My votes for the five best action sequences in movie history would include (1) any of Buster Keaton's death-defying stunts in his Civil War classic, The General, but especially the train wreck scene, (2) the chariot race in the 1959 version of Ben-Hur, (3) the helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now, (4) the Omaha Beach sequence of Saving Private Ryan, and (5) every minute of Raiders of the Lost Ark, my pick for the best picture of 1981.
Feel free to weigh in with your choices in the comments section below.
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 ✱.
Okay, let's skip ahead six years to 1981. The polls from the intervening years probably aren't perfect, but they're good enough — or at least nobody complained about them at the time which is pretty much the same thing as far as I'm concerned.
In retrospect, I can see I was doing then out of necessity what I am doing now by design — relying on a consensus of other people's opinions to arrive at my list of alternate Oscar nominees. The truth is, while a post appeared every Sunday morning in 2019 like clockwork, I went weeks at a time without writing a word. I was, instead, heading to the hospital every morning before dawn, gobbling Compazine and Zofran like tic-tac's, and otherwise napping all day just so I could brush my teeth and go to bed at 7. That's something they never tell you about cancer: it's exhausting.
But I digress.
Anyway, in my heated rush to knock out ten or twelve weeks worth of blog entries during a lull in treatments, I was forced, like Blanche DuBois, to rely on the kindness of strangers. And overall, I like the results.
The danger, though, of a purely consensus methodology is you can fall into the same simple-minded habits the Academy does and wind up with the same nominees, year-in and year-out, whether they've really done anything special or not. Meryl Streep has, like, eleventy-thrillion Oscar nominations — she could puke up a roll of film after a night of heavy drinking and the Academy would give her an award for it — while some of Hollywood's greatest actresses never got nominated at all (paging Myrna Loy). So I have to be on guard for that, separating out the good stuff from the "dingoes ate mah baby!" kind of autopilot noms.
There's not much point in doing this if you don't occasionally think outside the box ...
That said, 1981 actually went pretty well as far as the voting goes, but 1981 was also the first time I paid attention to the Oscars and I wanted to tweak it a bit.
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 ✱.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ.
Would Henry Fonda have won the Oscar for On Golden Pond if he had already won as he should have for The Grapes of Wrath? Well, maybe. I think Hollywood liked the idea of him and his daughter Jane reconciling at last, if only on the big screen — which, come to think of it, is the only place that counts. It didn't hurt that he was dying.
As for Katharine Hepburn, this was her fourth Oscar, and like the one for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, it was her co-star who did all the heavy lifting. I've already given her three alternate Oscars, and so have you (per current vote tallies). That's plenty. Let's give somebody else a chance.
I gave the award for best actor in a comedy to both Wallace Shawn and Andre Gregory for their work in My Dinner with Andre. I've given collective awards to obvious comedy teams before—the Marx Brothers, the Three Stooges, Hope & Crosby, Abbott & Costello, Monty Python—but never to two guys who happened to be in a movie together.
Still, it makes sense to me, if not to you. Aside from a waiter, Shawn and Gregory are the only two guys in the film, and the movie only works if they're both on their game, in this case, one talking and one listening. I mean, you wouldn't give the Grammy for best songwriter to Lennon or McCartney, you'd give it to Lennon and McCartney. (Actually, the senile old goats at the Grammys would give it to Englebert Humperdinck, but that's beside the point.) (You know, somebody ought to do an "alternate Grammys" blog, handing out annual awards for best male/female/group performers, best album and best song. Maybe somebody already does.)
Anyway, my blog, my rules. The point is to say something about the history of movies rather than hand out awards strictly according to Hoyle.
PICTURE (Drama) winner:Reds (prod. Warren Beatty)
PICTURE (Comedy/Musical) winner:Raiders of the Lost Ark (prod. Frank Marshall)
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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