Oscar Night is finally in view, but if there is anything quarantine has taught us, it’s that celebrations are fleeting. And let’s face it, the awards circuit have been a weird dichotomy. There’s half of liberal Hollywood telling us to stay home, sequester, keep this plague under control. Then at the same time, another half is telling us we need to celebrate and honor these movies we’re not supposed to go out and see. But so far the awards shows have been underwhelming to disappointing. Socially distanced, with winners remote at home like us. If their awards parties are no more elaborate than ours, then where is the Hollywood magic?
To help escape this lackluster mindset, here’s a review of better times, when gowns were ridiculous to absurd and hair-don’ts the de rigueur look of the evening. To be nice, here are the times Oscar got it best…….and the times it couldn’t have been more wrong.
THE MOST DESERVED OSCARS OF MY LIFETIME:
Julie Andrews (Best Actress, Mary Poppins, 1965). An instant star moment that had it all–the most glorious singing voice ever, great production numbers, and the best vindication for being turned down for the role of Eliza Doolittle in My Fair Lady, which she originated and defined (and sang) on Broadway. This was the first movie that my mother had ever taken me to and will always hold a special place in my heart, and little did I know what an amazing debut that was at the time. Movies had a high bar after that.
Barbra Streisand (Best Actress tie, Funny Girl, 1969). Say what you want at this point, but this was another of those career defining “wow!” debuts, and the most glorious pop voice of her era that gave a preview of the career to come. And in a great compromise, Oscar didn’t deny the new kid for the classic by giving a tie to the more standard type winner Katherine Hepburn for A Lion in Winter. And there’s a reason a revival has never been back to Broadway, because everyone still sees how hard those shoes are to fill.
The Godfather (Best Picture, 1973). The last of the great Hollywood movies. Sure there have been many good to excellent movies since, but this type of sweeping, gripping epic that plays as well 50 years later as it did opening night and can be watched with equal pleasure a hundred times has definitely passed.
Sissy Spacek (Best Actess, Coal Miner’s Daughter, 1981). How did anyone beat Mary Tyler Moore in Ordinary People, in a role where America’s reigning sweetheart made the audience loathe her? By giving arguably the most endearing performance ever filmed, and doing a spot on singing impersonation of country legend Loretta Lynn. Add the best performances a young Tommy Lee Jones and Beverly D’Angelo (as Doolittle Lynn and Patsy Cline) have ever given. Today, I still can’t watch the movie without a giant smile on my face from Butcher Hollow to Nashville.
Hillary Swank (Best Actress, Boys Don’t Cry, 2000). Perhaps the most controversial pick here, Swank is dead on convincing as a gender confused girl living life as a boy. And she was no less believable as a boy than any of the current Biebers today, so much so that I actually forgot during the sex scene with Chloe Sevigne that it was actually two girls on screen. Not a versatile legend like the above, but right role, right actress in a role most couldn’t pull off. And I get it today I’m supposed to be all about a trans actor playing the role, but Swank physically embodied everything the real Tina Brandon did. The rest is acting. And more importantly, would that at-the-time unknown actor (there were zero out trans actors in Hollywood at the time) have had the star power to make the movie am Oscar winner?
Ron Howard (Best Director, A Beautiful Mind, 2001). Howard gave the most realistic portrayal of mental illness from the inside, minus all the clichés of blurry screens and disembodied voices and swirling colors. The audience understood the illness from the viewpoint of the patient as never before. Completely amazing and original, and all thanks to Howard.
Chicago (Best Picture, 2003). The first musical to not only win best picture, but to even make sense since Oliver! in 1968 (excepting Grease in 1979 because it really took a mediocre play and made it something completely different and wonderful. But the academy couldn’t even nominate the right song, so…). Chicago not only revived but redefined the movie musical in a property that seemed an impossible one to adapt. A strong cast, but mostly perfect direction, made it all work.
Charlize Theron (Best Actress, Monster, 2004). One of the most dramatic DeNiro-esque physical transformation ever by an actress, eyebrows universally piqued when Hollywood announced casting of the young, stunning blonde as scary, dumpy, homely serial killer Ailene Wuornos. But Theron put on 40 pounds to look enormous, and her features weren’t even recognizable in her face or performance. Theron long-jumped out of her comfort zone and became an entirely different person. Of course she took it all off in record time to look fantastic in her Oscar gown, but, even so. the performance was good enough to not hate her after.
Heath Ledger (Best Supporting Actor, The Dark Knight, 2009). Not only did he win for playing a Batman villain, but he did by creating an original and new interpretation of a role that has strong prejudices among generations of fan. He even erased all memory of Jack Nicholson’s definitive performance in the role and created a version of the Joker that actually could exist outside of Gotham City’s cartoonish limits. This was a sign of an actor was just beginning to emerge and will leave a void of what he could have done.
Eddie Redmayne (Best Actor, The Theory of Everything, 2015). Big money was on Michael Keaton for the unlikable title character in Birdman, but the Academy came through on Redmayne’s flawless performance as Stephen Hawking. Playing a character with such a huge physical handicap more often than not ends up coming across as mawkish and uncomfortable but Redmayne remained dignified and sympathetic.
Parasite & Bong Joon-ho (Best Picture/Best Director/Best Original Screenplay, 2020). Finally Hollywood honored a foreign film with Best Picture honors, but credit Bong with making it easier by perfectly combining the masterful artistry of a foreign film with the contemporary pacing and wit of an American one. Suddenly everyone was reading subtitles and not complaining. It was landmark that they bestowed these three honors, yet criminal that not one of the stellar cast was nominated for an acting award…see below
And even though it is not from my lifetime, I feel a need to admire one particular award from the golden age, 1940: Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind. With all the PC talk to cancel one of the greatest movies of all time needs to come with the awareness that it made history 70 years ago when Miss McDaniel became the first African-American performer to win a well-deserved Oscar. It was decades before Sidney Portier became the second, and decades more before it became not a novelty. If we throw away Gone With the Wind (which is a blog all unto iteself, don’t we have a few bigger fish to fry right now?), we throw away a most important moment of black history. Now, being 1940, it comes with a caveat that yes she was good enough to win the award, but not good enough to sit in the whites-only banquet room for dinner, but that too, is part of that other blog.
THE BIGGEST WTF OSCAR FLUBS IN MY LIFETIME:
..and then the times they didn’t. The Alternative Better Oscars that should have been…
BEST PICTURE FLUBS:
1965: Mary Poppins. History has shown that Mary Poppins, fresh original and with Julie Andrews amazing charm, was indeed the better movie than My Fair Lady, which was only a B+ musical in the grand scheme to begin with. And while Audrey Hepburn was exquisite as Eliza Doolittle, her singing voice was dubbed, where Andrews (who ironically originated the role on Broadway, lost it to Hepburn, then beat her for the Oscar) obviously did her own–superbly.
1978: Star Wars. While never a huge fan of the movie, again 40 years later it’s remained one of the most beloved movies ever. Who really ever thought Annie Hall was that great of a movie even then? Woody Allen was the pre-Soon Yi Hollywood critical darling, but even he’s made better before and after. And Diane Keaton was at her most annoying ever. Honestly, I just want any other film than Annie Hall–The Turning Point, Julia, hell, even Neil Simon schmaltz The Goodbye Girl was better–but the Force has undeniably been with the true winner. This was just Hollywood showing their lack of morals in backing the guy who employs them all and makes big money for LA and NY, just like they did later when he was accused of molested his daughter.
1982: Raiders of the Lost Ark. Breathtaking pacing, incredible special effects for the peroid and arguably the best adventure movie ever made which redefined the genre. And the double insult to losing to Chariots of Fire, perhaps the most boring movie ever made? To this date I have never seen the movie without falling asleep. I know someone wins a race in slow motion to some annoying song you can’t get out of your head for days. All this movie did in retrospect was give fodder to endless spoofs and parodies since. Raiders by contrast influenced decades of other adventure movies, as well as spawning three sequels.
1996: Toy Story. I will maintain forever that Toy Story is not only Disney’s crowning achievement and changed the face of animation forever, but it was truly the best picture of the year. To not even be nominated let alone to lose to that douche Mel Gibson for Bravehart is a blemish the Oscars will forever have to bear.
2006: Brokeback Mountain. Some of the most amazing cinematography since Out of Africa or The Sound of Music, sensitive direction, and an amazing performance by Heath Ledger. Here is the instance where the big sweeping epic story Hollywood usually favors for some unseen reason loses to Crash, a good, solid, ultimately forgettable movie with a big cast. My guess is not the homophobia most critics rely on to explain, but the fact that practically everyone in Hollywood had a friend in Crash.
2009: The Dark Knight. Inexplicable. The movie was phenomenal, successful, artistic, visually stunning, and featured a supporting actor win portraying a comic book villain. And it wasn’t even nominated (losing the 5th slot to The Reader, another in a long run of the mill string of Holocaust tales). Not only was this oversight unforgivable, it’s also the reason we now have the ridiculous up-to-10 best picture nominees to try to prevent it again. Thanks stupid nominating committee of 2009.
2011: Toy Story 3. The most perfect ending to the most perfect trilogy ever filmed and a blown second chance to redeem themselves from the Toy Story debacle of 1996. The Hurt Locker was a good film, but a director’s award was enough for it. But then the Toy Story franchise went for a greedy money grabbing 4 and we realized how perfect 3 was in retrospect. There are years when the best picture is a Disney film.
2015: The Imitation Game. Birdman, starring washed up ex-superhero Batman Michael Keaton as washed up ex-superhero Birdman, took the big prize home based on Hollywood’s marvel that they shot the movie in long stretches of 20+ minute long single takes, to which the Broadway community said, “8 shows a week….” The Imitation Game, on the other hand, took a computer story that could have been a total geek fest and made it a thrilling race against time and adversity with a persecuted hero. Again,virtually anyfilm that year was better than Birdman.
2018: Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri Somehow, the socially relevant movie that took the rest of the awards circuit by storm, the true story of a mother taking on the corrupt sheriff of her small town demanding answers why her daughter’s murder was swept under the carpet, somehow, it lost to The Shape of Water, which is basically computer-generated water porn.
BEST ACTOR FLUBS
1982: Dustin Hoffman (Tootsie). Still the worst oversight ever to me personally, Hoffman created two distinct characters and was one of the funniest and most convincing actors to ever fully commit to playing woman, not just being a funny guy in a dress. Dorothy Michaels was her own person, and a better one than her male counterpart. Despite expert comic timing and a first class movie with the last great huge supporting cast ever, Hoffman lost to Ben Kingsly in Ghandi. In retrospect, it’s even significanlty less effective a performance because 80% of Kingsly’s acting achievement is the mere fact that he just happens to look a whole lot like Ghandi.
1986: William Hurt (Children of a Lesser God). Who cares that he won the year for a great performance in Kiss of the Spider Woman, he outdid himself here. His performance is remarkable in that not only did he learn sign language to the point where he could hold explosive arguments with Marlee Matlin throughout their volatile relationship, but in those arguments he had to argue, sign for himself, and interpret her signing for the audience, in effect arguing with himself. And while Paul Newman is a wonderful actor, to give this award to him for a movie as pointless as The Color of Money was ridiculous. Maybe you should have given it to him for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or even the precursor to Money, The Hustler.
1992: Denzel Washington (Malcolm X). Washington gave the best performance of his career with a strong, insightful view into a more than controversial real life character. To lose to Al Pacino for his “hoo-wah”-ing mess in Scent of a Woman is a double insult without even getting into the race angle. I’m sorry Pacino didn’t have an Oscar. Perhaps that should have been taken care of with The Godfather II.
1998: Ian McKellen (Gods and Monsters): Where’s the career award when you need it? McKellen gives an amazing performance as director James Whale looking back on his life in reality of being an openly gay man in 1930’s Hollywood interspersed with blended visions of an alternate reality, due to a brain tumor, of life filtered through his career defining movies Frankenstein and The Bride of Frankenstein. And to lose to that little 11:00-at-the-ball, Italian seat-hopping clown from Life is Beautiful was unforgivable.
2001: Russell Crowe (A Beautiful Mind): Again, sorry you gave him the award the year before for an undistinguished performance in Gladiator, Crowe was amazing as mentally ill mathematician John Nash and showed the audience the progression of mental illness in his mind as never before. When you can make mental illness, blurred reality, and math mesmerizing, you deserve to win twice. Add the fact that I find him deplorable and still think he deserved hands down to win says it all, especially when the victor was a make up award for Denzel Washington in Training Day, a clichéd, B movie. Washington himself said in post-Oscar interviews, “Wrong movie, wrong role.”
2007: Heath Ledger (Brokeback Mountain) or Joaquin Phoenix (Walk the Line). Ledger gave an amazing and ultimately heartbreaking performance, aging convincingly twice his age, as a man who rarely used words to convey his regrets and inner pain. Phoenix learned to play the guitar and did a realistic performance as young Johnny Cash. Either performance was superior to Phillip Seymour Hoffman’s stereotypical swish as Truman Capote where no gay cliché was left unturned. Ledger was a far more realistic gay character, and Phoenix was far more effective in recreating a real person in a biopic. To make Phoenix’s oversight worse was that Reese Witherspoon was the favorite all season for playing June Carter when his performance was by far the better of the two.
And even though it is not from my lifetime, I feel a need to admire one particular award from the golden age, 1940: Hattie McDaniel for Gone With the Wind. With all the PC talk to cancel one of the greatest movies of all time needs to come with the awareness that it made history 70 years ago when Miss McDaniel became the first African-American performer to win a well-deserved Oscar. It was decades before Sidney Portier became the second, and decades more before it became not a novelty. If we throw away Gone With the Wind (which is a blog all unto iteself, don’t we have a few bigger fish to fry right now?), we throw away a most important moment of black history. Now, being 1940, it comes with a caveat that yes she was good enough to win the award, but not good enough to sit in the whites-only banquet room for dinner, but that too, is part of that other blog
BEST ACTRESS FLUBS
1966: Julie Andrews (The Sound of Music): Again, penalized for having won for Mary Poppins the year before, she topped herself in this classic, which is the only palatable version of the musical ever staged. Have you ever sat through The Sound of Music without Julie Andrews–and not clawed your eyes out at it’s manipulative, saccharine stickiness? Yet with Andrews it’s breathtaking. Words that are artificial and stilted in any other mouth become honest, sincere, and endearing when Andrews delivers them. And again, who can ever remember that Julie Christie beat her out?
1978: Meryl Streep (The Deer Hunter). Streep came out of the gait in a wonderful performance that showed exactly where her career would take her. How did the Academy give the award to Maggie Smith, a remarkable actress no doubt, but for Neil Simon’s drivel California Suite, which isn’t even C grade Neil Simon?
1985: Whoopi Goldberg (The Color Purple) or Cher (Mask). Two more casualties of the career award, Goldberg gave a screen debut completely devoid of everything that made her famous and broke, yet eventually warmed, our hearts as awkward, homely, abused Miss Ceely. Cher wasn’t even nominated for her best work ever because Hollywood wanted to send her a message about how a serious actress should behave (as if they should talk?). Again, Geraldine Page was a wonderful actress, but being old and without an Oscar should not be a criteria to win.
1993: Michelle Pfeiffer (Batman Returns). Just because she wore the Catwoman suit perfectly with all that comes with it. Who cares who won? Can you tell me what Emma Thompson wore in Howard’s End?
1999: Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth). Blanchett’s first big role in a splashy, Elizabethan costume drama as Queen Elizabeth that could have been dull as mud in anyone else’s hands, she lost to Gwyneth Paltrow in a splashy, Elizabethan costume dramedy as a cross dressing wannabe actor where her major acting style is being pleasant makes no sense.
2003: Renee Zellweger (Chicago). Zellweger, sang, danced, and aced the central role in the first musical to win best picture in 35 years, and carried the whole project on her back. Nicole Kidman won for wearing a fake nose to play Virginia Woolf in a movie where she was in at most a quarter of the plot, really amounting in a glorified supporting role. You do the math.
2012: Viola Davis (The Help). Meryl Streep has been nominated more than any other actress, almost 20 times. Remember all the times you passed her over for amazing performances like Sister Aloysious in Doubt, or the time she created an iconic character like Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada? So the year Viola Davis gives an amazing break-out performance, you decide to give it to Streep for lesser work in The Iron Lady.
2013: Jessica Chastain (Zero Dark Thirty). Oscar has a tendency to favor pretty 20-something actresses to make the Oscar compilation photo look better or something, I guess, and Jennifer Lawrence was just that in The Silver Linings Playbook. If you needed someone pretty, why not have given it to Bradley Cooper who had the meatier part. Lawrence gave a perfectly fine performance, where Chastain became yet another chameleonic force, no two characters ever alike. If there is a makeup Oscar out there, Jessica Chastain deserves one.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR FLUBS
Apparently the Academy blows it less often in this category than any other because the only real offender I have is Eddie Murphy’s 2007 loss as James Brown-esque James”Thunder” Early in Dreamgirls. Eddie sang, danced, carried on, was alternately hilarious and sad, and basically revived his sagging career in a huge breakout role, yet lost to Alan Arkin for an amusing performance in Little Miss Sunshine with limited screen time. Word on the street had it that it was a throwback to the Cher “not a serious actor” excuse because his next role was in the nonsense film Norbert. Newsflash, academy, actors can do both serious and commercial work and still earn awards.
BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS FLUBS
On the other hand, this category could go on for days. Here is just the highlights….
1974: Madeline Kahn (Paper Moon). As washed-up carny dancer Trixie Delight in this charming period comedy, Kahn was, as usual, hilarious yet touching as a brassy, shallow, racist, floozy who exists by living man to man yet understands nothing really ever works out for her, Kahn lost to her 10-year-old co-star Tatum O’Neal. Now O’Neal as pint-sized con artist-in-training Addie Loggins is amazing. She gives one of the best child actor performances ever opposite her father Ryan as his friend, foil, reluctant business partner, and possible daughter. Trouble is it’s definitely a starring role. Sad thing is young O’Neal was actually the best actress of the year, but they settled in applying for the supporting award, thus costing one of the greatest comedienne’s ever her best shot at Oscar gold.
1981: Eileen Brennan (Private Benjamin). A veteran comic actress with a great career of scene-stealing roles behind her, the hardened, militant, resentful Capt. Lewis whose frustration with Goldie Hawn’s Jewish princess recruit drives her to madness, drink, and ruin is the crown. She lost to Mary Steenburgen, another fine actress in a forgotten performance in Melvyn & Howard.
1983: Lesley Ann Warren (Victor/Victoria). 15 years later at the 1997 Tony Awards, Julie Andrews laid out the Tony committee for snubbing Victor/Victoria at the Tonys, coining the euphemism “most egregious oversight”. How ironic that 15 years earlier, Oscar committed their most egregious oversight when they denied Miss Warren this Oscar. While the performance as platinum floozy Norma Cassady borders on the clichéd, Warren was hilarious. She sang, danced, and stole the movie from the legendary Julie Andrews in her best role since The Sound of Music. Add onto that the fact that before this role, Warren was most noted for playing the lead in Rogers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella on TV. She so nailed Norma that she’s been typecast as the quintessential crazy, wacky, bimbo ever since. Compound this oversight with the fact that she lost in another make up contest, to Jessica Lange in Tootsie, who in turn lost the lead actress award that same year for the role of her life in Frances to make room for Meryl Streep to win for Sophie’s Choice. It’s complicated, but still wrong. Tootsie is my favorite movie comedy and I love Lange, one of my favorite actresses of all time, in it, yet the victory was hollow and Warren robbed in the role of her life.
1997: Lauren Bacall (The Mirror Has Two Faces). So where’s the you’re a classic “we love you, and this is your very last chance for us to give you an Oscar award” when you need one. The one time it would have made sense to reward the legendary Bacall as Barbra Streisand’s over the top society matron mother from hell, she lost to Juliette Binoche in The English Patient, the movie most likely to make me go to sleep since Chariots of Fire.
1998: Joan Cusack (In & Out) or Julianne Moore (Boogie Nights). Cusack as Kevin Kline’s clueless fiancée who gets dumped at the alter is the funniest and biggest of a long comic career, and her deliver of the her infamous line (“Is everybody gay!?!?!”) has become part of pop culture. Moore came to fame as the warm mother-hen porn star Amber Waves whose career costs her her daughter. In one of the most senseless awards ever, the forerunner from the beginning was Kim Basinger, an actress more noted for her runway looks than her acting, for portraying a Veronica Lake lookalike femme fatale in LA Confidential. The movie was great, but Basinger’s biggest accomplishment was a genetic resemblance to Veronica Lake. The saddest thing is that even without Basinger in the mix, neither of these deserving actresses were being considered. The runner-up was the old lady from the Titanic, who appeared in about 8 minutes of the movie and whose basic accomplishment was being old.
1998: Lynn Redgrave (Gods and Monsters). If Lesley Ann Warren’s snub was the most egregious oversight in Oscar history, Redgrave’s snub here is a flat out slap in the face. In the year of the Queen Elizabeths, the right Elizabeth lost and the wrong Elizabeth one. Redgrave gave one final bravura performance in a career that started out as Georgy Girl as Ian McKellan’s harsh Teutonic housekeeper who simultaneously despises his homosexuality yet is secretly in love with him. Her resolve of this dichotomy results in a performance that is ultimately funny yet heart breaking–equal parts Alice and Frau Bleucher. She lost to Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth in Shakespeare in Love–a role that gave her literally about 5 minutes of screentime.
2019: Scarlett Johanson (Jojo Rabbit). Generally, I’m not even a fan of Johanson’s, but she turned in the best work of her career here, significantly better than Laura Dern did in A Marriage Story, and Dern walked off with every award of the season. Dern is a fine actress but her role as a high profile LA woman’s divorce attorney was nothing special, she’s done much better work. But Dern is a legacy and all her Hollywood friends voted for her and all her mother’s and father’s Hollywood friend voted for her and, the winner is…
Best Director Flubs:
2001 and 2008: Christopher Nolan (Memento and The Dark Knight). Nolan, one of the most stylish and imaginative directors of this generation, is a perpetual snub. In Memento, he told a tale of a man with anterograde amnesia (he remembers the past, but nothing short term from the minute he was attacked) attempting to solve the murder of his wife. To add to this odd conceit, he uses a dicey gimmick of telling the story scene by scene in reverse, so that the audience never knows anything more at any point than the protagonist does. I generally detest gimmicks but this one works brilliantly. In the Dark Knight, he takes a Batman movie and genuinely makes it thrilling, real, contemporary, and a best picture contender, in the process reinventing the classic character of the Joker to make him a real plausibility. Sadly, he wasn’t even nominated for either one, as he was again snubbed this year for Inception. Both movies, particularly Memento, only work because the director did his job. What does the Academy have against this guy?
2003: Rob Marshall (Chicago). Ok, the guy reinvents and reestablishes the movie musical with a project that had been floundering since the 70’s because no one could figure out how to adapt and film the obviously stagy production. Yet he did, and with a new, unique, and visually stunning style, directing both the best picture and best supporting actress in the process. Instead they gave it to convicted rapist Roman Freaking Polanski (for the totally adequate The Pianist) who is never even allowed back in the country lest he be arrested, in one of the Academy’s most morally reprehensible decisions. Super snub on an easy decision.
I don’t know if this actually helped, but it can at least tie things over until the weekend to see if I’m at least in the mood for whatever the Oscars turn out to be. Tune back in before Sunday to check out that discussion.