The fate of 1917 at the oscars and how it was inevitable

I never pay much attention to the awards shows, all I have seen from this years awards was a short segment on TV of a singer saying she was proud to be a black queer female .. or something?.. and Natalie Portman's dress.. I don't know or care. Its depressing and more importantly, boring.

Perhaps if Natalie Portman had the names of movies directed by woman she thought deserved to be nominated, I might not think she was a total idiot.

Oh and Laura Dern saying is she could giver her Oscar to a female director.. (of Little Woman) she would..

I knew a British historical film would not do well, it was just a feeling, even having not seen the movie and when it was in the production stages.

__________________
Do you know what a roller pigeon is, Barney? They climb high and fast, then roll over and fall just as fast toward the earth. There are shallow rollers and deep rollers. You can’t breed two deep rollers, or their young will roll all the way down, hit, and die. Officer Starling is a deep roller, Barney. We should hope one of her parents was not.

^I think that was the exact reason she had those names on the dress in the first place, dude.

.

Raiders and Jurassic Park were attempts to recover from the prominent failures of 1941 and Hook respectively (plus Jurassic Park came after he made multiple attempts to do prestige films anyway). Besides, I think if you take Mendes' other films into account then you can spot enough aspects to distinguish his entries into the Bond franchise, whether it's tangible ones like bringing in Roger Deakins to lend Skyfall an extremely distinctive look or by having both films touch upon themes of family and one's definition of oneself in relation to that that are present throughout every other film he's ever done. In any case, I would argue that Nolan's Batman trilogy is separate from the rest of his filmography because he doesn't do nearly as much dicking around with flashbacks or intersecting timelines or anything of a particularly temporal nature so I might actually question whether or not he did both The Prestige and The Dark Knight if I didn't already know he did both.

Guess it depends on what you consider impressive directing and I could argue that the narrative surrounding The Revenant was more to do with it being the movie that would finally win Leo the Oscar (but I guess spending a year in the snow is also supposed to be that kind of impressively Hard directing that the Academy apparently loves to reward), but it really does just read like they were still high off Birdman.

Which is why I thought Gravity was the better point of reference for 1917 than Birdman because it also involves technically impressive long takes but doesn't feel quite so committed to the (ultimately immersion-breaking) one-take illusion (and like I said, Gravity sticks to its protagonist the whole way through while Birdman veers between characters quite a bit). That and 1917 also transitions from daytime to nighttime via a single conventional cut to black so it's also not overly committed to the one-take approach either. In any case, I'd still contend that there's more to being an auteur than just having a tangible sense of style - you've got to have the substance to back it up (which even an overly stylish director like Tarantino manages to provide more often than not).

It's a Best Picture winner. Backlash usually comes with the territory (when was the last unanimously beloved Best Picture winner anyway?)

As for Little Women, that's an awful lot of conjecture. Blaming some nebulous scapegoat of "bloggers and journalist [sic] and awards websites" for forcing a narrative by doing....what exactly? Saying they liked the movie and thought it was awards-worthy? Then following that up by saying that every other nominee deserved it because "enough people loved them", even when it comes to something as notoriously divisive as Joker or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, but without specifying how much is "enough" in this scenario - never mind the possibility that people might actually like some of the other nominees as much as they liked Little Women anyway. It's one thing to personally dislike the movie, but to act like other people liking it is some kind of conspiracy that couldn't possibly apply to a movie you like doesn't help your case. In fact, I actually like most of those movies I mentioned earlier (at least ...Hollywood and Irishman, anyway) and was only speaking hypothetically in order to prove a larger point about the problem with being overly concerned about what did or didn't count as "forced".

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

__________________
Iro's Top 100 Movies v3.0

I didn't see her speech or the Oscars, so I don't know if there was more to it than that. But if that's all she said then it's disrespectful to the people who supported & voted for her in the first place. I mean it sounds like she's saying, thanks for the Oscar but I don't care, I like to give it away. She could've sung the praises of the Little Women director without belittling the honor that was bestowed on her.

Now I'm trying to remember which one of Bong Joon-ho's Oscar speeches involved him saying that he should "Texas Chain Saw" the Oscar and share the pieces with the other nominees. That I would've liked to see.

I would say Schindler's List is one of the very few, universally agreed upon Best Picture winners in Oscar history. Both at the time and in retrospect it's difficult to imagine many legit arguments against its winning. Not just given its direct competition on the ballot of The Piano, In the Name of the Father, Remains of the Day, and The Fugitive but of anything else released that year. I can't even imagine any of the nominated movies or winners in the year before or after it (the winners being Unforgiven and Forrest Gump) getting more Best Picture votes. It's pretty much the perfect Best Picture, being critically acclaimed, a serious subject, and a blockbuster.

The Godfather might be the only other film I would deem perfect in Best Picture terms with Gone with the Wind and Lawrence of Arabia maybe a fraction of a tier down. Pretty much everything else either hasn't aged well, did not receive universal acclaim, didn't make obscene amounts of money, in retrospect did not face some great movies that should have been on its ballot that year, or if it were released in a different year would not be as bullet proof.

The overwhelming majority of the time the winner is only a benchmark for eternal debate. The choice between Parasite and 1917 is no different.

And this is inevitable. Movies the caliber and circumstance of Schindler's List, The Godfather, Lawrence of Arabia, and Gone with the Wind are extremely rare.

__________________
"Film is a disease. When it infects your bloodstream it takes over as the number one hormone. It bosses the enzymes, directs the pineal gland, plays Iago to your psyche. As with heroin, the antidote to Film is more Film." - Frank Capra

I like that, it's both creative & thoughtful and shows him to be a good sport.

In the hindsight it will appear like that. They bought the movie rights to the book even before the book came out.
I made the same mistake of thinking pirates of carribean/titanic being safe bets because one is based on a popular theme rides and the other is about the most popular ship ever. But thats not always the case. Sam Neil/jeff goldblum or anyone in jurassic park for that matter is not a movie star. 1990s was a time in film industry where everyone thought only movie stars can make movies hits. Even when making titanic they wanted tom cruise. And that is two years after jurassic park. So at the time of jurassic park when the visual effects were not exactly sure they could pull it off. It was risk. Moreover, for the most part you dont even see dinosaurs and most of jurassic park is pretty scientific unlike independence day. All those were pretty risky. Even terminator was less about time travel and metals and more about just an action chase.

"people" you are referring to is a very small insignificant percentage. They dont matter. In general, foreign movie demand has a ceiling. Even now, if you make a straight up american movie with asian leads, it will struggle at box office(not based on popular books or disney properties). So thats not gonna change. Foreign movie aesthetics are different and that will not change. As for the 10-100k people on twitter that obsessively follow film news and awards season, everything has changed but in real world its not gonna change drastically.

Maybe so - I know I'm struggling to come up with a good alternative for 1993. Still feel like I need to revisit Schindler's List to verify certain criticisms about how it soft-pedals the Holocaust by framing it as the story of a Gentile war profiteer having a change of heart (to paraphrase Kubrick, making a success story about humanity's greatest failure). The same goes for Gone with the Wind to see just how much it does or does not venerate the antebellum South.

Wouldn't contest Godfather or Lawrence of Arabia, though.

Schindler's List is not my favorite film of 1993, I have issues with it. But as a Best Picture winner I can't fault the Academy for their inevitable and really invincible choice. There are very, very, very few Best Pictures one can say that about.

I would say Schindler's List is a perfect movie and in my top movies of all time for sure. I guess if I had one nitpick, I feel that maybe Amon Goeth, may not have been a necessary character, and just have the antagonist be the Nazi army in general rather than one lead villain. But the rest is perfect.

Also before on here, when I posted my top ten movies of all time, two of them on there were best picture winners. If I decide to add Schindler's List to it, that would be three. So I guess that means I agree with some of the best picture winners over the decades for sure.

Little Women is a fine film. Gerwig does a great job with the story, chopping what's not important and keeping what's good. Chamalet's character is bit flat and one note compared to the book, that's okay I guess. It's miles ahead of Once upon a time for me. If I wanted a 60s Hollywood experience, I can always have a costume party. If you read the book, it's becomes a little bit better experience. This is one of the few book adaptations I can say this about. Even Godfather falls a few notches after reading the book.


Not sure what was forced about it. It definitely deserved the Oscar nod. And if you don't like it, don't watch it. There is nothing forceful here.


Do I sense a little misogyny in criticizing the movie?

__________________
My Favorite Films

Could it be that the poster meant that maybe Little Women was forced cause it's been adapted a few times before, with the last one being in the 90s, not too long ago so maybe it feels kind of old to remake it again, kind of like say remaking Pride or Prejudice or A Christmas Carol again?

As a British film at a very American ceremony, it was never going to do as well as it should have.


(I'm aware of the poor timing of this given which film beat it for Best Picture, but that's a story for another time.)

No, I sense a little political correctness female empowerment quota going on.

Like I said before...

Anyway...

I read The Godfather first and the movie only made the book's flaws stand out more (most obviously the multiple ways in how it would end one chapter with the sudden reveal of one character's death to another and then spend the whole of the next chapter recounting the events leading up to said death, whereas the movie just played everything in chronological order and let the shocks happen to the audience first). That's without mentioning the various extraneous sub-plots.

I doubt it.

Naaa... If you are looking at PC stuff, this is not it. It perfectly deserves the nomination.

Those sub-plots are the things that made the book better for me. I can understand putting all of them in would have made the movie 6 hours long maybe, so in a movie if they get dropped it's understandable. But for me, it painted a more vivid picture. If I recall correctly, one of the brothers life was just brushed aside in the movie, isn't it?

Depends which brother. If it's Fredo, I'm pretty sure that was true in both versions of the story. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure the movie also have the requisite amount of time to both Michael and Sonny. I think the problem is more that the sub-plots don't really reconnect to the main plot in any meaningful way (most obviously in the case of Lucy Mancini, but the same is arguably true of Johnny Fontane). I won't argue that the book is able to flesh out various characters in ways that are hard to accomplish even in a 3-hour movie (like going into detail about Al Neri's ex-cop background) but I didn't necessarily consider the film to be inferior for not being able to include that.

Yeah probably Fredo. I just remembered the F, not the full name. The film isn't inferior. It's still one of the best book adaptations out there. But I guess that is the life of a mob boss. There so many things going on around them, nothing much to add to the boss's life other than just to display his power. For me it made the book more bustling with events and characters which makes it a fine read. Puzo worked on the story with Coppola if I remember it right, so every chop they made was with his approval I would believe.

The only movie I can say that the subplots are main driving force is Shawshank Redemption. It's endless meandering into different character's background is what makes the movie so strong.

She said it when speaking to journalists after the show, there was no more to it, she said it like it was something amusing, all I could thing was dear lord be grateful you have an Oscar Laura Dern.