Listomania Sunday; Oscars

Midnight Cowboy was the 42th movie to win best picture and tonight is the 83rd Academy Awards making Midnight Cowboy the halfway point to my goal of seeing all the movies to win best picture in order. So, I thought this would be a perfect time to do a list of my 5 favorite and 5 least favorite movies of the first 42 years of Oscar.



5 Favorite
1. Casablanca (1943)
2. All About Eve (1950)
3. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
4. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
5. The Sound of Music (1965)
Honorable Mention: On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, and The Apartment

5 Least Favorite
1. Cimarron (1931)
2. Tom Jones (1963)
3. Oliver (1968)
4. Hamlet (1948)
5. Gigi (1958)
Dishonorable Mention: How Green was My Valley, Cavalcade and Grand Hotel.

Academy Award Predictions

Almost forgot to post my predictions.
I realized that I am predicting a lot of upsets this year so I have included the favorite to win in each category.

Best Picture-The Social Network (Favorite to Win-The Kings Speech)

Best Director-David Fincher (also favorite to win)

Best Actor-Colin Firth (also favorite to win)

Best Actress- Natalie Portman (Also favorite to win)

Best Supporting Actor-Christian Bale(also favorite to win)

Best Supporting Actress-Helena Bonham Carter (favorite to win- Melissa Leo)

Best Screenplay Adapted-The Social Network (also favorite to win)

Best Screenplay Original-Inception (favorite to win The Kings Speech)

Best Animated Feature- Toy Story 3 (also favorite to win)

Art Direction- Inception (favorite to win The Kings Speech)

Costume Design- Alice in Wonderland (favorite to win The Kings Speech)

Documentary Feature-Restrepo (favorite to win Inside Job)

Best Editing-The Social Network (also favorite to win)

Foreign Language Film- In a Better World (favorite to win Biutiful)

Make-up- The Wolfman ( also favorite to win)

Original Score- Inception (favorite to win The King Speech)

Original Song- We Belong Together from Toy Story 3 ( also favorite to win)

Sound Editing/Sound Mixing/Visual Effects- Inception for all thee (also favorite to win)

UPDATE-Got 13 right. Not bad.
Also realized I forgot to post my prediction for Cinematography which I correctly predicted Inception
Missed
Best Picture-Kings Speech
Best Director-Tom Hooper
Best Supporting Actress-Melissa Leo
Art Direction-Alice in Wonderland
Documentary Feature-Inside Job
Original Score-The Social Network
Original Screenplay-The Kings Speech.

Midnight Cowboy

1969 proved to be an interesting year for the Oscars with a distinctly western theme.  Two of the front runners for Best Picture were the ultimate winner Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid.  The fact that Midnight Cowboy actually winning seems somewhat surprising.  Not because it is a bad movie but because it is not your typical Hollywood movie. 

Midnight Cowboy is a gritty tale of a Joe Buck a man who leaves Texas to become a male prostitute in New York City.  Once in NY he learns that it is not as easy or glamorous as he thought it would be.  He ends up living on the street with the scum of the city. He becomes friends with Ratso who is a sickly con man.  The two end up living in a condemned building with dreams of moving to Florida once they make enough money. 

Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight are great in this movie.  Really two actors at their peak.  You see Jon Voight go from wide eyed dreamer to run down homeless man.  It portrays the late 60's feeling of sexual freedom with a sense of hopelessness.  It does feel that the movie speaks to that generation and asks what are the consequences of this sexual revolution.  The movie does not shy away from dealing with hard subject matter. It shows Buck as he does everything from gay trysts to psychedelic partying to make a little bit of money.  It also shows how far movies have pushed the boundaries since the beginning of the 60's.  In 1960 when The Apartment won Best Picture it was controversial just to talk about men having affairs. By 1969 we have nudity and male prostitution in the Best Picture winner.  I feel that it speaks volumes to the sexual revolution of the 60's. 

Both Midnight Cowboy and Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid are great movies.  While I think Midnight Cowboy was a bold pick for Best Picture that year I think that Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid is the better movie and has become a classic. While Midnight Cowboy is a good movie but speaks for its time and doesn't hold up as well that time has passed.

I feel that 2011 Oscar ceremony(which is this week) has some things in common with the 1969 awards. The two movies that are front runners for Best Picture this year are The Social Network and The Kings Speech.  One speaks to the current generation about the quest for power and status and the other is a classic kind of movie about overcoming your disability.  Do you pick the movie that speaks to the current culture and time(The Social Network) or do you pick the movie that is the typical Oscar movie(The Kings Speech).  In the future will we look back and say the Kings Speech was better because it is a classic story or will The Social Network live on as more then just a current movie for this generation?  For more on my thoughts on that check out my Yahoo! article what movie will win best picture? Another interesting connection of the 1969 and 2010 Oscars is the fact that True Grit is nominated in both years for best actor.  John Wayne won in 1969 for playing Rooster Cogburn and we will see if Jeff Bridges will win this year. 

Oscar Firsts.
Midnight Cowboy became the first and only movie to win Best Picture that had an X rating.  At the time this just mean for mature audiences and had nothing to do with pornography. It is only the second movie to win since the MPAA started rating movies and it is interesting the first two rated movies to win were G and X and no G or X(NC-17 in today's rating) have ever won Best Picture since. 
Midnight Cowboy was also the first movie to win Best Picture that had nudity in it(the reason for the X rating)
Cary Grant won a lifetime achievement award from the Academy. Despite his many memorable characters and amazing performances he never won a competitive award. 

Listomania Sundays: Best Musicals

After watching My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music back to back I figure now was a good time to list my favorite musicals of all time. I was going to post it earlier but after Sundance I decided to just post it after I saw Oliver the last musical that won Best Picture in the 60's. This was kind of tough as there are alot of musicals and while I do like them there are very few that stand out. But here is what I came up with.

1. The Sound of Music
2. Fiddler on the Roof
3. All That Jazz
4. Chicago
5. The King and I

Other movies that just barely missed the list. My Fair Lady, Mary Poppins, Aladdin.The Wizard of Oz

Oliver!

The last of the musicals to win Best Picture in the 60's. Also the worst. The songs are bad and the singing is just awful. It was almost painful to listen too.

The movie is a musical version of Dickens's Oliver Twist. About an orphan boy who runs away to London and falls in with a gang of thieves. I don't know how well the movie follows the book since I haven't read the book since High School but besides for the singing I think it is a faithful adaption.

Obviously the big problem with the movie is the song and singing. I don't remember not liking the book when I originally read it so it can't be the story. It just baffles me that they could turn a classic book into a bad musical. Also, what I don't understand is if you are going to dub Oliver's singing with a girl why would you pick a girl who can't sing? She is the worst singer in the movie. I dreaded every time Oliver had to sing. Really the only good thing about this movie is the choreography and Onna White won an Honorary Award for it.

I was reading something that in 1968 the two movies that were favored to win were The Lion in Winter and Funny Girl. The theory is that they split the votes and Oliver! ended up winning. I have never seen Funny Girl but I thought The Lion in Winter was a great movie and should have won.

Oscar trivia from 1968
The first time that there was a ties for Best Actress. Barbara Streisand for Funny Girl and Katherine Hepburn for The Lion in Winter each got the exact same number of votes.
Also Hepburn became the 3 actor or actress to win two years in a row after winning the year before for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. 
Oliver! was the first movie to win Best Picture after the MPAA set up its rating system of G, PG, R, and X. Making this the first movie to have a rating when it won and the only G rated movie to ever win Best Picture.
War and Peace became the longest movie to ever win an Academy Award. It won for Best Foreign Film and was nearly 7 hours long.

Listomania Sunday: Romantic Comedies

Valentines Day is this week and I just read an article about how there are no good movies coming out this year for Valentines Day. So I thought I would do a list of my favorite movies in a genre that is one of my least favorites.
So here is the list of my favorite romantic comedies. I feel these movies take the genre above the normal chick flick clichés, and some people may feel that these movies don’t really fall into the romantic comedy genre but that is probably why I like them.

1. 10 Things I Hate about You
2. The 40 Year Old Virgin
3. About a Boy
4. The Philadelphia Story
5. (500) Days of Summer

In the Heat of the Night

 1967 was a year when the Academy was starting to acknowledge the so called "new Hollywood".  A lot of the themes in the best picture nominations represented social changes of the time. Two had to do with racial tensions in the late 60's. Both of them starred Sidney Poitier including the the winner In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who's Coming to Dinner. The other themes that year included sexual coming of age with the Graduate and the highly violent Bonnie and Clyde. The final nomination that year was Dr. Doolittle which was not considered a serious contender and represented the "old Hollywood".  I think In the Heat of the Night is my favorite of the 5(although to be honest I have never seen Dr. Doolittle). It is an amazing detective drama.  And while I love Guess Who's Coming to Dinner I like the grittiness of In the Heat of the Night.
In the Heat of the Night is about a detective from the North who is in the wrong place at the wrong time when a murder of a rich business man happens in the deep South. The local cops immediately arrest him not knowing he is a also a cop. Being a detective from Philadelphia he is more familiar with murders then they are in the local town. The wife of the businessman who is from Chicago realizes that he is better equipped to solve the murder then the local cops, and he is stuck helping out.  This obviously does not sit well with the local white cops and he does not want to be there either.

What makes this movie so great are the performances by Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger as the two cops who do not like each other and are forced to work together. Also, it deals with racism without specifically talking about it. You can tell it with their glances and attitudes. When Sidney Poitier's character realizes that he has certain prejudices that has steered him in the wrong direction of the investigation it makes the point that we all have predisposed ideas about certain people without being very preachy.  The music by Quincy Jones was perfect for the movie and really set the tone.   It is the first detective mystery to win best picture and in my opinion deserved it.

A lot of people think that The Graduate was the best picture that year and it did win best director for Mike Nichol.  It also makes a lot of lists of best of all time. But I personally did not like that movie. Maybe it is because my dad absolutely hates that movie and it is the movie that he cites for not going to see movies anymore. In his opinion if that was the best movie of the year and it was bad then he doesn't want to see the other movies. It's a valid argument but I don't think it any reason to stop seeing movies. But that is just my opinion.  Also about Bonnie and Clyde another movie that didn't really do anything for me.  I guess at the time it was really controversial because of all the violence, but compared to modern film it is nothing. I with I could have seen it when it first came out but now it just doesn't seem that exciting. 

The biggest snub that year was to Sidney Poitier who was in two of the movies nominated for Best Picture and didn't get nominated for either one.  Rod Steiger won  Actor for In the Heat of the Night and Katherine Hepburn won best Actress for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.  Also, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner was nominated for Best Actor(Spencer Tracy), Best Supporting Actor(Cecil Kellaway), and Best Supporting Actress(Beah Richards) who plays Sidney Poitier's mother.  But no nomination for Poitier himself.

Intersting Facts
Also that year the Academy gave Alfred Hitchcock a very deserved lifetime achievement award.
Besides being the first detective movie to win Best Picture it is the only Best Picture winner to go on and inspire a TV show.
AFI 100 Greatest List in 1997 had The Graduate at #7, Bonnie and Clyde at #27, and Guess Who's Comming to Dinner at #99. In 2007 the Graduate was at #27, Bonnie and Clyde was at #42, Guess Who's Comming to Dinner was not on the list but In the Heat of the Night was added at #75.

Listomania Sundays: Football Movies

So, I decided that each Sunday I will post a list and I will call it Listomania Sunday. This Sunday being Super Bowl Sunday I decided to do a list of my favorite football movies. When I started thinking of football movies I couldn't really come up with many and realized that there are alot of football movies that I didn't see like Friday Night Lights, Rudy, the original The Longest Yard and Remember the Titans. So, I am sure there are a whole lot missing from my list. Let me know what movies you think should be on here and I should see.

1.  The Blind Side
2.  We are Marshall
3.  Any Given Sunday
4. The Replacements
5. Big Fan

A Man for All Seasons

Here is a movie that I had seen before but couldn’t remember much about it. Which typically means it wasn’t great and it wasn’t awful. So watching it again I pretty much came to the same conclusion. Not the best movie to win best picture but not the worst.

The movie is about Sir Thomas More in 16^th Century England and his refusal to break with the Catholic Church and recognize King Henry’s VIII divorce from Catherine of Aragon.  As a Chancellor he is in a position to make judgments on cases of his people. He refuses to take bribes and as a man of law he is very careful what he says. When he refuses the king he does so in a way that he can not be charged with treason. But he is pressured, bribed, jailed, and eventually framed and sentenced to death for not compromising his beliefs. 

Paul Scofield won Best Actor and was great as More and really showed his resolve to not compromise his beliefs. I guess my problem with this movie is it makes More out to be perfect and a holier than thou person. Maybe it just my cynical outlook but I would have liked a little more internal conflict within More especially when it came to his family.  He tried hard to not put his family in jeopardy but other than that he didn’t seem to care how he was hurting them. Director Fred Zimmerman won the Best Director Oscar and had previously been nominated 5 times including for High Noon, and had won for From Here to Eternity but I don’t think this is his finest movie. The final scene where More finally tells the world what he believes after keeping it a secret for so long is one of the best scenes in the movie but it takes so long to get there that by that point you're almost not interested any more. 

The other movie that came out in 1966 and was nominated for Best Picture and Best Director was Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe? TCM recently showed this on TV and I was lucky enough to catch it. The movie starred real husband and wife Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton as an onscreen old bickering married couple Martha and George.  This was Mike Nichols (better know for The Graduate) first directorial effort. And it was a great movie.  I really think it should have won more awards.  It was about a self destructive couple who has a newly married younger couple over for drinks.  The movie is basically the four of them in the house as Martha and George play psychological games with themselves and the unsuspecting couple. The writing is amazing and I am not sure why it didn’t win best screenplay and the acting is great also and all four of its cast members were nominated.  It was interesting to see George Segal as a young guy in a serious role as all I know him from is the comedy TV show Just Shoot Me.  Who’s Afraid of Virginia Wolfe was also the movie that challenged the production code with the foul mouthed  Martha and eventually forced the MPAA to come up with the new rating system of G, PG, R, and X.  A perfect sign of how movies were becoming more edgy in the 60’s. 

Interesting Fact:

A Man for All Seasons became the third movie in a row to have won Best Picture after previously winning a Tony Award for Best (My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music had done it the previous two years and Amadeus would do it again in 1984).