A great year for moving pictures. Charlie Chaplin, Fritz Lang and René Clair turned in the best work of their careers. James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson, Clark Gable, Boris Karloff, Bela Lugosi, Peter Lorre and Joan Blondell all went from bit players to stars. And Universal Studios launched its classic horror cycle with Frankenstein and Dracula ...
As promised, I'll be reposting my alternate Oscar polls every other day or so until we catch up to the present. But rather than drag you through the silent era — an era which even many film buffs don't know well — I'm starting with 1930 and moving forward from there. (You can always follow these links and vote for the Silent Oscars: 1888 to 1909; 1910s; 1920s)
Most of the races in 1930 are blowouts, but the best actor contest is nip-and-tuck between the Marx Brothers in Animal Crackers and that smoked Nazi ham, Emil Jannings. If you love the Marx Brothers, this is their only realistic shot at an alternate Oscar — they trail badly in 1933 and 1935.
As for Emil Jannings, he's running away with the 1928 alternate Oscar ...
I heard from an unimpeachable source that you've all been good little children this year. So as a last-minute gift from me to you, all the Monkey's alternate Oscar polls are up and running — that's 728 741 polls covering 130 132 years of movie history honoring more than two thousand motion picture features, shorts and fragments.
What value! What insanity! As I told Katie-Bar-The-Door this morning, it's like bragging you finally chopped down that oak tree with a butter knife. But it's my oak tree and my butter knife and you chop that which fate has given you to chop whether the chopping of it makes sense or not.
Or as Albert Camus put it, "One must imagine Sisyphus happy."
The polls are grouped by decade, starting in 1888 and running through 2017 2019. On New Year's Day, I'll begin reposting them one year at a time until you've had a crack at them all.
In the meantime (in case you just can't wait), you can follow these links to the decade of your choice and vote now. Seasons greetings and happy new year!
Rumor has it that Edmond O'Brien won best supporting actor because a trio of On the Waterfront actors — Lee J. Cobb, Karl Malden and Rod Steiger — split the vote. Given that O'Brien didn't do anything in The Barefoot Contessa but sweat, all I can say is, "Maybe."
No, that's not fair. Edmond O'Brien was actually very good in The Barefoot Contessa, and a lot of other things, too — D.O.A., Seven Days in May and The Wild Bunch, for example.
But the Monkey is all about having your cake and eating it too — I've combined Cobb, Malden and Steiger into a single nominee for your voting convenience. No excuses if they lose this time.
Me? I'm voting for Toshiro Mifune.
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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Same approach as before — vote for as many as ten movies for best picture, and up to five nominees in the other categories, I'll total the votes, and the top ten vote getters for best picture and the top five in the other categories will be the nominees for the 2017 alternate Oscars.
Oh, and remember, there are six categories, six polls ...
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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Sight & Sound came out this past week with its once-a-decade list of the greatest movies ever made.
As usual, it treats the ticket-buying public with ridicule rather than respect. Screw Star Wars and Marvel. And there's not much love for classical Hollywood filmmaking either — no Spielberg, no Hawks, no Capra, no Lubitsch.
Dr. Strangelove? Double Indemnity? The Marx Brothers? Not on the list.
The Adventures of Robin Hood? Pulp Fiction? The Grapes of Wrath? Nope.
A Hard Day's Night? Unforgiven? Uh-uh.
Not even Weekend at Bernie's 2!
Make of it what you will.
As for their choice of the best of all time, Jeanne Dielman, 23, quai du commerce, 1080 Bruxelles — a dull movie about a dull woman living on the raggedy edge of Dullsville — well, other than to note that it's 200 minutes of Delphine Seyrig peeling potatoes, I don't have much of anything to say about it.
But I do want to mention how much film fandom has changed in my lifetime. Back in the day, everything was word of mouth — no VHS, no DVDs, no streaming. No IMDB. Hell, no cable television! There were only two ways to see a movie: in the theater or on broadcast television. Sometimes you'd have to wait five years to see a movie and if for some reason you missed it, you waited five more.
And if some boozed-up jackanapes laid claim to a watching-paint-dry-snoozefest as the best movie of all-time, you had to take his word for it.
Now pretty much everybody in the industrialized world can dial up a movie like Jeanne Dielman (on the Criterion channel) and watch it at their convenience.
The old film canon is dead because you don't need one — watch everything yourself and draw your own conclusions.
Anyway, is Jeanne Dielman the greatest movie ever made? Let me put it this way — I'd rather spend three hours on line at the DMV. But if you want to vote it the best movie of 1975, here's your chance.
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. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. 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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