I got more complaints about my polls for 1963 than about any other year, so I rethought it from the ground up. This time I went with purely consensus nominees — looking up every alternate Oscar site I could find, noting everyone's choices, and with mathematical precision, coming up with 1963's nominees.
I really wanted to accommodate the Bergman fans and the Mifune fans and all of you who didn't think Tom Jones was two hours you'd never get back, but hey, I didn't invent math. If you don't like the results, blame the Mesopotamians!
By the way, my good friend Mister Muleboy and I were lucky enough to see Federico Fellini's masterpiece, 8½, in the big theater at the AFI-Silver the other day — a new 4K restoration. I'd seen it before, more than once, but never on the big screen, and Muleboy had never seen it at all.
What a great movie, about a famous director (played by Marcello Mastroianni) who can't get his latest film off the ground. The past, present and fantasies of the future play out in his mind in a visual tour de force as his wife, mistress, producer, priest and the press all push him to make a decision, any decision, before everything comes crashing down. It's funny and sad at the same time, and has been often imitated, but never equaled.
And then I stopped off at the library and picked up La Dolce Vita, Fellini's 1961 film, also starring Marcello Mastroianni, about seven wild nights in the seven hills of Rome. If you've never seen a Fellini movie, might I suggest you watch both films as a double feature, first La Dolce Vita, then 8½. Seen back-to-back, the films are the story of a man's journey from ambition to decadence to disillusionment and finally to a sort of hard-won wisdom.
It's also peak Fellini. Great stuff.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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