The Nighthawk Awards: 1940

“Joad got out and stood beside the cab window. The vertical exhaust pipe puttered up its barely visible blue smoke. Joad leaned toward the driver. ‘Homicide,’ he said quickly.”

You can read more about this year in film here.  The Best Picture race is discussed here, with reviews of all the nominees.  First 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 – it might be eligible in a different year.  Films in red won the Oscar in that category.  Films in blue were nominated.  The Academy added two categories this year.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. The Grapes of Wrath
2. Rebecca
3. The Philadelphia Story
4. The Great Dictator
5. His Girl Friday

 

Great Read: The Great Train Robbery

Sociology, history and a thrilling real crime all wrapped together with pure Crichton entertainment.

The Great Train Robbery

• Author:  Michael Crichton  (1942 – 2008)
• Published:  1975
• Publisher:  Knopf
• Pages:  281
• First Line:  ”Forty minutes out of London, passing through the rolling green fields and cherry orchards of Kent, the morning train of the South Eastern Railway attained its maximum speed of fifty-four miles an hour.”
• Last Line:  ”The money from The Great Train Robbery was never recovered.”
• Film:  1979  (*** – dir. Michael Crichton)
• First Read:  Spring 1993

 

What’s next from Nighthawk News

A picture of Thomas to tide you over.

I’m not precisely certain what the next post will be and I don’t quite know when it will be up.  What it won’t be is the Best Adapted Screenplay for 1940.

Almost seven years after Veronica created this blog to keep people updated on Thomas and well over five years after I hijacked it to pontificate on films and literature (Thomas is now mostly updated through my YouTube page or Veronica’s Facebook, where most of family and friends can watch him grow up), I find myself exhausted.  Several thousand films have been watched, hundreds of reviews have been written, along with six days of work a week, a marriage and a family.

I lack the energy to continue writing a series that takes so long to research (all those books to read, all those films to watch again) and much longer to write (review the film, review the book, talk about the differences).  I started it because I found the idea fascinating and I just can’t bring myself to write more on it.  It’s one thing when you’re going to get in a game of Star Wars Angry Birds before working on your post.  It’s something different when you would rather just keep playing rather than actually write the post.  This isn’t a job and I get no pay for it; if I’m not loving what I do, there’s no point to it.

Or, if you don’t come here for Thomas updates, here’s a recent picture of Benedict to tide you over.

I may continue the Nighthawk Awards, partially because there is so much less in the manner of full-length reviews to write and partially because I enjoy the format of that writing more at the moment.  But I haven’t decided that yet.  I will review the Best Picture nominees sometime after the Oscars.  I will do a 3.0 of the Top 100 Directors, but not until after TSPDT do their new update.

But I really don’t know what I will write and I don’t know when I will write it.  I spent all week at home with a vicious cold.  Usually a single sick day becomes a chance for me to unleash myself on the computer for as long as I can sit upright.  After five days at home I wrote nothing.  So the passion to write something is low.

So, something will come, eventually.  With what length and what frequency, I don’t know.

 

Great Read: La Bête humaine

The Penguin Classics edition of the novel that first got me to read it.

La Bête humaine

• Author:  Émile Zola
• Published:  1890
• Publisher:  Charpentier
• Pages:  366
• First Line:  ”Roubaud came into the room and put the pound loaf, pâté and bottle of white wine on the table.”
• Last Line:  ”With no human hand to guide it through the night, it roared on and on, a blind and deaf beast let loose amid death and destruction, laden with cannon-fodder, these soldiers already silly with fatigue, drunk and bawling.”
• Film Version:  1920 (possibly lost), 1938 (**** – dir. Jean Renoir), 1954 (***.5 – dir. Fritz Lang), 1957
• First Read:  2010

 

RCM: Superman III

Yes, it is as bad as this poster makes it look.

Revisiting Childhood Movies Part VI

Superman III

• Director:  Richard Lester
• Writer:  David Newman  /  Leslie Newman
• Producer:  Ilya Salkind
• Stars:  Christopher Reeve, Richard Pryor, Annette O’Toole, Robert Vaughn
• Studio:  Warner Bros
• Award Nominations:  none from groups I track
• Length:  125 min
• Genre:  Fantasy  (Comic Book)
• MPAA Rating:  PG
• Release Date:  17 June 1983
• Box Office Gross:  $59.95 mil  (#12  -  1983)
• Ebert Rating:  **.5
• My Rating:  *
• My Rank:  #87  (year – out of 91)
• Nighthawk Nominations:  none
• Nighthawk Notable:  none
• First Watched:  on HBO at some point – I don’t think I saw it in the theaters
• Number of Times Watched as a Kid:  2 or 3

 

Great Read: Sherlock Holmes (the novels and stories)

The Bantam two volume Complete Sherlock Holmes.

The Complete Sherlock Holmes, consisting of:

1. A Study in Scarlet  (1887, 104 p)
2. The Sign of the Four  (1890, 102 p)
3. The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes  (1892, 246 p)
4. The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes  (1894, 208 p)
5. The Hound of the Baskervilles  (1902, 146 p)
6. The Return of Sherlock Holmes  (1905, 263 p)
7. The Valley of Fear  (1915, 144 p)
8. His Last Bow  (1917, 168 p)
9. The Case-Book of Sherlock Holmes  (1927, 214 p)

• Author:  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle  (1859  -  1930)
• Published:  see above
• Publisher:  various, mostly George Newnes, after initial publication in The Strand
• Pages:  see above  (all page totals from the Bantam Complete Sherlock Holmes)
• First Line:  ”In the year 1878 I took my degree of Doctor of Medicine of the University of London, and proceeded to Netley to go through the course prescribed for surgeons in the Army.”
• Last Line:  ”Both police and coroner took a lenient view of the transaction, and beyond a mild censure for the delay in registering the lady’s decease, the lucky owner got away scatheless from this strange incident in a career which has now outlived its shadows and promises to end in an honoured old age.”
• ML Edition:  #206  (1946 – Adventures and Memoirs published together); gold hardcover (Adventures and Memoirs published together); Modern Library classics (Adventures and Memoirs published together; A Study in Scarlet; Hound)
• Films:  see below
• First Read:  high school

 

Oscar learns to laugh (and other Oscar trivia)

In the history of the Golden Globes, only once has the Best Picture – Comedy category produced more than 2 Oscar nominees for Best Picture (that was in 1987, with Hope and Glory, Moonstruck and Broadcast News).  Today, though I had been hoping for 5, they went with 4.

You could argue that there are now more Best Picture nominees at the Academy Awards and so of course this happens.  And yet, in the first four years of the expanded Best Picture lineup, only 5 Globe Picture – Comedy nominees went on to the Oscar lineup.  There were 4 just from this year.

But here is the other big statistic, which I looked up last night, just in case it came true.  And it did.  This is the 86th annual Academy Awards.  In the first 85 years, 14 times a film was nominated in all four acting categories.  Those 14 films were directed by 14 different directors.  And now we have a 15th film – American Hustle.  And not only is American Hustle directed by a director who’s done this before, David O. Russell, but he did it last year!  Hell, last year was the first time in 31 years this happened.  And now Russell has done it in back-to-back years.  It’s truly astounding, and yet, I thought it might happen.

This might also put Jennifer Lawrence in the driver’s seat.  Only two of those 14 films failed to win an acting Oscar – My Man Godfrey and Sunset Boulevard.

As usual, I jotted things down.  I missed one in almost every category – Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor and Animated Film.  I’m stunned they passed on Inside Llewyn Davis and incredibly stunned they would pick the dreck of The Croods over Monsters University.  But I got Adapted Screenplay and Supporting Actress right and correctly picked Amy Adams, though I thought they would pass on Streep.  I also correctly got Leo over Redford, but missed on Bale instead of Hanks.

On to the trivia: