Category: Academy Awards
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1964 at the Oscars
There was very little suspense at the 1964 Oscars. From the day it opened on Broadway in March, 1956, My Fair Lady was a cultural phenomenon. It spawned two best selling cast recordings, the Original Broadway Cast recording in mono and the 1959 London Cast recording with the same stars, Rex Harrison and Julie Andrews,…
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Tom Sherak elected President of the Academy
Two bits of recent news out of the Academy. The first is that, in a run-off election for the open Directors Branch seat, Edward Zwick has beaten out almost-perennial Oscar director Gil Cates. This was the Academy’s first tie in voting. It’s an interesting turn of events, but has a certain amount of humor in…
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1963 at the Oscars
Handicapping a ten nomine Best Picture race in 1963 becomes more daunting as the Directors Guild drops its by then traditional long list of semi-finalists and announces only the finalists. The DGA finalists for 1963 were Federico Fellini for 8 ½; Elia Kazan for America America; Ralph Nelson for Lilies of the Field; Tony Richardson…
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1962 at the Oscars
1962 has to be one of the oddest years in Oscar history in that only two of the five Best Picture nominees and their directors were nominated – Lawrence of Arabia’s David Lean and To Kill a Mockingbird’s Robert Mulligan. But then, they were the two most likely to win anyway. With ten nominations to…
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1961 at the Oscars
Three films dominated the year-end awards in 1961: West Side Story, Judgment at Nuremberg and La Dolce Vita, with the latter becoming the first serious foreign language contender for a Best Picture Oscar nomination since Grand Illusion way back in 1938. Alas, when the nominations were announced, the Italian film had to settle for just…
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1960 at the Oscars
1960 was an interesting year at the Oscars. Adult themes were much more in evidence than ever before. Sex was one of the themes, if not the major one in The Apartment; Sons and Lovers; Home From the Hill; Elmer Gantry; Psycho; The Dark at the Top of the Stairs; Hiroshima, Mon Amour and Never…
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1959 at the Oscars
1959 was a year of many big films – Ben-Hur; North by Northwest; Some Like It Hot; On the Beach; Imitation of Life; The Diary of Anne Frank; Anatomy of a Murder and The Nun’s Story to name a few with room for only five in Oscar’s Best Picture line-up. Four of them, Ben-Hur; The…
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1958 at the Oscars
1958 was an interesting year at the Oscars. The two films now regarded as the greatest of the year, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo and Orson Welles’ Touch of Evil were not on Oscar’s short list. Nevertheless some very good films were. Oscar chose to embrace instead, Morton Da Costa’s film of the irrepressible stage hit, Auntie…
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1957 at the Oscars
Big was still in in 1957, but a transposed TV drama a la Marty managed to sneak in amongst the five nominees for Best Picture. Joining The Bridge on the River Kwai; Witness for the Prosecution; Peyton Place and Sayonara in the Best Picture race was Sidney Lumet’s first feature film, Twelve Angry Men based…
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1956 at the Oscars
If 1955’s Oscar wins for Marty flew in the face of industry moguls, 1956 was right up their alley. All five Best Picture nominees were major productions: Around the World in 80 Days; Friendly Persuasion; Giant; The King and I and The Ten Commandments. The anticipated winner was, of course, Around the World in 80…
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1955 at the Oscars
For several years Hollywood had been doing everything it could to entice customers away from their TV sets and into theatres. By 1955, films shot on location in widescreen processes and glorious Technicolor and films with mature themes that wouldn’t play on TV were commonplace. How ironic, then, that a little film shot in 35MM…
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1954 at the Oscars
The quality of film released in 1954 was extremely high. Even so, the Best Director and Picture Oscar and races seemed open and shut cases for Elia Kazan and On the Waterfront, and indeed the film became the first to sweep the National Board of Review, The New York Film Critics, the Golden Globes and…
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1953 at the Oscars
Generally regarded as one of the greatest films ever made, if not the single greatest film of all time, Yasujiro Ozu’s 1953 masterpiece, Tokyo Story, about an elderly Japanese couple making an exhausting railroad journey to visit their faraway children for the last time, met the fate of all of Ozu’s other films in the…
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1952 at the Oscars
There are four films eligible for Best Picture consideration in 1952 that are still highly regarded today. Two of them, The Quiet Man and High Noon, were indeed nominated. The other two, Singin’ in the Rain and Rashomon were not. The Quiet Man was John Ford’s labor of love that he tried to make for…
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1951 at the Oscars
The 1951 Oscar race was expected to be between two critically acclaimed dramatic films, Elia Kazan’s film of Tennessee Williams’ stage sensation, A Streetcar Named Desire with its twelve nominations and George Stevens’ A Place in the Sun, the second screen version of Theodore Dreiser’s acclaimed 1925 novel. Ultimately, however, Vincente Minnelli’s celebration of the…
