The Alternate Oscars: Best Picture (1969-Present)

[Mr Sausage]

Out of curiosity, what cut of The Last Emperor are you directing your capsule at?

[domino harvey]

Good question: the theatrical version (in proper 2.35:1 via Optimum's DVD release)

[Mr Sausage]

Good question: the theatrical version (in proper 2.35:1 via Optimum's DVD release)

Figured as much. Remarkably, the four-or-so hour version moves just as swiftly and seems just as inconsequential.

[domino harvey]

1970
Airport Dear Airport, "thanks" for inspiring so so many subsequent disaster movies that upped all your negative qualities-- name-brand but slightly shelf-worn stars, bigger than life locale, exaggerated and unrealistic dangers, looooong running time to milk all of these things for whatever they're worth-- while forgetting all of your great attributes, such as just kidding there are no great attributes: This film is 137 bland minutes of cinematic white bread. Admittedly I didn't have trouble sitting through all this, but just because I wasn't exactly bored doesn't mean what I was seeing and hearing wasn't silly garbage. Helen Hayes won an Oscar for the same reason Margaret Rutherford won for the V.I.P.s seven years earlier-- literally, they're both Silly Old Biddy In An Airport role!

Love means never having to say "Don't abort our baby" to the foreign stewardess you're banging.

Five Easy Pieces One of the few Best Picture nominated films about an asshole to actually be a good film, this character study benefits greatly from Jack Nicholson's mere presence and a strong, sad supporting perf by the late Karen Black. This film, coming on the cusp of the decade and symbolically representing the turning tide between all the competing ideals and desires of so many differing belief systems and lifestyles, holds significant weight and import in addition to its fine acting and strong, ambiguous characterizations.

Love means never having to say "I'll wait in the car."

Love Story A film as single-minded as this-- young lovers love each other until one dies too young-- depends solely on likable central characters behaving with at least some sense of universal behavior. However I thought Ali McGraw and Ryan O'Neal's characters were somewhat annoying and motivated by silly, screenplay-constructed character tics that attempt to substitute characterization with caricature. I can not even begin to conjure up a scenario in which watching the last act of this film would make me cry. Perhaps only if you told me I had to watch the whole thing again…

I may not have been dumb enough to try to seek out any of the Airport sequels for extra credit this round, but I did watch Oliver's Story, the incredibly misguided sequel to Love Story, so I'm still a fucking idiot. I wasn't even aware such a product existed until that recent sale at WBShop brought this title to light (Hey, it's only $3.59 right now if you hate yourself) and now that I've seen this thing I know why. I'm certain everyone involved quickly worked hard doing other things to remove the thought of this from the minds of anyone unfortunate enough to sit through it.

***Spoilers for Love Story If You Don't Know What Happens Already And Also Oliver's Story But I Doubt Anyone Will Mind That Part So Much*** Ryan O'Neal appears to have had furtive contractual obligations to be filmed looking off in deep thought for as much as possible as he navigates a world without his beloved Ali McGraw and the movie is literally 90 minutes of one of the most morose, listless, sadsack piece of shit main characters ever anchored with a franchise. Most of the film is taken up with a lifeless romance between O'Neal and Candice Bergen, who is given saint-like patience and warmth in the face of O'Neal's rampant worthlessness. When this relationship nosedives after O'Neal yells at her for not being his dead ex-wife, the film continues in its premise that O'Neal will never get over her and will just keep funneling his energy into lost cause social justice activities instead. Gee, just what every romantic sap who bought into Love Story's simplistic machinations wants to hear! I'd almost admire this kamikaze dive into core audience alienation if the end result weren't so much worse than the first film.

Love means never having to say "Thank God there's not a third book/movie of this shit."

M*A*S*H I can hardly be called an Altman booster, as my tastes with his output are all over the map, but this is certainly close to the top for me. After all the lukewarm reappraisals the film's received here and elsewhere, maybe my expectations were just low, but I thought this was a delightfully cynical military comedy in the spirit of the Teahouse of the August Moon. The film offers a clear stance that war is horrible and those who insist on taking it at face value and furthering codes of proper military ethic are feeding into the war machine itself. So many people single out the treatment of Hot Lips and Major Burns as being objectionable or worse but these characters are representative of a larger social ill and the cruel "pranks" enacted against them aren't funny so much as outpourings of frustration at the only perceivable targets available. This and Five Easy Pieces were the new guard nominees this year, and that they were passed over for the staid old guard nature of Patton is a shame, but no one ever accused the Academy of being on the cutting edge of what's actually going on in film!

Love means never having to say "I've still never seen an entire episode of the TV show this spawned but I do remember Alan Alda drinking martinis, so clearly they carried over the important details."

Patton At complete odds with M*A*S*H's cynical vantage, this war-bolstering biopic was still liked on both sides of the political aisle and hilariously liberals insisted that it could be read as anti-war. Ha! Talk about wanting something that's not there. I have no problem with the fact that this is a film bolstering American's military might and all the conservative aspects that includes, but spare me revisionist readings that are based on nothing on-screen. That said, what's on screen failed to engage me much beyond the workhorse-like WWII features to which this owes its heritage- Rommel's appearances call to mind studio-era pics like the Desert Fox (or any of the interchangeable studio war pics announced over the PA in M*A*S*H for that matter), technically fine films without much to recommend in them regardless. I was expecting far more from George C Scott's performance than I got-- any of his other nominated perfs before and after this prove more interesting, but I'm okay with him winning since he turned it down and made Oscar History in the process.

Love means never having to say "Eat it, Vietnam protestors."

My Vote M*A*S*H

[knives]

You should at least watch the Smight entry to get the jokes from Airplane. I half believe it's making fun of the original as it builds up everything to a ridiculous crescendo.

[matrixschmatrix]

Love Story's greatest contribution to film has to be the setting up of the joke at the end of What's Up, Doc?.

[colinr0380]

I always thought that, while the Airport series gave the idea of doing a disaster spoof mass audience appeal, that Airplane! was mostly a comedic remake of Zero Hour!

[flyonthewall2983]

Interesting that you bring that up, the Airplane! movies seem to have had a longer lasting legacy than the very movie it based itself upon.

[zedz]

Interesting that you bring that up, the Airplane! movies seem to have had a longer lasting legacy than the very movie it based itself upon.

Though Airport kickstarted an entire genre that is arguably still with us today.

Actually, Airplane! basically did the same thing, though there were less codified genre parodies before then.

[colinr0380]

But then even Airport had its antecedents with the rather staid melodramas set inside then modern settings of airport terminals more than on airplane dramas. Films such as The VIPS that domino mentioned (I guess Spielberg's The Terminal was a throwback to the pre-Airport mode of airport-drama films?)

Although my favourite of those films has to be the wonderfully comforting and undramatic Basil Dearden Ealing film Out of the Clouds.

[zedz]

I'm not talking about "airport films" as a genre, but the big budget, kitchen-sink-cast disaster movie (Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Armageddon etc.). There are a few (mainly historical) examples beforehand (e.g. various Titanic projects), but that particular story structure pretty much got its seal of approval from Airport. They seem like quintessential 70s trash cinema nowadays, but they were high prestige items at the time, complete with successful Oscar campaigns.

[flyonthewall2983]

That's certainly true, and maybe "legacy" was a bad word to use. But when was the last time you remember seeing Airport on cable? On the other hand, Airplane! (and it's sequel) seems to always cycle on either on the HBO/Cinemax channels or Comedy Central every few years.

[Dylan]

Almost everybody I know has seen (and for the most part, likes/loves) Airplane! and every time I ask somebody - say 18 to 30 - if they know about the Airport movies they have no clue what I'm talking about (and many are fairly well versed in film, or even extremely well versed). I wager that the melodrama/soap traditions it's parodying are also rather obscure (the Saturday Night Fever reference not so much - and even then that's a film way more people know about than have actually seen). Similarly, lots of people love Elmer Bernstein's (really-really great) score but don't realize that it too was (quite an elaborate!) comment on how disaster movies/melodramas were scored (many by Bernstein himself!). I think it's a testament to Airplane!'s power how extremely well it still translates to all ages today (and rather universally) even when most of the cinema/culture it's referencing has more or less been forgotten.

[colinr0380]

I'm not talking about "airport films" as a genre, but the big budget, kitchen-sink-cast disaster movie (Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Armageddon etc.). There are a few (mainly historical) examples beforehand (e.g. various Titanic projects), but that particular story structure pretty much got its seal of approval from Airport. They seem like quintessential 70s trash cinema nowadays, but they were high prestige items at the time, complete with successful Oscar campaigns.

Such as films like San Francisco, or John Ford's The Hurricane or Krakatoa, East of Java from earlier periods, though the 70s were key for just piling the fading stars high and letting the audience guess who would survive or get killed off (something It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World might be lacking!)

I wonder if there is an essay to be done on how high seas adventure or Jules Verne films merged or morphed with the high class period spectacle and all-star casts of the various Bible films to create the 'epic disaster film' genre.

And I suppose at a pinch Gone With The Wind could be considered a disaster film - Titanic certainly follows the romance-spectacle pattern that GWTW set down.

Although don't forget the best sci-fi disaster film When Worlds Collide, still influential on Deep Impact, Armageddon, Knowing and their ilk.

[zedz]

I'm not talking about "airport films" as a genre, but the big budget, kitchen-sink-cast disaster movie (Poseidon Adventure, Towering Inferno, Armageddon etc.). There are a few (mainly historical) examples beforehand (e.g. various Titanic projects), but that particular story structure pretty much got its seal of approval from Airport. They seem like quintessential 70s trash cinema nowadays, but they were high prestige items at the time, complete with successful Oscar campaigns.

Such as films like San Francisco, or John Ford's The Hurricane or Krakatoa, East of Java from earlier periods, though the 70s were key for just piling the fading stars high and letting the audience guess who would survive or get killed off (something It's A Mad Mad Mad Mad World might be lacking!)

I actually just watched San Francisco, and it's a very different kettle of fish. A lot of the earlier films, like this one, are conventional melodramas into which a disaster intervenes, and they're conventionally focussed on a single lead story (in this case Gable / MacDonald's romantic and professional woes) rather than featuring a nest of micro-narratives that percolate through a film that's entirely predicated on dealing with the disaster. In San Francisco, the earthquake strikes at the very last minute, and rather impressively wipes away the couple of hours of convoluted plotting that preceded it. Suddenly, it doesn't matter who's going to win the competition the whole rest of the film has been building towards. No point having a "we gotta save the theatre!" storyline if the theatre has been levelled. (This is a fakeout that the film handles very well indeed.)

In the 70s there might have been a half hour or more of stage-setting preamble, but nobody was going to delay flipping the boat / destroying the city / igniting the building until the last ten minutes, and nobody's kidding themselves that the human drama has any value beyond providing local colour and modest character differentiation for the core survivalist sequences. By contrast, almost none of San Francisco's effort is put into exploring how Gable and MacDonald survive the disaster, or elude tight scrapes that the disaster creates. They're the stars; they just survive, and the film's real emotional energy is devoted to whether or not they'll end up together. Various supporting characters don't survive, but again, we're not particular invested in the mechanics of their demise, since that mostly happens off-screen.

[domino harvey]

Weirdly (or not, considering my mad dash towards finishing this project), I too just saw San Francisco and thought it was a bad melodrama for 105 minutes before briefly turning into a disaster pic in the last twenty. This methodology of setting up a more conventional film and then having everything undercut by the horrific historical finish was done much better by In Old Chicago the following year. Also, you're leaving out that the film makes Clark Gable a total shit for most of the film just so he can find God in the finale. It's like if Titanic ended with Billy Zane selflessly saving some orphans!

[swo17]

Is anyone else envisioning a scenario wherein domino watches San Francisco, throws it across the room in frustration, then undergoes his Jekyll/Hyde transformation into zedz, finds the movie on the floor and says "Hmmm...don't believe I've seen this one before, I guess I'll check it out."

[movielocke]

There is a lot of similarity to San Francisco and In Old Chicago but I found San Francisco better, overall, but then I watched San Francisco first, so perhaps the bias is towards the first disaster film of that particular 1930s variety.

[zedz]

Is anyone else envisioning a scenario wherein domino watches San Francisco, throws it across the room in frustration, then undergoes his Jekyll/Hyde transformation into zedz, finds the movie on the floor and says "Hmmm...don't believe I've seen this one before, I guess I'll check it out."

Well, that's seven or eight years of painstaking set up ruined in an instant!

And, replying to my alter ego, I basically agree that San Francisco is a dead duck failure as a drama, and Gable's horribly conceived character is as guilty as the amazing lack of chemistry between the leads, but I do love the idea of a tedious melodrama being rendered instantly redundant by the arrival of a disaster movie, and the earthquake scenes are spectacular. I was actually watching the clock waiting for the thing to finish and completely forgot that there was supposed to be an earthquake, so imagine my delight when it happened!

EDIT: The problem with a lot of more recent disaster movies is that they want to have and eat both their tedious melodrama cake and their spectacular disaster sundae, so rather than the disaster taking everything off the table except raw survival, those tedious personal stories carry on, inflecting and infecting the disaster storyline. Thus the alienated married couple learns to trust one another again; the shaky ex-cop overcomes his drinking problem; whatsisface finally avenges his dead brother; Tom Cruise learns how to be a Better Father. There's a degree of this to San Francisco, certainly, and it's as eye-rollingly annoying there as in any other film, but I was impressed with how much of the film's plot was taken off the table (when the table was smashed by a falling wall).

[knives]

Isn't that Short Cuts in a nutshell?

[domino harvey]

1984
A Passage to India I suppose this is blasphemy but I never cared for the source novel and I like David Lean even less by a power of ten, so Lean had less to lose in my eyes than most with his last film. Maybe that's why I was so surprised to like this film even a little, which is about the amount I can muster, mainly due to the central performances of Judy Davis and Victor Banerjee. The film could have lost at least an hour of its screentime and come off even better, especially in the first half. Lean's "Directed and Edited" credit damns him more than I think he recognized...

A Soldier's Story Unbelievable that this got nominated (though just barely, apparently-- it only scored two other noms this year), as here, finally, is a Best Picture nominee about the black experience that isn't just misery porn and, most importantly, that isn't made for a white audience. That I'd never even heard of this until this project tells you a lot about what kind of race-related nominees still get perpetuated and by who, though, huh? That this adaptation of a Pulitzer Prize Winning-play is directed by a white man, Norman Jewison, is immaterial, as he expertly relays the film to be true to its source and its story. Which is to say Jewison gets out of the way and tells the film's murder mystery exactly as necessary, with no obvious and tiresome white surrogates anywhere to be found. The acting is exceptional all around, with sure performances by a mostly theater-trained cast, several of whom went on to bigger careers (Denzel Washington and David Alan Grier among them). What I appreciated above all else though is that the film had something to say and was so confident and sure of its complicated and thought-provoking commentary on race that the filmmakers did not need to bother to "open the story" up for a non-black audience. And guess what, idiots in Hollywood? It didn't hurt the film one bit, because a movie this good will appeal to anyone regardless-- sometimes, and it's a rare occurrence in this category, it's just nice to be respected as an audience member. This Oscar season, as 12 Years a Slave gets bandied about as some kind of game changer, why not see what a real awards-caliber film asking real questions about race related issues looks like?

Amadeus Milos Forman's epic reclamation of classical music is often fun and light and makes its points regarding the agony of creativity not possessed. The problem is that I enjoyed this commentary, appreciated the stylish touches, and was entertained by the performances (It was genius to cast Pinto from Animal House as the buffoonish young maestro) … for a couple hours. But in a three hour film with one (good) idea in its head, I grew wearisome in the final third, losing patience as Forman took his time rounding the bases towards home. Pity.

the Killing Fields I went into this fearing that it would be another white tour guide through foreign victimhood film. Imagine my surprise when Sam Waterston's reporter character kinda comes off as a dick and the film turns out to actually be about non-professional actor Haing S Ngor's character (as it should be, it's just that's not how it always works out). Ngor is tremendous in the film in a part that requires great skill and presence, and that he's not a trained performer makes his Oscar even more deserved. Eventually he is called on to carry the movie as the second half of the film turns itself almost completely over to the story of Ngor's escape out of Cambodia and is filled with powerful and horrific images such as the little girl who picks a random worker out of the rice paddies and suffocates him with a blue plastic bag, apparently just because she can. This one also has what has to be the weirdest score to ever appear in a Best Picture nominee!

Places in the Heart Sally Field may have earned her first Oscar for Norma Rae but I don't think she should've walked away with a second trophy for this film. Hell, she wasn't even the best Strong Farming Woman performance nominated in this category this year! Odd that the Academy gathered around this Depression-era tale of a gumption-filled widow who, through the works of others, is somehow held in the highest esteem, rather than the Jessica Lange-starring Country, which tackled with intelligence the problems of foreclosures and the failed agriculture policies of the era it was made. And by odd I mean of course Oscar gave Country the charity nom for its best quality and then jerked off this movie instead. I feel bad rallying too hard against Places in the Heart, though, as it's a step up from Benton's Kramer vs Kramer and while messy and misguided, it is a handsome and well-made film and I was never bored. But I can't reconcile the film's genial intent from "heroic" scenes like Sally Field blistering her hands in the cotton fields or telling Danny Glover he should be proud of how he saved her farm by doing almost all the work and receiving nowhere near his fair share of the profits. And what the hell was all that Ed Harris-Lindsay Crouse-Amy Madigan stuff doing in there? The final scene to this one, which I will not spoil, is audacious on such a ludicrous level that it seems beamed into the picture from another film (and possibly from another planet)-- I'd have rather watched whatever movie it properly belongs to, though!

My Vote A Soldier's Story

[flyonthewall2983]

the Killing Fields I went into this fearing that it would be another white tour guide through foreign victimhood film. Imagine my surprise when Sam Waterston's reporter character kinda comes off as a dick and the film turns out to actually be about non-professional actor Haing S Ngor's character (as it should be, it's just that's not how it always works out). Ngor is tremendous in the film in a part that requires great skill and presence, and that he's not a trained performer makes his Oscar even more deserved. Eventually he is called on to carry the movie as the second half of the film turns itself almost completely over to the story of Ngor's escape out of Cambodia and is filled with powerful and horrific images such as the little girl who picks a random worker out of the rice paddies and suffocates him with a blue plastic bag, apparently just because she can. This one also has what has to be the weirdest score to ever appear in a Best Picture nominee!

The Khmer Rouge stuff is some of the most disturbing stuff I've ever seen committed to film, for someone that's not really into horror movies. The horror of what was going on onscreen is made more disturbing that it was based on something that happened, and according to Ngor was still light-weight compared to things he'd seen during that awful period.

Spoiler

That said, the use of "Imagine" at the end was pretty awful. The scene by itself is fine, but I felt that using the song just put more emphasis on the filmmaker's liberal guilt than anything Sam or Haing were doing. They would have been better off using Mike Oldfield's version of Étude.

[domino harvey]

Spoiler

It is a little on the nose, but I think it ended up being a clever counterpoint to the use of Wings' "Band on the Run" during the mass execution scene early in the film-- there's a kind of symmetry to using two post-Beatles solo projects to such different ends!

[flyonthewall2983]

Spoiler

Maybe also an indication of the people's perception of Lennon/McCartney at the time. Paul's song is basically just background music for the horrific action taking place, while "Imagine" is used to tug at the heartstrings at the end. The book You Never Give Me Your Money paints a good picture of what happened in the aftermath of John's death, of him becoming elevated to near-sainthood and Paul just the writer of some good songs who had the good fortune of being briefly recognized as an equal to John. Seems to me that it may no longer be the case because in all the years John has been dead and continued to be at that status, Paul is still around making good records.

[domino harvey]

Spoiler

I also thought maybe the Lennon song hadn't yet become the overused cliche it would be now if a moderb movie tried to underscore an emotional finish with it? It's hard to hear it now and not roll my eyes but it surely was a little fresher nearly 30 years ago