are not links to all the individual posts I wrote about all the years, because it really takes quite a while to do all the links.  So, if you go to the winners, you can find the links there.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture (the winners – ranked)

Michael in both the darkness and the light in The Godfather (1972) – still the best film to ever win Best Picture at the Academy Awards.

Here we have 85 years of Oscar winners.  Though, because of the two winners in 1928 there are actually 86 winners that are ranked.

This list covers a complete ranking of all 86 of those films, from the very worst to the very best.  This will be followed by two more lists: a complete ranking of all the Best Picture years and a complete ranking of all 503 films that have earned Best Picture nominations (not including the 3 that can’t readily be seen).

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – 2012

They walk out of the embassy and into history: Argo (2012).

The 85th annual Academy Awards, for the film year 2012.  The nominations were announced on 10 January 2013 and the awards were held on 24 February 2013.

Best Picture:  Argo

• Lincoln
• Les Misérables
• Zero Dark Thirty
• Django Unchained
• Amour
• Silver Linings Playbook
• Life of Pi
• Beasts of the Southern Wild

Most Surprising Omission:  Moonrise Kingdom

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  Anna Karenina

Rank (out of 85) Among Best Picture Years:  #16

 

The Year in Film: 2012

That great shot where we first see Lincoln’s face.

My Top 20:

1. Lincoln
2. Argo
3. Les Misérables
4. Zero Dark Thirty
5. Anna Karenina
6. Moonrise Kingdom
7. Django Unchained
8. Amour
9. The Dark Knight Rises
10. Skyfall
11. The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
12. Brave
13. Silver Linings Playbook
14. Prometheus
15. Life of Pi
16. The Avengers
17. Frankenweenie
18. The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel
19. The Master
20. The Secret World of Arietty

 

For Love of Books: William Faulkner

The cream of the crop of my collection, as it sits on a shelf in the dining room.

“”When Miss Emily Grierson died, our whole town went to her funeral: the men through a sort of respectful affection for a fallen monument, the women mostly out of curiosity to see the inside of her house, which no one save an old manservant – a combined gardener and cook – had seen in at least ten years.”  -  ”A Rose for Emily”

I can blame the Tolkien obsession on my brothers.  But my Faulkner obsession has the blame laid squarely on Carol Mooney, my high school English teacher (both for Freshman and AP).  In AP English we read The Sound and the Fury and I was hooked for life.  And as for the collection, you can actually blame that on Veronica.  It was when she bought the Signet copy of Sanctuary because of how awesome the cover was, in spite of the fact that I already had it, that I started opening myself to collecting various editions of books.  Before I met her I owned precisely 1 copy of Lord of the Rings and 1 copy of The Sound and the Fury.

There is a competition going.  Looking in my Book Register (of course I have a spreadsheet that has all this information – read this and stop asking silly questions), the Faulkner collection currently encompasses 314 books for a total of 114273 pages.  The Tolkien collection only has 188 books for 88201 pages.  Of course, Tolkien only wrote two novels while Faulkner wrote 20.  And the Faulkner collection has probably only grown by about a shelf since we came to Boston, whereas the Tolkien collection has probably doubled in size.  Clearly they are the two collecting passions in my life (if by the two, you don’t count Star Wars, the Modern Library, the Viking Portable Library, Harry Potter or Lego).

 

Top 100 Novels #1: The Sound and the Fury

The Vintage Corrected Text mass market copy of The Sound and the Fury I bought for AP English in 1991. I haven’t parted with it since.

The Sound and the Fury

• Rank:  #1
• Author:  William Faulkner  (1897  -  1962)
• Published:  1929
• Publisher:  Jonathan Cape & Harrison Smith, Inc.
• Pages:  378
• First Line:  ”Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could see them hitting.”
• Last Line:  ”The broken flower drooped over Ben’s fist and his eyes were empty and blue and serene again as cornice and facade flowed smoothly once more from left to right, post and tree, window and doorway and signboard each in its ordered place.”
• ML Version:  #187  (with As I Lay Dying - 1946), #187  (by itself – 1966), P6 (both with As I Lay Dying and by itself), gold dust jacket, new dust jacket
• Acclaim:  Modern Library Top 100 English Language Novels of the 20th Century #6, Le Monde’s 100 Books of the Century, All-TIME List
• Film Version:  1959  (***  -  dir. Martin Ritt)
• First Read:  Fall, 1991

 

The Top 100 Novels: The Complete List

The Top 100 Novels.

Here it is.  My Top 100 Novels – the complete list.

The intro was here.  The second 100 can be found here.  Various statistics and trivia about the list can be found here.

Here is the list:

 

The Top 100 Novels: stats and trivia

Faulkner is the king of the list. Does that really surprise you?

Before I put up the full Top 100 list (and do the post for #1), I am tossing up this bit of various trivia and statistics about the novels on my Top 100 list and on the 101-200 list.

Please note that none of the lists involving 101-200 have numbers attached because I didn’t rank them.

• Longest Top 100 Novel:  In Search of Lost Time  (4651 pages)
• Shortest Top 100 Novel:  Heart of Darkness  (96 pages)
• Earliest Top 100 Novel:  Gulliver’s Travels  (1726)
• Latest Top 100 Novel:  Jonathan Strange and Mr Norrel  (2004)
• Latest Top 200 Novel:  The Night Circus / The Tiger’s Wife  (2011)