Awards presented April 4, 1960
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Ben-Hur. This great, gassy blockbuster with its undeniably exciting chariot race but also its sappy religiosity set a record for most Oscars (eleven) that has yet to be broken -- though it has been tied twice, by
Titanic and by
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
... when it should have gone to ...
The choice of an alternative to
Ben-Hur confronts us with an embarrassment of riches, though not among the nominated films, which included
Anatomy of a Murder,
The Diary of Anne Frank,
The Nun's Story, and
Room at the Top. Any one of those is preferable to the winner, but the real richness lies in the unnominated: François Truffaut's first Antoine Doinel film,
The 400 Blows; Ingmar Bergman's wry and touching
Wild Strawberries; and an Alfred Hitchcock film that we think is one of his greatest,
North by Northwest. But we finally settled on
Some Like It Hot, the sweetest-natured of writer-director Billy Wilder's usually acerbic comedies, with its endearing performance by Jack Lemmon, seen above setting up Joe E. Brown for one of the greatest final lines in all of movies; Tony Curtis's high-spirited mimicry of his idol, Cary Grant; and the breathtaking luminosity of Marilyn Monroe.
No comments:
Post a Comment