1958-1967: Oscar’s Fourth Decade -A Look Back

	Musical	Historical Epic	Lavish Setting	British	Social Injustice
1958: Gigi	X		X
1959: Ben-Hur		X	X
1960: The Apartment
1961: West Side Story	X
1962: Lawrence of Arabia		X	X	X
1963: Tom Jones			X	X
1964: My Fair Lady	X		X	X
1965: The Sound of Music	X		X	X-ish
1966: A Man For All Seasons		X	X	X
1967: In the Heat of the Night					X

 

This poster for Lawrence of Arabia really tells you all you need to know: Handsome man in white, lots of desert.

The Oscars fourth decade (1958-1967) is the start of the “traditional” Best Picture with the sorts of lavish costume dramas, period pieces and BRITISH-ness from the ten winners that dominate what we think of when we think of a “Best Picture type” today. It’s very notable that in a decade revered for its social consciousness and upheaval, only 3 of the 10 best pictures take place in the contemporary time period. It’s like the Academy – and perhaps moviegoers as a whole—looked to the escapism of movies for comfort from trying times.

None of this nonesense

Unique to this time period is the Academy’s absolute adoration of big musical spectacles. Before 1958, only two musicals ever won Best Picture. In this ten year stretch, 4 out of the 10 winners were musicals. In the next 50 years, we’ll only see two more musicals win. Oddly, aside from the success of the winners, the 60s are viewed as the decline of the Hollywood Musicals and you can probably count the successful musicals released between 1970 and 2000 on your fingers. Does this mean the Academy was behind the times? Regressing into the past to avoid the harsher realities of the present – both in terms of what was going on in the world and the struggles and changes within the filmmaking business? Or were they caught up in the zeitgeist and awarded the statue to the “right” winner – West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music are all much-remembered and well-loved to both audiences of their time and today’s fans.

Lots of jazz hands

The other major trend, carried over from the last decade, was the prominence of historical epics and the triumph of a movie’s “big-ness” that was used to compete with television. Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia are two the most visually stunning and exciting Best Pictures ever. Even the non-epics like Tom Jones and A Man for All Seasons use their big budgets and location settings of movies to employ elaborate sets and costumes unlikely to be seen or appreciated on television at that time, perhaps another reason that period pieces fare so well among Best Pictures in this period.

One cannot deny the British influence over this time period (as with a lot of things in American culture – it was the British invasion, after all). From 1962-1966, four of the five Best Pictures are set in England and The Sound of Music, despite being in Austria, has a predominantly British cast and feel.

All hail the Union Jack!

Was the Academy out of touch? It’s well worth noting that the majority of the Best Pictures in this time frame were among the top ten financial grossers for their respective years of their release. The Sound of Music was the highest grossing movie of all time for a long period following its release. So it’s not as if the critical and commercial aspects of the Academy were as misaligned as they were today, when we have some of the lowest grossing Best Pictures ever. Even today, many of the winners are very highly thought of by some if not all – West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Sound of Music, in particular. Hindsight has left many critics to question some of the Oscar choices – notably choosing In the Heat of the Night over Bonnie and Clyde and The Apartment over Psycho – but both those winners are very strong, in my opinion (There really is no defending Tom Jones, however), and it was impossible to know, for example, that Psycho would create a whole new genre of film.

Filmmaking was about to undergo a significant upheaval in the 70s and that is reflected in the Best Picture winners of that time period. For the Oscars in the late 50s and 60s, the Best Picture was about celebrating epics and style over social issues and “small” pictures.

2015 Oscar Predictions

The big day is finally here. Before we get to my sure-to-be wrong predictions, here’s my personally rankings of the Best Picture nominees, from most to least favorite.

1. Room
2. Spotlight
3. Mad Max: Fury Road
4. Brooklyn
5. The Martian
6. The Big Short
7. The Revenant
8. Bridge of Spies

Now then onto to my predictions.

1. Best Picture: Spotlight

Popular consensus seems to be a three way battle between Spotlight, The Big Short and The Revenant. I think Spotlight has the edge with more traditional story-telling and the social injustice issues that always captures a voter’s fancy.

2. Best Director: Tom McCarthy, Spotlight

If voters go hog-wild over the technical majesty of Mad Max it is theoretically possible George Miller could win, but I still stick to the tried and true idea that Director and Picture go hand in hand most years.

3. Best Actor: Leonardo Dicaprio, The Revenant

Seemingly the biggest lock of the year, Leo finally walks home with the big gold statue. The Oscars love actors playing real people and physical transformation/suffering for one’s art. I guess I’d have picked Michael Fassbender for his flashy Steve Jobs, but all five candidates were strong.

4. Best Actress: Brie Larson, Room

Another seeming sure thing, Larson’s cleaned up at the awards running up to this.

5. Best Supporting Actor: Sylvester Stallone, Creed

Slightly less of a sure thing than Larson and Dicaprio, I mean it is Sylvester Stallone we’re talking about here, but I think he wins as a sort of lifetime achievement award and the Academy always likes the redemptive story of an actor who makes crap for 30+ years doing good. My pick would have been Tom Hardy who was captivating in the Revenant.

6. Best Supporting Actress: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl

The closest race this year. I would not be surprised by any of the five winning, but The Danish Girl is really more Vikander’s movie than it is Eddie Redmayne’s, plus the Academy will always want to look like it’s tackling tough issues, even if I’m not so sure that The Danish Girl was all that flattering a portrait of a transgendered person.

7. Best Animated Feature: Inside Out

8. Best Original Screenplay: Spotlight

9. Best Adapted Screenplay: The Big Short

Big Short had to do the most with very dry and difficult subject matter and to be able to wring some laughs out of it, and make mortgage bonds slightly less murky is a feat in and of itself.

10. Best Foreign Language Film: Son of Saul

I hope Helen Mirren presents this award like she did at the Golden Globes, if only to demonstrate her encyclopedic knowledge of countries that have won awards for film. Son of Saul is a holocaust movie, always a safe bet for any Oscar.

11. Best Documentary Feature: Amy

I have no clue, but I feel like people at least had heard of this one (it’s about Amy Winehouse) and being celebrity types, maybe even knew her, so here you go.

12. Best Original Score: The Hateful Eight

13. Best Original Song: “Til It Happens To You”, The Hunting Ground.

Look if Vice President Joe Biden is going to introduce Lady Gaga singing a song on Oscar night, then the producers have pretty well tipped their hand as to the winner.

14. Best Sound Editing: Mad Max: Fury Road

And thus begins the long string of technical awards won by Mad Max.

15. Best Sound Mixing: Mad Max: Fury Road

16. Best Production Design: Mad Max Fury Road

17. Best Cinematography: The Revenant

It’s possible Mad Max could win Cinematography too, but Revenant was so damn pretty when it didn’t involve people eating raw buffalo organs.

18. Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Mad Max: Fury Road

19. Best Costume Design: Carol

20. Best Film Editing: Spotlight

21. Best Visual Effects: Mad Max: Fury Road

22. Best Live Action Short: Shok

23. Best Animated Short: Sanjay’s Super Team

24. Best Documentary Short: A Girl in the River: The Price of Forgiveness

1938-1947: Oscar’s Second Decade – A Look Back

World War 2 was a major driver of Oscar Best Pictures in the 1940s and continues to be so

Following the lead I started WAAAAAY back after completing the first ten Best Pictures, I thought it would be interesting to look at the second decade of Oscar Best Pictures and see what made them “Best”. First here’s a chart to remind us about each movie and look for some commonalities.

	World War II	Social Problems	Epic	Modernity	Evil Bankers	Total Nominations
1938 -You Can’t Take it With You					X	7
1939 – Gone With the Wind			X		X	13
1940 – Rebecca			X			11
1941 – How Green Was My Valley		X		X	X	10
1942 – Mrs. Miniver	X					12
1943 – Casablanca	X		X			8
1944 – Going My Way	X	X-ish			X	7
1945 – The Lost Weekend		X				7
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives	X	X				8
1947 – Gentleman’s Agreement		X				8

 

Two themes dominated the second decade of the Academy Awards – World War II and addressing social issues. Every movie from 1941 onward (probably not coincidentally the point where the U.S. entered World War II) can easily be categorized under one or both of these subject matters.

While it is certainly easy to dismiss the trend of World War II movies as merely an update/reboot of the popular World War I movie trend that dominated the Oscars’ first decade, it must be noted that the World War I movies popular from 1927-1938 were being made more than a decade after WWI’s end. The World War II movies were being made while the War was going on. Thus these movies aren’t the somber reflections of war’s horror seen in All Quiet on the Western Front or Wings, but more invested in creating a rousing can-do, let’s-win-this-thing sort of spirit.

My favorite of the batch – and one of my favorite movies EVER

World War II clearly holds a special place in the nation’s conscious, even 80 years later. No subsequent war movie would win a Best Picture Oscar while being about a war that’s still ongoing until the Hurt Lock in 2009! Most winning war movies – The Deer Hunter, Platoon – are about wars that have been finished for several years, if not more. In fact, the majority of “current” war movies have been box office duds. But the World War II movies of the 40s were huge hits and World War II movies examining every aspect of the war continue to be churned out – and win Best Picture Oscars – to this day! Clearly the black-and-white nature of World War II – the last true “Good vs. Evil” battle PLUS the nationalistic ideal of America as the heroes – holds a special appeal that will likely never be broken.

The socially conscious trend in the last half of the decade is harder to pin down. During the 1930s, when the country had arguably significantly worse problems of greater scale with the Great Depression, no movie explicitly about the Great Depression won an Oscar and only one – The Great Ziegfeld – even directly acknowledged the Great Depression. Movies were seen as a key to escapism from hardships during the 30s. During the post-war 40s, America prospered like never before. Whether that prosperity unleashed a liberal guilt in filmmakers or just freed them to make statements about issues they’d always been concerned about but seemed insignificant in light of the Depression’s overwhelming despair is hard to say. The Great Depression’s effects were felt indirectly in a number of films that cast bankers and taxmen as villains, although evil taxmen weren’t exactly a new phenomenon in the 1930s.

Epics, while toned down compared to the all-out spectacles of the 30s, still held a powerful sway on Academy voters. Of course, the grandest epic of them all, Gone With The Wind, won huge and several other movies with an epic feel (and/or epic lengths) like Casablanca and Rebecca also took home the gold. But as noted in the Academy Award Handbook, the emergence of the social problem movie also brought about the first real opportunity for smaller films to get in on the action. The Best Years of Our Lives combined the best of both worlds with an all start cast and an epic story focusing on domestic problems of returning soldiers.

You Can’t Take It With You winning is as perplexing as this scene from the movie

You Can’t Take It With You remains a great outlier not just of this period but of the Oscars in general. A smallish, low-stakes moral comedy with a basic message of “Just relax” doesn’t seem like Oscar bait in any time period and is hardly one of the best remembered films of its director or star.