The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
The Apartment. The withering away of the Production Code made possible this Billy Wilder film about a man who lends his apartment to executives in his company for extramarital affairs. At the time, honoring it must have seemed like a sharp riposte to the Code enforcers, but despite Wilder's bright dialogue and the superb performances of Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray, the years have not been kind to the movie: the shaky construction of the drama and the failures of tone and lapses of taste (viz., MacLaine's suicide attempt) show through.
... when it should have gone to ...
One of the things the Academy is tasked with in choosing a best picture of the year is not only honoring artistic achievement, but also indicating which films are most likely to become deeply rooted in our culture, their images forming part of our iconography, their dialogue contributing to our store of (at best) wisdom and (at the least) catchphrases. Only a handful of the real best picture winners -- among them Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, the Godfathers -- truly qualify on this latter count. So we shouldn't be surprised that the Academy failed to recognize how profoundly Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho would enter the collective unconsciousness, to the extent that it is still influencing movies half a century later. And we shouldn't be surprised that a lot of critics, and probably most of the Academy voters, at the time dismissed it as a sordid, tawdry little shocker, cheaply made (by a crew that also worked on Hitchcock's TV series). But we should wonder why film editor George Tomasini was denied a nomination, when today the film is studied by editing classes everywhere, or that the music nominees don't include Bernard Herrmann, whose yelping violins in the shower scene have been endlessly imitated. (Only John Williams's motif for the shark in Jaws is as instantly evocative.) And what about Anthony Perkins, whose Norman Bates so memorably fuses sweetness and creepiness?
And the Oscar went to ...
The Apartment. The withering away of the Production Code made possible this Billy Wilder film about a man who lends his apartment to executives in his company for extramarital affairs. At the time, honoring it must have seemed like a sharp riposte to the Code enforcers, but despite Wilder's bright dialogue and the superb performances of Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine, and Fred MacMurray, the years have not been kind to the movie: the shaky construction of the drama and the failures of tone and lapses of taste (viz., MacLaine's suicide attempt) show through.
... when it should have gone to ...
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| Psycho |
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