The Alternate Oscars: Best Picture (1969-Present)

[thirtyframesasecond]

I can't find any real convincing alternatives for 1996 just briefly perusing the other films released that year. At least The Birdcage and Romeo and Juliet weren't in serious contention. I am also very agnostic on Fargo/Secrets and Lies.

[matrixschmatrix]

I can't find any real convincing alternatives for 1996 just briefly perusing the other films released that year.

Uh, The Rock? Obviously?

[Gregory]

It was ridiculous that Lone Star wasn't even nominated for anything but Best Original Screenplay (and that even that one went to Fargo). If I were the Academy, the Foreign-Language Film noms probably would have been a lot different too. Kolya wasn't a bad film by any means but clearly won because it was heartwarming and had a notable child-actor performance.

[bamwc2]

I can't find any real convincing alternatives for 1996 just briefly perusing the other films released that year.

Seriously? There are some remarkably good films from that year, just not the kind that the Academy tends to nominate. Here are my picks for the year:

1. Breaking the Waves (Lars Von Trier)
2. Crash (David Cronenberg)
3. Fargo (Joel Coen and Ethan Coen)
4. Hamlet (Kenneth Branagh)
5. Irma Vep (Olivier Assayas)
6. The People vs. Larry Flynt (Milos Forman)
7. Lone Star (John Sayles)
8. Everyone Says I Love You (Woody Allen)
9. The English Patient (Anthony Minghella)
10. Sling Blade (Billy Bob Thorton)

Runners Up: Basquiat (Julian Schnabel), Beavis and Butt-Head Do America (Mike Judge), Big Night (Campbell Scott and Stanley Tucci), Bound (The Wachowskis), The Cable Guy (Ben Stiller), Citizen Ruth (Alexander Payne), Conspirators of Pleasure (Jan Svankmajer), Deep Crimson (Arturo Ripstein), From Dusk Till Dawn (Robert Rodriguez), The Funeral (Abel Ferrara), Get on the Bus (Spike Lee), God of Cookery (Stephen Chow and Lik-Chi Lee), Gray’s Anatomy (Steven Soderbergh), Hamsun (Jan Troell), Hard Eight (Paul Thomas Anderson), Jackie Chan’s First Strike (Stanley Tong), Kansas City (Robert Altman), Kissed (Lynne Stopkewich), Microcosmos (Claude Nuridsany and Marie Pérennou), Mother (Albert Brooks), Nénette et Boni (Claire Denis), Oriental Elegy (Alexander Sokurov), Paradise Lost: The Child Murders at Robin Hood Hills (Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky), Perfect Love (Catherine Breillat), La Promesse (Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne), Regarde la mer (François Ozon), Ridicule (Patrice Leconte), Secrets & Lies (Mike Leigh), Shall We Dance? (Masayuki Suo), Shine (Scott Hicks), Six O’Clock News (Ross McElwee), Supercop (Stanley Tong), Trainspotting (Danny Boyle)

Actually, looking at that, I find it kind of amazing that Hamlet didn't receive a nod.

[thirtyframesasecond]

I meant films likely to be in contention for Oscars, of course there are plenty of good films made outside the Hollywood bubble. Whilst The Cable Guy and Mission Impossible are probably two of my favourite mainstream films of the year, they're not going to be nominated. Of the more Oscar friendly films, Primal Fear and Michael Collins might've done more, though neither are perfect. 1996's worst film is probably A Time To Kill.

[domino harvey]

2005
Brokeback Mountain Forever the underdog in the hearts and minds of the public after its unceremonious loss for Best Picture, this is a good and involving film that isn't quite worth getting up in arms over. The love story between Heath Ledger and Jake Gyllenhaal is told with clarity and conviction, and Anne Hathaway and Michelle Williams do even better playing the women stuck in the midst of a scenario that's a little hard for them to grasp-- the best moment in the film finds Williams seeing Ledger and Gyllenhaal's passionate embrace outside their place and clearly not having the tools to fully comprehend or deal with what she's just witnessed. It's a great observation and the film has a few others to compete with it. Had this won people would nod their heads and move on, as they do with Million Dollar Baby et al, but now advocating for the film is a cause unto itself. I can understand the impulse, but it wasn't the film that got robbed this year.

Capote Competent character study with Phillip Seymour Hoffman bolting himself to the big leagues in his Oscar-winning titular role. The true crime aspects, which compose the majority of the action, fail to involve on the level of the more interesting eavesdropping-type bits into Capote's celebrity. I haven't seen it but from what I understand the competing Dante's Peak to this film's Volcano, Infamous, focuses its attention more on those aspects, so I imagine I'll have to seek it out one of these days, when the siren call of Best Picture nominees and winners isn't as strong!

Crash Well, I've had some surprise reevaluations due to giving dreaded nominees and winners a second chance, and I thought maybe even something as contentious as Crash could benefit from an open mind. That positive attitude lasted, oh, forty seconds or so, and then we get well-observed lines like "You should've used your blakes! Mexians can't drive!" and so on. Widely regarded as the worst Best Picture winner of modern times (though great films like Chicago and Shakespeare in Love get bandied about in the same breath, so that doesn't mean anything), this film is just as staggeringly stupid as I remembered (Just look at the lazy paralleling of Matt Dillon and Ryan Phillippe's characters for the clearest evidence of this film's sins). The problem here is that the film insists and reinforces at all times that we're all a little racist sometimes, a thesis I reject outright. I don't need to provide bonafides to support my lack of racism, believe me or don't, but anyone who found this film to be a powerful statement on racism is to some degree racist themselves. "See, here's confirmation that everyone is this way!" The fact that white liberals latched onto the film says more about the state of race relations and the underlying racism of the so-called progressive party than anything. I suppose it's possible to like the film based on aesthetic/narrative/&c grounds, so I'm not saying anyone who responded positively to the film is a racist, but if you find it a valuable witnessing tool re: racism, I'm going to look twice at anything else you say or do. Call it Crash Profiling.

Good Night, and Good Luck A well-observed film directed by George Clooney in a decidedly minor key, but the overall effect is strong and David Strathairn is excellent in the lead. This may be polite, erudite docudrama, but at least it's good polite, erudite docudrama. I did like Clooney's acceptance speech this year recognizing the time honored Oscar tradition of representative sympathy votes when he won for Syriana, "I guess I'm not coming back up here tonight then!"

Munich Wow. I knew some people considered this one of Steven Spielberg's strongest recent pics, but after being underwhelmed by Lincoln, which pulled in similar remarks here and elsewhere, I had low expectations. But this is a stunning achievement, up there with Raiders of the Lost Ark and War of the Worlds as his absolute best work. What makes it succeed is the detail and focus, clear without being overly expository, and the sheer bravura of many of the scenes. The outcry against the film's blown-out cinematography, already a cliche by the time this was released, overshadows how effective Spielberg is at blocking and framing his action within the fluid camera-- I'm think particularly of the surreal shootout after one of the operatives throws the grenade into the hotel room to activate the TV flash bomb, wherein the action is played out in expertly disorienting fashion as all hell breaks loose. The film loses the game a bit with the last twenty minutes of reflection and rejection of that which the film spent so much time and energy focusing on beforehand, but I forgave it this transgression since what came before is involving in the best manner of conspiracy-styled thrillers from the period it depicts. The DVD of the film includes a hilariously defensive intro by Spielberg where he insists, point blank, that the film wasn't intended to be "anti-Israel." Make of that what you will!

My Vote Munich

[mfunk9786]

Ah, the year when Philip Seymour Hoffman won one of the biggest shoo-ins in Oscar history, and despite being a fantastic actor turning in an excellent performance, completely robbed Heath Ledger

[knives]

Eh, I think Hoffman did as good a job as Ledger. Also Dom, you have forced my hand to post this, sorry.

[mfunk9786]

The tiebreaker for me is the fact that the work Ledger does goes beyond impersonation of a public figure - he created that character without a guide to use, whereas Hoffman did a terrific job with someone who already had very distinctive characteristics. I always tend to lean more in the direction of someone who creates something memorable out of only what's on the page.

[knives]

In general I'd agree with you, but I think Hoffman sufficiently works within the parameters of the film to make his Capote distinctive from, say, Jones'. Though ignoring the craziness he's since shown himself to be I'd actually would probably have gone with Howard that year.

[Matt]

Munich Wow. I knew some people considered this one of Steven Spielberg's strongest recent pics...But this is a stunning achievement, up there with Raiders of the Lost Ark and War of the Worlds as his absolute best work.

Whatever vast differences in taste we might have, we do agree on this. Spielberg was on such an incredible run with Saving Private Ryan, A.I. (which is, if not good, at least interesting), Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, and Munich. (We'll overlook The Terminal, which is just an embarrassment for everyone involved.) It really seemed like he had matured as a filmmaker and was ready to make very serious films. And then he made Indy 4.

[zedz]

Munich Wow. I knew some people considered this one of Steven Spielberg's strongest recent pics...But this is a stunning achievement, up there with Raiders of the Lost Ark and War of the Worlds as his absolute best work.

Whatever vast differences in taste we might have, we do agree on this. Spielberg was on such an incredible run with Saving Private Ryan, A.I. (which is, if not good, at least interesting), Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, War of the Worlds, and Munich. (We'll overlook The Terminal, which is just an embarrassment for everyone involved.) It really seemed like he had matured as a filmmaker and was ready to make very serious films. And then he made Indy 4.

Well, I've seen most of those films and just have to shake my head in disbelief. I can see that they're more ambitious, and play around with darker themes, but so many of them are marred by his typical simplistic sentimentality. The invasion of Earth and millions of gory deaths is really all about teaching Tom Cruise to be a better father? Whatever.

[domino harvey]

Well, I've seen most of those films and just have to shake my head in disbelief. I can see that they're more ambitious, and play around with darker themes, but so many of them are marred by his typical simplistic sentimentality. The invasion of Earth and millions of gory deaths is really all about teaching Tom Cruise to be a better father? Whatever.

Oh come on, you are being reductionist in the extreme thanks to one small element of the final film. I think the ending to War of the Worlds bites too, but everything that came before is dour and downbeat and cynical to the extreme and I still believe it to be one of the most audacious, feel-bad blockbusters ever made. To call it sentimental makes you appropriately enough look like you're from another planet

[knives]

Though I think you're reducing the element of the daddy issues in the film if you just think it comes up in the ending or even in that quickly dropped plot. I don't agree with Zedz that it's a sentimental tract (though it is as stereotypically Spielbergian as possible), but the father stuff seeps through even the darkest elements of the film.

[domino harvey]

How is War of the Worlds "as stereotypically Spielbergian as possible"?

[knives]

I meant the daddy issues stuff, not the film itself.

[zedz]

The daddy stuff is indeed a (completely unnecessary) thread that runs through the entire film, and it's the most identifiably Spielbergian thing in there, plus it's THE over-arching plot for the main character(s), so I think it's perverse to try and wish it away, however much I'd like to. I agree that the rest of the film is pretty great, but the skeleton it's hanging on is mawkish to the point of being insulting. Why can't Spielberg (and plenty of other Hollywood directors) just allow the power of their film to rest on the inherent drama of a hair-raising situation without piling on Little House on the Prairie life lesson frosting?

[colinr0380]

I like War of the Worlds, though I do have real issues with the theme of Cruise having to learn to stop being such a wuss and let his son go off, be a man and fight the alien menace, which gets neatly resolved with the happy families reuinited ending. In a way Cruise and co might have a traumatic experience but they aren't left with the scars of their experience (the equivalent of watching a 9/11-like event without being marked by it? I guess that is where the film goes 'stereotypically Spielbergian' for me, as everyone around our main characters gets destroyed instead), apart from losing a couple of family homes, a car and having to move back in with their parents - perhaps making it less a 9/11 film than a strange recession-prefiguring one!

And Spielberg's best film of the decade by far is A.I., turning all of Spielberg's weaknesses into heartbreaking strengths! This was a great read-through of the film.

[Mr Sausage]

What irritated me about War of the Worlds was how many times it went back to "stupid kid puts everyone in danger" well. Over and over Tom Cruise says "stay here" or "don't go there" and the movie trots out the plot device of the kid outright not listening and everyone getting into danger once again. It's hackneyed and not believable, even in a broken family. When faced with an apocalypse, people forget petty problems like their Dad wasn't around enough--especially when their Dad is now trying his hardest to save their lives. Kids of any age cling to that, and cling to rules too since they're attractive in times of uncertainty. So, yeah, like zedz I was also bothered by how much of this movie revolves around exploring banal family tropes. Also, the aliens don't ever have a coherent invasion strategy, but I'm fine with them being plot devices.

It's a dark movie in some aspects, but sentimental at its core. The whole narrative arc is a man succeeding in keeping his family together, including miraculously finding his son again after the latter runs off into a battle without any weapons, armour, combat know-how, ect. It's not really about loss, it's about achieving familial unity. Hence the movie starts with a broken, dysfunctional family unit and proceeds to run them through the drama of that until the unit all meets up at the end to love and appreciate each other. That's not reductionist, that's precisely why the movie is putting everyone through the wringer.

[flyonthewall2983]

War Of The Worlds has one great moment in it that almost saves it entirely for me.

SpoilerShow

When Tom is trying to tell the soldier about the birds

Otherwise for me, it stands humble in the shadow of Munich which is possibly my favorite Spielberg film. My favorite Williams score, too.

[domino harvey]

1982
E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial I could never engage with this film as a kid because I thought E.T. was just too ugly to deal with, so this was one kid-friendly 80s title not in repeat rotation growing up. Rewatching it now, I can appreciate some of what Spielberg's film does-- Drew Barrymore's pitched at about the perfect level of adorable little girl and Henry Thomas and the older brother are quite good too. There were individual scenes I enjoyed, like Elliott freeing all the frogs and then sweeping the cute classmate into his arms because E.T. was watching the Quiet Man, and the set-design on the suburban house was dead-on in many small details. But the core relationship between Elliott and E.T. is much more one between especially bright pet and owner than best buds, and I couldn't engage with their interactions beyond that level. I like many of the great 80s kidventure films this movie inspired/paved the way for (I mean, other than Mac and Me) far more than I enjoy the original blockbuster. And of course even to adult eyes E.T. is still gross to the maxx.

Gandhi I went into this with about as much trepidation as I have any other dreaded three-hour-plus Oscar-branded epic, but to my delight this was another year that the Academy got it right. I think the key to the film's success is two-fold. One, Ben Kingsley is Gandhi, and he completely disappears into the role so fully that at times I forgot I wasn't actually watching Mohandas Gandhi. And Two, Richard Attenborough films the entire extended narrative straight-forwardly and without stylistic accouterments or pastoral indulgences. This "Just the facts ma'am" approach allows the fascinating historical events to play out with as little distraction as possible-- it looks and sounds dry and dull from the outside but it's anything but. In fact, the opposite: I thought it was a film that respected the material enough to rely solely on it, and in its fashion paid the ultimate respect to the subject without being overly cloying in its reverence, and still remained an entertaining and involving biopic. If only other films of this ilk forced upon me by this project were capable of eliciting such praise!

Missing Costa-Gavras gives us yet another political nightmare filled with surreal yet shockingly mundane violence and a bureaucratic snakes and ladders game poor Jack Lemmon and Sissy Spacek try to navigate for the majority of the picture. As with most docudramas, I don't care much for the accuracy of the particulars and prefer to focus on the experience of their expression via the quality of film itself. And by those perimeters this is a small but fine film, with simple and obvious conclusions reached with great help from talented performers and a gifted filmmaker. I doubt I will remember much of this film in a week's time, but that I will remember any of it at all puts it one-up on many titles that make it this far!

Tootsie I have resisted the urge to do this so far, but I don't think I can sum this one up any better than I already did a few years ago on this very board. So:

What a tremendously bad film this is! As a comedy, it never had a single moment worth even a smile, and as a bonus it featured some of the most abominable morals I've come across in a long long time. Besides the "men dressing like women and kissing men is hilarious" garbage, Hoffman's character emotionally rapes Lange and leads Durning and Garr on in a way that only highlights how these three are actual characters being taken in by Hoffman's smug cipher-- and the movie thinks Hoffman is in the right here? That it tries to counter this with his Dorothy character "empowering" women only underscores how abhorrent and regressive his real-life actions are towards women. Amazingly, this irony isn't really addressed by the film except with glib asides where he goes "Yeah I'm awful" in a way that makes sure the audience knows he's really the bee's knees. And he ultimately learns his lesson how, by realizing given time, everyone will just shrug their shoulders and go "Well, he betrayed all our trust on a basic level but gosh that transvestite was simply too fantastic to stay mad at!" This is really one of the most popular comedies of all time?

the Verdict The "Let's Give Paul Newman An Oscar" Show and then, whoops, Ben Kingsley gave a performance too good to overlook in favor of settling old debts. Hell, if you want to blame anyone for Bob Hoskins losing for Mona Lisa four years later, it's Kingsley in '82, not Newman in '86! Newman is of course good in the role of the washed out lawyer but the early script by Mamet has a lot of problems (one character's completely obvious duplicitous nature for starters) that the film as a whole never quite overcomes on its way to being "satisfying." As one of those movie poster pull-quotes might say, "The Verdict's In-teresting"-- but they'd have to stop me there.

My Vote Gandhi

[colinr0380]

Ok, the mention of E.T. gives me another chance to pose the question of which E.T. rip-off has the better (by which I mean most excrutiating and with the scariest alien) dance sequence: the McDonald's scene from Mac and Me or Jaadoo Jaadoo from Koi...Mil Gaya

[domino harvey]

1987
Broadcast News Well, I've gotten in my licks on this one more than enough lately, but just to make sure the proverbial horse is fully beaten: Three of the best performances of the decade depicting three of the best cinematic characters in memory and two-plus hours of sheer joy at spending time with these people who are interesting and human and funny and good at their jobs and so on. Criterion did right by this one with their rescue a few years back, but this was a movie so good even the Academy couldn't ignore it-- not that quality issues have ever stopped them!

Fatal Attraction A highly unusual film to make it into this category-- Oscar does occasionally reward popular thrillers (See Witness two years prior), but this one is particularly vicious and not very bait-y. But the film's legacy is not in question and the film's pretty good for what it is, so this was another good call by the Academy. Watching it again I still find it hard to accept that Michael Douglas would cheat on someone who looks like Anne Archer with someone who looks like Glenn Close, but that quibble aside the film does a good job of unraveling Close's instability and murderous craziness, and despite some critical complaints to the contrary I don't think Douglas comes off well in this at all, feminist reductive claims to the contrary. Not that I'd claim this as a strong feminist work either, but the blame is certainly spread to the guy who went after Crazy in the first place.

Hope and Glory In the same year that brought us Woody Allen's nostalgic Radio Days, the British equivalent went and got itself nominated instead. Boorman, like Allen, fills his film with a large number of small, episodic vignettes, some more interesting than others, but the overall effect of this early wartime study isn't nearly as substantial as it could've been. I was entertained and some of the moments are clever enough (the final sequence does capture something elemental about kids' wildest fantasy) but overall, as with the winner this year, I wasn't left with a whole lot after it was over.

the Last Emperor In a strong year for nominees where every film in this category is at-worst still pretty good, this epic is the one that went all the way in a landmark fashion: the movie won all nine of the Oscars it was nominated for, tying Gigi's perfect record and coming two shy of the Return of the King's perfect score. Does the movie justify such a legacy? Well, more so than Gigi does, but nah. The point of this epic is to highlight the excesses and pretty but meaningless accoutrements that surround the titular figure's ascension and downfall, with all manner of bright and shiny costuming and location shooting making sure the whole thing has enough grandeur to be properly undercut by the underlying message of the futility of the ceremonious behaviors. It's a good idea in theory and in practice Bernardo Bertolucci does his best to distract the audience by keeping things moving fluidly and quickly. Even with a scope as large as that offered here the film floats by, but the end result is just as fleeting as the entertainment that unfolded beforehand: a nod of the head, a shrug of the shoulders, and off to dinner or dancing without ever needing to think of it again. Isn't that priority one for a Best Picture winner most times, though?

Moonstruck Cute Italian-American romantic comedy with a light touch and easy to like characters. Cher and Olympia Dukakis won Oscars for the film and both were deserved, but I'm surprised John Mahoney didn't at least get a nom, as his skirt-chasing professor proves to be the best catalyst for Dukakis in the film and their scene together where he gives that great speech about why he always dates younger women is the film's single best moment. This is a frothy good time and another laudable example of a worthy crowd-pleaser making the mix.

My Vote Broadcast News

[knives]

The Close Archer divide isn't that ridiculous and even if so looks are just one component of the cheating. Hell historically a few years later you get a perfect(ly weird) and more extreme example with Charles over in Britain.

[domino harvey]

Or Hugh Grant and Divine Brown (ashamed to admit I didn't need to Google that!)-- such is the joy of subjective tastes in the opposite sex!