The Nighthawk Awards: 1950

To my mind, the greatest film ever made.

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 (or Globe, in the Globes section).  Films in blue were nominated (this is the first year that there are nominees for the Globes).  Films with an asterisk (*) were Consensus nominees (a scale I put together based on the various awards) while those with a double asterisk (**) were the Consensus winners.

I’m going with a top 7 again, even though only my top 5 earn nominations.  That’s because in a lot of these categories, there are more than 5 films worth mentioning.

Nighthawk Awards:

• Best Picture

1. Sunset Blvd.  *
2. The Third Man  *
3. All About Eve  **
4. The Rules of the Game
5. Night and the City
6. The Asphalt Jungle  *
7. Kind Hearts and Coronets

 

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

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 Best of the Nighthawk Awards: The 1950’s

Sleeping Beauty: the best animated film of the 1950's

So why do this now?  Well, because I already covered the years in film, with 1950 – 1955 coming back before I started the History of Best Picture, and I have finally caught up with where I began my History.  So, since the next film year will be 1961, in which I will do both Year in Film and Best Picture, now is the time to wrap up the 1950’s.

1950  –  1959

Total Films I’ve Seen:  692

Films That Make the Top 5 in Any Category:  40

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

Film of the Decade:  Sunset Blvd.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture – 1950

Four of All About Eve's Oscar nominees (Anne Baxter, George Sanders, Celeste Holm, Bette Davis) as well as a young actress named Marilyn Monroe

The 23rd annual Academy Awards, for the film year 1950.  The nominations were announced on February 12, 1951 and the awards ceremony was held on March 29, 1951.

Best Picture:  All About Eve

• Sunset Blvd.
• King Solomon’s Mines
• Born Yesterday
• Father of the Bride

Most Surprising Omission:  The Asphalt Jungle

Best Eligible Film Not Nominated:  The Third Man

Rank (out of 82) Among Best Picture Years:  #63

 

The Year in Film: 1950

My Top 10:

The opening title shot of Sunset Blvd. (1950)

1. Sunset Blvd.
2. The Third Man
3. All About Eve
4. The Rules of the Game
5. Night and the City
6. The Asphalt Jungle
7. The Gunfighter
8. Harvey
9. Kind Hearts and Coronets
10. Winchester ’73

 

Great Director #9: Billy Wilder

Billy Wilder

Erich von Stroheim as Max von Mayerling and William Holden as Joe Gillis in Sunset Blvd. (1950)

• Born:  1906
• Died:  2002
• Rank:  9
• Score:  807.40
• Awards:  2 Oscars / DGA / 2 Golden Globes / 2 NYFC
• Nominations:  8 Oscars / 8 DGA / 5 Golden Globes
• Awards Note:  6 total Oscars and 21 total nominations
• Feature Films:  26
• Best:  Sunset Blvd.
• Worst:  Kiss Me Stupid

Top 10 Feature Films:

1. Sunset Blvd. – 1950
2. The Apartment – 1960
3. Double Indemnity – 1944
4. Some Like It Hot – 1959
5. The Lost Weekend – 1945
6. Stalag 17 – 1953
7. Sabrina – 1954
8. Ace in the Hole – 1951
9. One, Two, Three – 1961
10. Witness for the Prosecution – 1957

 

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

Sunset Boulevard (1950) - the greatest film ever made

Here we have it. Oscar day is upon us. And for those of you who have been reading these posts for the last month, thanks, and I hope, if you like film, you’ll keep reading. For the next year, I’ll be doing a countdown of the 100 Greatest Directors of All-time, doing one every few days or so. I’ll also continue to do regular film posts and the Family News page will come back to the front, if you’re here to read about Thomas, Veronica and me.

Okay, so that was last year.  The Top 100 Directors are now all completed as can be seen here. This next year involves further work on my Year in Film series, my Top 100 Novels and, starting this week, an in-depth look at all the Best Picture nominees.

Anyway, for the last post, since I have seen 461 475 of the 468 478 films that have been nominated for Best Picture, I am giving a comparative ranking of all the films nominated for Best Picture.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Picture (Part II) (2010 update)

1950 dawned with All About Eve, still talked about because of its (since tied) record 14 nominations. Among its nominations were two for Best Actress, which it didn’t win. In fact, no Best Picture winner during this period won Best Actress, even though 12 of the 21 Best Actress winners during this stretch were in Best Picture nominees.

 

The History of the Academy Awards: Best Original Screenplay

Talk about a category that can’t decide on a name. The category has bounced around, first just being Story, then separating the Story, then doing away with Story. This is partially because we no longer have the Studio System where writers were paid to sit in offices and come up with stories that other people would then write up as a script.

 

Concluding AFI: The 100 Best Dramas

The #1 Romantic Drama (#3 overall).

Here it is: the final AFI list. It is also the sparsest, for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I’ve been busy trying to get my Academy Award posts ready for later this month, because it takes forever to do the links for a list this long, and because I’ve been working at Borders a lot to make up for the fact that my job for AAS no longer exists. So, with no links or quotes or descriptions, I simply give you the 100 best dramas.