1953 Alternate Oscars

My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔.

The tenth spot on the best picture list was a real logjam — Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, The War of the Worlds, Anthony Mann's Western classic The Naked Spur, Hondo, Pickup on South Street, Luis Buñuel's El, the sublime British comedy Genevieve, and a couple of movies I don't much like, The Band Wagon and The Big Heat. Of those, The Big Heat consistently ranks highest on everybody else's list, so I reluctantly went with that.

Don't say I never did anything for you.

My pick for best picture is Yasujiro Ozu's Tokyo Story. If you have or have had or will have aging parents or, for that matter, if you plan on being an aging parent at some point, I highly recommend you see this one. It's Ozu's best, in my opinion, and he's Japan's most highly-regarded director, even more so than Akira Kurosawa if you can believe that.

"Sooner or later," the late great Roger Ebert once wrote, "everyone who loves movies comes to Ozu. He is the quietest and gentlest of directors, the most humanistic, the most serene. But the emotions that flow through his films are strong and deep, because they reflect the things we care about the most: Parents and children, marriage or a life lived alone, illness and death, and taking care of one another."

Of the Hollywood movies, I'd probably go with From Here To Eternity. Yeah, sure, it's a thoroughly bowdlerized adaptation of the novel — what do you expect of a studio movie made under the strictures of the Production Code — but it still packs quite a punch and the scene of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr rolling around in the surf is one of the most iconic in movie history. Considering all the way it could have gone wrong, From Here To Eternity is something of a modern miracle.

The final choice is yours.