In Contention

Tag: A Clockwork Orange

  • THE LISTS: Top 10 Oscar nominee fields

    Ralph Fiennes in Schindler's ListIn exactly one week’s time, we’ll have a brand new list of Oscar nominations to pore over, pick apart and eventually file away in our subconscious with the other 81 editions of this annual collective. For Oscar geeks, nomination day is in many ways more exciting than the ceremony itself, celebrating a broader spectrum of work and throwing up far more surprises along the way.

    For all that, once the winners are announced, the nomination list as a whole tends to be disregarded, returned to only by trivia buffs and the geekiest of Oscar geeks. (Guilty on both counts.) And that’s shame, because a field of five nominees can often be more illuminating viewed collectively than even the worthiest of individual champions.

    Today’s list, then, is devoted to that most elusive of Oscar holy grails: the perfect nominee field.

    Yes, more often than not, the Academy will nominate several notable achievements in a single category. But rarer than hen’s teeth are the robust Oscar categories that feature a full house of five outstanding nominees, five contenders that would all be worthy of a win in any other year. No unremarkable coaster nominees sliding in on the coattails of a popular picture. No bad films with an expensively studio-bought  nominations. No filler. No fat. Just five superb achievements.

    (more…)

  • ‘WALL-E’ faces Academy bias against…the future?

    WALL-E

    A best pic nomination for Wall-E would be a rare honor for animation in general, but it would also be a long over due rarity for another reason: Wall-E would only be the second best pic nominated film in the history of the Oscars to be set in the future. The only one to date is A Clockwork Orange. When you consider how many nominees are period pieces (I didn’t care to count), this represents a massive bias on the part of the Academy. It’s clear that they love the past, but they hate the future.

    So says Spout Blog writer Kevin Buist in a smartly realized item.  Buist goes on to note seven futuristic AMPAS snubs, but I’m still hung up on the statistic.  Really?  ONLY one?  How bizarre.  Considering “2001: A Space Odyssey” and “Metropolis” have permanent fixtures on my list of the 10 greatest films of all time, it’s just one more reason for me to be pissy at the Academy.

    Get with the program, people!  Not that I’m advocating for “WALL-E,” mind you.  But it is an intriguing stat.

  • Why does the Academy fear controversy?

    Jon Voight in Midnight CowboyIn 1969, the Academy saw fit to give “Midnight Cowboy” the award for Best Picture — a first ever for an X-rated film.  Some saw the moment as a bellwether signaling a new dawn for the group, that they were developing a growing acceptance for the films that would start coming at them around this time of creative invigoration in the cinema.  But was it really?

    I remember somewhere that a high-ranking Academy official stated that if “A Clockwork Orange” won the Oscar for Best Picture they would resign their membership! The film had already won top honors from the New York Film Critics Circle and was nominated for four Academy Awards, among them Best Picture and Best Director. A ground-breaking work, the best of Kubrick’s career, still looking futuristic 37 years later, the film is an obvious masterpiece.  But it frightened the Academy for whatever reason.

    A year later Bernardo Bertolucci’s “Last Tango in Paris” came along with a galvanizing performance from Marlon Brando and was certainly a better film than at least two of the pictures nomination int he top race, “The Sting” and “A Touch of Class,” yet as expected, the Academy backed away from the film, nominating only Brando and Bertolucci.

    What is it in the makeup of this esteemed organization of artists that makes them steer clear controversial films, films that push the envelope, that go further out on a limb than most in exploring dark and sometimes daring subject matter?

    (more…)

  • The 80s yielded one great Best Pic winner: ‘Platoon’

    Ten awards for Best Picture were handed out throughout the 1980s, one of the worst decades for film in history, and I’d wager that only “Platoon,” the Oscar winning giant of 1986, can lay claim to being a great film.

    Oh, that is not to say there were not great films made in the 80s; there were indeed, but nobody went to see them, despite rave reviews. Many of the decade’s very best films were released and abandoned, to be re-discovered on video, at that time a very new addition to the film industry.

    “Raging Bull” ended up being the finest film of the decade, hell one of the five greatest films of all time, yet Oscar did not see it that way. Somehow, Martin Scorsese’s masterpiece lost the Oscar for Best Picture and the New York Film Critics Circle award for Best Film to Robert Redford and “Ordinary People” — a well crafted film, but hardly the raw and angry work of the former.

    That same year would see the releases of “The Empire Strikes Back” — a superior film to the first “Star Wars” installment, yet snubbed for a nomination for Best Picture — and Richard Rush’s “The Stunt Man,” which might have been a strong choice for a nomination as well.

    (more…)