Some Oscar trends were established very early on.
And so a creature feature, even one with groundbreaking visual effects, and as iconic and influential
as Kong, surely couldn’t be a Best Picture nominee.
But this is one Hollywood’s beauty pageant that couldn’t kill the beast…
Ernst Lubitsch’s wartime farce, with a vainglorious Polish theatre troupe outwitting the Nazis,
baffled, even offended its contemporary audiences.
What’s clearer today, is that it’s one of the all-time great serious comedies,
a defiant call for improvised anarchy (and the luminous Carole Lombard) over controlling
fascism, and, decades after Mel Brooks, still unmatched.
Is it because Gene Kelly-starring An American in Paris won Best Picture the year before,
that, in an era where musicals were award magnets, arguably Hollywood’s most beloved
song and dance spectacular was overlooked?
I’m clutching at straws because otherwise Singin’ in the Rain’s absence is inexplicable.
John Ford’s four directing Oscars reflects his esteemed status.
Which makes it even stranger that perhaps his – even the genre’s
– greatest Western, with John Wayne’s best, most conflicted performance, isn’t
among his Academy honourees.
All Stanley Kubrick’s features between Dr. Strangelove and Barry Lyndon received Best
Picture nominations – except what might just be his most influential film ever.
2001 changed the perception of science-fiction cinema forever, and while Kubrick was nominated
as Director, and won for visual effects, the film's overall status should’ve been reflected too.
One of the great directorial debuts, Terrence Malick emerged fully formed as screen poet,
using and counterpointing image, sound and voiceover, as he charted his tragically blinkered,
murderous lovers-on-the-run.
Set against his more experimental recent work, it’s a reminder of how deep Malick’s narrative
cinema can reach.
As fierce, poignant and relevant today as when it blazed onto screens almost thirty
years ago, Spike Lee’s provocative take on urban racial disharmony gave 1990 Academy
voters the perfect chance to reflect politicized innovation and energized diversity.
They blew it.
And that genteel throwback Driving Miss Daisy won that same year only added to the sense
of injustice.
The superhero movie as crime epic, Christopher Nolan’s ambitious and morally complex Batman
still stands as one of the great blockbusters, elevated by the late Heath Ledger’s definitive
Joker.
That The Dark Knight missed out on a Best Picture nomination is largely held responsible
from the shift from five, to five-to-ten nominees; some legacy for a mere comic-book character.
Long overdue changes to Academy membership is finally – gradually - starting to widen
gender and racial opportunities.
One social sector that Oscar still seems to struggle with, is the underclass,
those forgotten by society and Hollywood movies.
Sean Baker’s terrific study of those balancing on the poverty line in the shadow of Disney
aspiration deserved much more, a sad parallel to the neglected lives it portrays with such
honest vivacity and dignity.
It’s no right-on #BlackLivesMatter pose to anoint Spike Lee’s best joint.
Do the Right Thing has proven to be a modern American classic – exactly the type of cinematic
art the Academy should celebrate – and use to fight the oppressive power structures that be.