Awards presented April 13, 1964
The nominees were ...
... when they should have been ...
And the Oscar went to ...
Tom Jones. This loosey-goosey treatment of Henry Fielding's eighteenth-century novel showed how profitable it could be to break from the stateliness of movie costume dramas and infuse them with the grubbiness and energy of real life. But today it looks a little forced and frantic in spots, and producer-director Tony Richardson would later write that it was "incomplete and botched in much of its execution."
... when it should have gone to ...
For many of us this remains Federico Fellini's masterpiece, a hugely entertaining, baroque, provocative exploration of the director's own psyche, as his surrogate, Marcello Mastroianni, tries to come to terms with creative blockage. Art about art can sometimes become self-indulgent, but Fellini's wit and inventiveness, Mastroianni's superb performance, Gianni Di Venanzo's gorgeous cinematography, and Nino Rota's evocative score result in a classic. It was, of course, omitted from the list of best picture nominees, though it did win the foreign-language film Oscar, as well as an award for Piero Gherardi's costume design.
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