The Nighthawk Awards: 1912-26

You can read more about this year in film here.  Since this is the pre-Oscar era, clearly there are no Best Picture reviews to link to.  So, without further ado, here are the initial Nighthawk Awards, covering the entire pre-Oscar era.  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.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture:

1. Greed
2. The Battleship Potemkin
3. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari
4. The Gold Rush
5. The Phantom of the Opera

note:  A good year for films because there are so many.  The next five, in order, are The Hunchback of Notre Dame, The Birth of a Nation, Faust, The Last Laugh and Foolish Wives and the **** films go all the way down to #16.

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Best Adapted Screenplay: the pre-Oscar years (1912-1926)

I grabbed this banner from altscreen.com. They deserve credit, because it’s awesome.

My Top 10 Adapted Screenplays:

1. Greed  (1925)
2. The Phantom of the Opera  (1925)
3. The Hunchback of Notre Dame  (1923)
4. Faust  (1926)
5. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse  (1921)
6. Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde  (1920)
7. Ingeborg Holm  (1913)
8. Oliver Twist  (1922)
9. The Birth of a Nation  (1915)
10. The Avenging Conscience  (1914)

 

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: 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