animehermit said:
DVS BSTrD said:
Ummm Why was Dances with Wolves winning the Oscar unforgivable? (Unless you're referring to the fact that Godfather 3 was even considered)
<url=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IP9a10PK54g>This was a far greater travesty.
And For the record I DO remember Crash
Cause it was awesome.
indeed it was. I'm still reeling, however from the 94 Oscars, where Forrest Gump beat out not only Shawshank Redemption, but also Pulp Fiction.
I have not seen
Goodfellas yet, as I have quite a bit of "great films" Netflix backlog to work through yet, but I
have seen
Awakenings [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0099077/].
Dances With Wolves was the bigger movie, but
Awakenings had better acting and more sincerity, and is better deserving of the award.
Also something I wish would get more and deserved attention: animated feature films. Now that the Best Picture nominees number ten instead of five, the Academy feels more comfortable nominating
Up and
Toy Story 3 (a year too late for the Academy to be in its comfort zone to include
WALL-E among the Best Picture nominees), but I remember the 64th Academy Awards, where
Beauty and the Beast was considered good enough to be included in the five-only group. It lost to
The Silence of the Lambs. Someday I'll sit down and watch it (and probably also fellow-nominees
JFK,
The Prince Of Tides, and
Bugsy for good measure) and try to find out why, but I have the feeling Anthony-Hopkins-plays-a-crazy-guy will fail to earn as much respect as I give to The Tale As Old As Time.
Therumancer said:
Awarding a good movie, that happens to be rooted entirely in current trends, is anathema because down the road that movie might not age well as trends change. In comparison period dramas tend to remain "relevent" having dealt with a documented period as opposed to "of the moment" pop culture.
I present as counterpoint
Gone With the Wind. All films, even those set in a different time period, are still subject to the time in which they are made.
Gone With the Wind and the book it was based on were both part of an early-20th-Century cultural perception of romanticizing the American Civil War - a collective view of the conflict as the South's noble-but-ill-fated fight to the end and a way for America to say, "Ah yes, it was sad and dramatic, but it's all in the past now, and it really wasn't that bad." The film does not try to say much about the causes and effects of the Civil War itself, but primarily views it more like a natural disaster, inescapable and with almost no warning, through the eyes of the protagonist Scarlett O'Hara. Scarlett's need to survive comes not from an internal strength, but from pure self-absorption. This would make for an intriguing character study worthy of analysis through the years, except that Scarlett goes through no character growth until the last ten minutes of the film, and by this point, it's a marvel anyone still cares about her well-being.
African-Americans in
Gone With the Wind are happy, contented, mostly-invisible slaves before the War, and a dangerous, omnipresent, mostly-invisible menace after the War. Hattie McDaniel would win the Best Performance by an Actress in a Supporting Role Oscar and be the first African-American woman to do so, but her role was "Mammy", a character who was given no other name in the film and who embodies much of the "Mammy" stereotype that the African-American community abhors for more than a few good reasons. [Hattie McDaniel, talented actress with long career, wins Best Supporting Actress for playing a maid. Viola Davis, talented actress with long career, nominated for Best Actress for playing a maid. There's a whole other post somebody can write on how little/much the Academy has changed.]
By the time Ken Burns's documentary
The Civil War came along in the 90's, American culture was embracing the viewpoint of, "The Civil War wasn't that bad. It was
worse." In another fifty or so years, a feature film or TV documentary about or set in the Civil War will reflect the future's view of the conflict. The Academy does not strive for artistic survivability, as it were, for this only possible in hindsight. If the Academy really
did have the ability honor the films that would "stand the test of time", the 1939 Best Picture wouldn't have been
Gone With the Wind. It would have been
The Wizard Of Oz.