I was a movie nerd when growing up (we didn’t call it “cinema” back then). If a movie got a single Oscar nomination, even in costume design or sound, I had to see it somehow.
In college I took film courses of dubious academic merit just so I could get to watch the then hard-to-see (before VCRs) films of Bergman, Fellini, and Truffaut.
But the recent Oscar ceremony is the 33rd consecutive one I’ve missed. That makes the Academy Awards the second longest of my personal boycotts (the longest is any movie with “Hanoi” Jane Fonda in it, which, thankfully, there aren’t many of these days-some sins truly are unforgivable).
I’m fairly proud of this, since most of my other boycotts, including of red wine made by cheese-eating surrender monkeys, tend to last for only a few months of gradually dissipating pique.
The first hint in my youthful naivete that the Oscars might be of dubious value, if not outright pandering frauds, came when Sylvester Stallone’s dumb (and dumber with distance) Rocky beat out Taxi Driver and Network for best movie made in 1976, with that premonition then decisively confirmed just a few years later, when such classics as Apocalypse Now, Being There, Manhattan, and Raging Bull lost out to Kramer vs. Kramer (made in 1979) and Ordinary People (made in 1980), two Hallmark Channel-caliber melodramas that everyone has long since appropriately forgotten.
Hence my vow from way back then to never watch the Oscars again. But to further reinforce that oath, I’ve also come up with a list of the Academy’s five most embarrassing best-movie choices (apart from those already noted). These aren’t simply cases where I have a personal preference for certain losers over certain winners-as, for example, for The Graduate over In the Heat of the Night (1967), or for A Clockwork Orange over The French Connection (1971)-but where the Oscar was clearly given to a vastly inferior film at the expense of an undeniably great one in what could be considered gross derelictions of cultural duty.
How Green was My Valley in 1941, of course. What else could top the list of mistakes but a decidedly minor John Ford beating out the greatest movie of all time, Citizen Kane, one of a mere handful that gets better every time you see it, even after 15 and counting? Not to forget that 1941 also saw the release of The Maltese Falcon and The Lady Eve.
Gigi (1958) over the film that unseated Kane in the most recent Sight and Sound survey, Alfred Hitchcock’s Vertigo, which didn’t even get nominated that year. My hunch is that the Sight & Sound voters toppled Kane because they were simply bored and wished to provoke, andVertigo happened to be a handy alternative. I’m not sure that it’s even the best Hitchcock (the nod in that respect might go instead to Rear Window or North by Northwest), but Gigi? Really?
The most interesting and influential movie of the past two decades, Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction, losing to the inane Forrest Gump in 1994. So, too, did The Shawshank Redemption.
The completely forgettable (and hence now thoroughly forgotten) spectacle Around the World in 80 Days beating the greatest Western of them all, Ford’s The Searchers in 1956 (which wasn’t nominated for anything at all, a factoid which should be sufficient by itself to exclude the Oscars from polite company). So, for curiosity’s sake, when was the last time anyone (anyone at all?) put Aroundthe World in 80 Days on their Netflix queue?
The pointless The Greatest Show on Earth in 1952 over the consensus greatest musical of all time, Singin’ in the Rain (not even a best movie nomination), and High Noon. The 1950s were a very bad decade for the Oscars, but not for movies, which is precisely the point.
And then there are the lesser but still significant offenses: My Fair Lady over Dr. Strange-love and A Hard Day’s Night (the best musical of the past 50 years) in 1964; Marty (Ernie Borgnine is better remembered for McHale’s Navy) winning instead of Night of the Hunter or Rebel Without a Cause in 1955; and Oliver somehow topping 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968.
We could, of course, go on: The Great Ziegfeld (remember that one?) over Modern Times and Swing Time (1936); Laurence Olivier’s pedestrian Hamlet beating The Treasure of the Sierre Madre and Red River in 1948; and Richard Attenborough’s pompous Gandhi (almost as big a fraud as the Mahatma himself!) winning over Blade Runner (1982).
And yes, to be fair, the Academy has sometimes gotten it right, but usually where it would have been virtually impossible to do otherwise (Casablanca, The Godfather). There have even been a few years when you could have drummed up some sympathy for their having to choose-take a look at what came out in 1939, for instance.
But we still come back to the same questions: How many of the movies that have won the best picture Oscar are worth seeing a second time? Even a first?
This is, in the end, so much easier than boycotting Louis Jadot Beaujolais and Cuban cigars.
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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.
Editorial, Pages 11 on 03/24/2014