This is one of those rare years where I didn't nominate the actual best picture winner (Around the World in 80 Days) for an alternate Oscar. This is what I wrote about it back in October 2018:
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.
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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