*** Official 2003 Academy Awards Discussion Thread (1 Viewer)

[Claire Panke]

Seth, in answer to your question, nominating groups do receive printed copies of the scripts. (I have a couple in my possession.) But they are not usually the shooting versions.

And thank you for pointing out the extreme importance of editing. While film is indeed a collaborative art, editing is surely foremost in the director's arsenal. Movies have their own language, and editing is the grammar. (Actors often say they prefer stage to screen acting, because they can control and fine tune their own performance - in film, the director controls much of the performance through editing.)

We could argue the merits of past Oscar winners and losers for days. I think it's instructive to reflect on what Oscar really is - an industry popularity contest. (Hence the acclaim for ROTK, although FOTR may have been the better films. Hence the award for Penn, although he's done better work in other films. This is a fmailiar Oscar refrain.)

AMPAS honors some good films, some mediocre ones, and a few great ones - however, I think it's safe to say that there are far more great movies that never won Best Picture than great movies that did (toddle over to the Sight & Sound thread if you don't believe me). It's no disgrace Oscar is chiefly concerned with as pop culture - after all, AMPAS is about the commercial film business more than it is about film art.

Oscar is a terrific horse race that's fun to handicap - it's nice to see favorite movies, actors and crafts artists recognized. I love to watch the show. I love to see the dresses and hear the acceptance speeches. But only time will truly separate these movies out. A great film doesn't need an Oscar to validate its quality - a mediocre movie is mediocre no matter how many awards it garners (can you say "A Beautiful Mind"?).

I don't think there is such a thing as "the best" film of any given year anyway. Even if I did, I wouldn't look to the Oscars to tell me.

OTOH, without Oscar, we probably woulnd't get to see things like the Oscar Shorts program that's coming to Indy and your town in the near future. I also hope a few more people will check out The Fog Of War due to its win.

Oscar has its uses.

 

[Kevin_H]

I agree with that. As I said myself previously, I like ANNIE HALL. I'm just saying there are a lot of people who have not seen it, whereas mostly everybody has seen STAR WARS. And of those people who have seen it, most would consider STAR WARS to be the better film, as you say yourself when you mention the AFI and S&S polls. I also think the only reason why STAR WARS didn't win was because it was a science fiction film. Though admittidly ANNIE HALL was probably a bit of an upset as Best Film, of the films that year, JULIA was probably the "traditional" movie the Acadamy usually gives the Oscar to.

 

[Colin Jacobson]

I think you got it backwards. Of the three examples mentioned, only Annie Hall continues to hold up well. I'd prefer that Star Wars had won, but even though I don't usually like Woody Allen, Hall is a damned fine film that remains very effective. It's one of the Oscar winners about which I don't much bitch, unlike Chariots and Gandhi, which were both rather weak flicks...

 

[Ernest Rister]

I like Chariots of Fire and Gandhi. I also like Raiders and E.T..

As for the eternal Star Wars vs. Annie Hall debate, I think Annie Hall is a brilliant movie, and perhaps Oscar voters were recognizing themselves and their modern lives in that film. Star Wars also received rave reviews - I think Time Magazine picked it as their choice for best film of the year, but I was seven years old, so don't quote me on that. The difference is that Annie Hall was a mirror for adult viewers in the 70's, while Star Wars was an escape.

When it comes to the whole Best Picture debate, I'm not sure it's the "fantasy" genre per se that has been overlooked as much as "escapist" cinema, like Raiders and even E.T. (though I think the personal drama in E.T. is often overlooked as a prime reason why that film was so successful). The reasons both Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven won Best Picture had less to do with their genre as they did with their social commentary -- both were "post-modern" Westerns, in a sense, in that they were revisionist looks at the American past, commenting on American myths as well as American film history themselves.

If you ask me, Return of the King is not the first "fantasy/escapist" film to win Best Picture. From where I sit, two "escapist" films were chosen in the 90's...Forrest Gump, which was a modern fairy tale that used history as a set-up for punch lines and dramatic turns, and Braveheart. Braveheart comes on like a historical epic, but it many ways, it's as big of a piece of escapist entertainment as Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Wonderful movie, but I don't group it alongside "historical epics" in my collection like Malcolm X, Schindler's List, The Longest Day, or The Mission. I have it in my Fantasy section, just above Conan the Barbarian and Dragonslayer.

 

[Paul_Scott]

i'd agree with you ER about Gump being Fantasy (actual its a good example to me of a G.G. Marquez like(lite) Fantasy/realism).

i would disagree about Braveheart.
the real events amy have been fudged a bit, but its in the same vein as Ben-Hur more so than Conan the Barbarian, to me.

 

[Jason Seaver]

I can see where Ernst is coming from, although I'd peg Gladiator as pretty much entirely escapist, too.

Now, what would be a really big deal would be a comedy getting best picture...

 

[Mark_vdH]

Annie Hall and Shakespeare In Love are not comedies then?

 

[Ernest Rister]

I don't get Gladiator. Every once in a while, a movie comes out that seizes the zeitgeist, and I stand there scratching my head wondering what all the fuss is about. Everyone else seems to have seen a completely different movie than I did. Beauty and the Beast. Gladiator. Signs. Good movies, but the acclaim seems disproportionate to the achievement in light of similar films in cinema history. I finally just remind myself that I've seen way too many movies in my life, and leave it at that.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Thanks to this thread, I was able to push my trivia team into second place last night by being able to name 4 of the 6 films that had collected 9 or more Oscars (minus ROTK).

 

[Lew Crippen]

I think that there were more reasons than that: for one, actors are the single biggest block in the Academy and for all of its merits, the acting in Star Wars ranges from adequate to lamentable. And this is compounded when the single actor of note, Alec Guinness, despised his role and was not shy about saying so. Contrast to Diane Keaton’s brilliant performance.

Of course the fact that it was perceived as Science Fiction hurt, but there were many other problems as well from the voters. For another example, how many writers do you think voted for Star Wars? As opposed to Allen’s script.

 

[Dome Vongvises]

I thought it was amazing that Star Wars received an Oscar nomination at all for script. If anything, Saturday Night Live perfectly captured probably one of the reasons it has detractors.

"What the hell's a Wookiee?"



Good call Lew. Not many people realize that adequate is a descriptive term these days. But you forget excellent from the only man in the film, Alec Guinness. Sadly, he was too cynical and grounded in traditional theatrics and cinema to understand the significance of the film.

Back on topic, A Beautiful Mind is what I would call a good movie, and it is hardly as terrible as people put it out to be. However, count me as part of the baffled when it won over who I thought were superior films.

 

[Lew Crippen]

And I fully expect that a good many actors of the day shared his view.

I would quibble a bit with your use use of the word ‘excellent’. No disrespect to Sir Alec, but in this film, I would use that term only in comparison to the rest of the cast.

I’ll stop now, before this seems to be a bash of the film, which was not my intent at all (nor my belief). Just trying to get some perspective on why it did not win back in the day.

 

[Patrick Sun]

Well, the Oscars sometimes tend to be a snapshot of the current climate of the voting period for each year. Sure, some winners don't "age" as well as others, but at that moment in time, the winners just had more momentum and buzz than the other nominees. It doesn't make the selection of the eventual winner any less valid (though we may disagree vehemently with the decision of the collective body known as "the Academy").

I'm just happy if we get 5 really good films per year.

 

[Kevin_H]

Enough to get it a nomination as Best Screenplay, which is more than Cameron got for TITANIC.

A quote by Paul Newman I think sums up why STAR WARS dosen't win, "I can't believe a movie staring two robots is up for best picture." (I assume he's talking about R2-D2 and C-3P0 )

 

[Dome Vongvises]

In spite of ROTK's win, don't expect a paradigm shift. There's still a whole lot of people out there (actors, critics, that guy that lectures at a university) who still will not respect the "unreal" fiction genre. It's sad really as I think comic books, fantasy tales, and mythology say just as much (if not more) about the human condition as a portrait of...oh I don't know, the idle rich?

 

[Quentin]

I don't think awards...ANY awards...are necessarily a good gauge for the quality of a film. However, they often do point you in good and interesting directions.

No, Titanic was not nominated for a screenplay Oscar, but it WAS nominated for a WGA award. Star Wars was nominated for best COMEDY by the WGA (they had Comedy/Drama then), and lost to Annie Hall. Yet, Harrison Ford is famous (rightfully so, IMO) for saying, "You may be able to write this shit, George, but you sure can't say it."

I happen to love all 3 for different reasons.

 

[Seth Paxton]

I based that on the opening scene as an example. While the fundamental structure is there, there is still plenty of room where the actor (or director) altered lines or took a few lines out to make the scene flow better. And in reading the script versus that scene the film does have a smoother flow.

Naturally once you are on set and hearing things live, or even in a reading, the writer/director/producer can hear things that they decide to change. Of course this is rarely the writer doing this, so it basically means a screenwriter can win the award for a script that he didn't even totally write.


I think if you take year 2000 voters back to vote between Raiders and Chariots of Fire they do give it to Raiders, and I mean without knowledge of the films beforehand. Simply because they did go with Gladiator, a more Raiders like film versus the artier Chariots of Fire type of films (Traffic, You Can Count on Me, Wonder Boys). I love Chariots of Fire but its scope is more limited than Raiders is.

 

[Seth Paxton]

No, I meant by the standards of being accurate to the book. And Tolkin did the screenplay too, with Altman's input as well with director's changes.

But Tolkin's book is not the film. Each are very good in quite different ways. As I said Tolkin's book feels more like American Psycho than Altman's film.

Both the Prof and myself would consider The Player an outstanding adaptation, proving that film and book are not the same unless the director/producer really want them to be. Altman had his own agenda, namely the same one he always does, a satire on authority groups, the powerful and the elite, as well as systems themselves. Of course he also likes to de-emphasize the individual which makes an adaptation of The Player an odd choice because it is so much of a journey inside the mind of one individual.

 

[Seth Paxton]

Yes, I do agree with that. Only in the last few years have we seen voters back away from social themed messages a bit. Generally the voters look for films that carry some relevent artistic comment on the culture.

I think Raiders and ET lost more in that way than by genre, if I might revise my stance slightly in light of your point.

 

[Chris]

I guess I missed this, but was listening to Tony Kornheiser today as he talked about the acceptance speech for "Fog of War" and said the director gave a speech that boiled down to "you fools! You should have recognized my work years ago!"

I must have missed this! Anyone have a summary or if anyone has video clips?