Awards presented April 9, 1962
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
West Side Story. The thing about the classic movie musicals, from the Maurice Chevalier-Jeanette MacDonald Ruritanian romances, to the Busby Berkeley extravaganzas, to the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers partnership, to the triumphs of the MGM Freed unit that starred Judy Garland, Astaire, and Gene Kelly, was that they were supremely conscious of their artificiality, of the escapism of the Big White Sets and the overhead camerawork.
West Side Story is a theatrical classic, but when the Jets and Sharks start dancing on real New York streets in the Robert Wise-Jerome Robbins film, they look like chorus boys warming up outside the theater. Ineffective realism is not the only weakness of this much-loved film: the dubbed leads, Richard Beymer and Natalie Wood, are, respectively, bland and miscast. Some of the Stephen Sondheim lyrics have been bowdlerized. On the other hand, "America," restaged from an all-female number to a debate between the Sharks and their girls, with additional lyrics that give the song more bite, is terrific. If the whole film had been rethought as effectively as that one song, it would have been an unquestioned success.
... when it should have gone to ...
An entire best picture nomination slate could have been made up this year from foreign-language films alone: The Academy could have chosen its five from among
L'Avventura,
Ballad of a Soldier,
The Big Deal on Madonna Street,
Breathless,
Rocco and His Brothers,
Two Women, and
Yojimbo, to name a few. It was the peak of the influence of foreign film, with directors like Jean-Luc Godard, Michelangelo Antonioni, Ingmar Bergman, Vittorio De Sica, and Akira Kurosawa reshaping both the content and the form of motion pictures. If Federico Fellini's film deserves to stand out from all those others, it was that it was the biggest box-office success. His exploration of the spiritual malaise afflicting the Roman upper classes naturally had a titillation factor that drew in even people who usually balked at reading subtitles, especially after the image of Anita Ekberg splashing in the Trevi Fountain became widespread. It's not an entirely successful film: The extraordinary vividness of its images tends to negate its message about spiritual emptiness. In this regard, Antonioni's
L'Avventura is a superior film. But
La Dolce Vita taught a generation about the potential of film, made Marcello Mastroianni a star, and established Fellini as an auteur whose career was to be watched. Although it didn't make the best picture slate, it received an Oscar for costume design, and nominations for director, screenplay, and art direction.
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