1956 Alternate Oscars

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

For best picture of 1956, the Academy chose Around the World in 80 Days, generally regarded as one of the worst picks for best picture ever. I saw it again yesterday for the first time since I was a kid and I can report that Around the World earned its reputation.

If you haven't seen it or read the book (by Jules Verne), Around the World is an adventure yarn about Phileas Fogg and his bet that he can circumnavigate the globe in, yes, eighty days — a rather rash bet in 1872. David Niven is typically pompous and peevish as Fogg, while Cantinflas, a superstar in his native Mexico, steals the show as Fogg's Chaplinesque man Friday.

Watching it again for the first time in more than forty years, I can see that the movie doesn't really work. For a story about a man racing around the globe, there's very little forward momentum, and the star cameos, for which the film is famous, are largely pointless and painfully unfunny. Whether you'll find the movie charming depends on your nostalgia for a time when the world was a big place and the only chance most people had to see any of it was in the travelogues that screened before the main attraction — sort of like seeing the world via Epcot in Walt Disney World.

Not terrible, just terribly dull. Certainly not the best picture of this or any other year.

On to other matters: I've finally given Douglas Sirk an overdue nomination for best direction. Sirk was a master of lurid, overripe melodrama that constantly called attention to its own phony artifice. Depending on how self-aware you think he was, Sirk was either a genius or one step removed from Ed Wood. I'm going with genius, but you decide.

Anthony Quinn won his second supporting Oscar for eight minutes worth of work in Lust for Life. I've bypassed him in favor of other veteran character actors who I think deserve some recognition for a lot more heavy lifting. My apologies to Anthony Quinn's friends and family.

Finally, there's no consensus at all as to who the year's best actress was — it was a pretty weak year — so I asked myself "Who gave the best performance of her career in 1956?" The answer was "Carroll Baker." Granted, that may be because it was the only good performance of her career (I haven't seen 1961's Something Wild). No matter. It was also the dirtiest, most perverse performance of the studio era, and that's good enough for me.