My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
The crop of actresses was so bad in 1970, Ali MacGraw got an Oscar nomination for Love Story — and you can't even say for sure that somebody better got snubbed as a result. Probably the worst year for actresses ever.
A little surprised you didn't include the M*A*S*H screenplay in the final list.
ReplyDeleteBut a lot surprised, since unlike me you don't feel the need to follow the Oscar's guidelines in categories, that you didn't put Gene Hackman in lead since he's so clearly the lead in the film.
And yeah, a terrible year for Actress. Glenda Jackson wins it by a mile.
On a more personal note, I'm currently cancer free after my operation though I will have one round of chemo in the next couple of weeks to reduce the chances of reoccurrence from about 20% to about 1%.
Erik -- that is great news about the cancer! Admittedly, chemo is a drag but dropping 20% to 1% is well worth it.
ReplyDeleteBy the way, one of my chemo coping tips -- these you can stream TCM over your mobile device of choice (my wife's phone, in my case). I would put in an earbud, and sleep through something I know pretty well (The Philadelphia Story, His Girl Friday, some Marx Brothers), waking up occasionally ...
Helped pass the time.
I finished my chemo/radiation treatments last week, now I'm resting for six weeks or so, and then it's on to surgery. Going to be a real swinger of an operation, but they promise me I should be playing the piano again by June.
Which is strange since i couldn't play the piano before ...
I wonder who first told that joke? Probably some ham on the vaudeville stage ...
Best of luck in the coming weeks! Let me know how it turns out.
what - no special Oscar for Pete Townshend? He deserves one for smashing Abbie Hoffman in the back of the head with his guitar at Woodstock. Ole Abbie picked the wrong time and the wrong band to interrupt to make a political speech.
ReplyDeleteIf not an Oscar, some sort of humanitarian award from the U.N. - at the very least.
Pete Townshend's finest hour!
ReplyDeleteHmmmm.
ReplyDeleteI bet you could have predicted many of my choices.
Now: how dare you exclude from your final grabbag of alternate Oscar choices the FINEST MOVIE THEME SONG IN THE HISTORY OF MOVIE THEME SONGS ??!?!?
To wit:
https://youtu.be/kgeIINs1TrQ
And to Mr. Beck: Ring Lardner Jr. is often quoted [ to paraphrase]: I'm very proud of my script for M*A*S*H*; too bad none of it was in the movie,, and revisionists talk of Altman dropping most of the dialogue, and adopting an improvisational style, a huge portion of the dialogue in the film (excluding the jeep-stealing and some of the football scene) comes straight from Hooker's novel. Having read the novel many times, and the Lardner script many times, I'd say that Altman landed right where he should have landed.
ReplyDeleteHis subsequent comments that the novel was awful and racist confound me: awful can be chalked up to taste (query: if it was so awful, how did so much of it make the screen?), but racist is hard to understand, since Hooker took on the racism directly.
In retrospect, Altman may have just been responding to a scene from the novel where Spearchucker explains to Hawkeye why he doesn't hang out with some of the negroes stationed at the unit. Altman certainly took great pride in all he [supposedly] did to make a "brilliant" movie from an "awful" novel that reads like -- the movie.
I could go on for hours. And have many thankful that I'm not. . . .
PS to mister beck, I'm pleased to read of your condition/results. mister monkey, this is a good roadmap. Have at it
my first paragraph somehow omits important words. but since I'm the only reader, I'll assume that i know what I was writing. . . .
ReplyDelete