Top 10 Best Picture Oscar Flubs
- Thread starter Trek4Ever
- Start date
About "Zodiac"...wasn't it a bit of a flop at the box office? Its box office performance and the fact that it was released fairly early in the year are the main reasons I think it was shut out at the Oscars. It sounds silly, but release date really makes a difference.
Since the Oscars are usually in February or March, they tend to nominate movies released late in the previous years, which have had about two or three months to build up momentum from good buzz/box office success going into award season. "Zodiac" was released in March, which is too close to the actual ceremony.
Also, it didn't really have any standout performances to help it stick in the minds of Academy voters. Not that every potential best picture nominee has to have a potential best actress or best actor nominee in it, but history has shown that this certainly helps.
Since the Oscars are usually in February or March, they tend to nominate movies released late in the previous years, which have had about two or three months to build up momentum from good buzz/box office success going into award season. "Zodiac" was released in March, which is too close to the actual ceremony.
Also, it didn't really have any standout performances to help it stick in the minds of Academy voters. Not that every potential best picture nominee has to have a potential best actress or best actor nominee in it, but history has shown that this certainly helps.
Your probably right. However, I'm sick of "stand out performances" being the hallmark for whether its nominated. The performances in Zodiac were not theatrical or showy. They were more subtle and more real. Javier Bardem in NCFOM had a crazy hair cut, crazy voice, and memorable methods etc, but does that really make his character as interesting or as deep as the academy would have us believe? I tip my hat to Mark Ruffalo, who played Tosci as a real person not a caricature.
As for the timing, i don't know why it was released when it was. However, the Academy should, uh, remember films from the year it was released, unless they want to make the awards show honor the best films of the "winter season"
As for the timing, i don't know why it was released when it was. However, the Academy should, uh, remember films from the year it was released, unless they want to make the awards show honor the best films of the "winter season"
Last edited:
Yeah, it was pretty much a flop, barely making $20 profit worldwide, but most of the films nominated now don't even get wide releases until after the awards show. 
What Lucas had may not be to everyone's taste, but I think it's pretty hard to make a case that he had "nothing," for two films at least. American Graffiti and Star Wars are more cinematic "experiences" than filmed stories. AG aimed to give an immersive look at what it was like to be a young adult in California in 1962. Star Wars aimed to give the audience the experience of being put into a completely unknown but fully realized and believable alien universe, and combined that with old-fashioned action-adventure for an enjoyable ride. Both were born of Lucas's enjoyment of foreign art films as a student: The long shots and energetic editing of the French New Wave and the documentary style of Pontecorvo for "Graffiti," and for Star Wars the engagement of the disoriented audience exposed to a completely unexplained foreign setting, as Lucas had experienced seeing Japanese films for the first time.
Many of their merits were technical. Besides the cinema verite compositions and masterful editing, "Graffiti" was very innovative in sound. A continuing soundtrack of popular music was very new, and the device of having the music emanating from car radios was original and effective. Another effective departure from tradition was the lack of music and heightening of ambient sound during dramatic moments.
The plot may be a simple coming of age story, but the characters are believably human and developed in sure, telling moments. Toad's initial arrival and "dismount" from his Vespa gives a better summary of his character in seconds than pages of dialogue could. The semi-improvised, naturalistic dialogue was also new to wide-audience films. The humor is low-key, but it's definitely there. The movie can be called nostalgic, but it's never sentimental. It does not editorialize or judge the choices made by Steve and Curt, or Milner for that matter. It just presents it as the way things happened.
A lot of American Graffiti's success (I believe it still has the highest profit-for-cost ratio, adjusted for inflation, of any American movie) had to do with timing and the escapist desire to remember a time before the JFK assassination and Vietnam. But I think it was the film's fresh, non-traditional style that caught people's attention and allowed them to identify so strongly. And its style has been imitated so many times now that its original impact can be forgotten.
So, yes, American Graffiti is not a great film on the level of Casablanca or The Godfather. But it is an unpretentious, innovative, technically sophisticated and extremely finely crafted entertainment movie that was as justified as any to be a Best Picture nominee. And it's strong evidence that, at one time, George Lucas was a hell of a film maker.
--Justin
Was it alien? I saw it first in 1979 (for the re-release before ESB) and I distinctly remember thinking how familiar it all seemed. There were elements from Westerns, Arthurian Legend, WWII movies, California car culture, and comic books (Darth Vader = Doctor Doom). The stuff about the Force binding the cosmos together was familiar from environmentalism and all that New Age blather from the 70s.
And as a Trekkie, the sci fi elements were far from unfamiliar to me: FTL travel, doomsday machines that destroy whole planets, crazy looking aliens, intelligent robots, thrilling space battles, mind control, evil empires, guys with an unhealthy attachment to their spaceships, and starry-eyed adventurers who couldn't wait to leave Iowa/Tatooine and see the universe! I was a bit thrown by Leia being described as a "princess" until I remember vaguely hearing about old Flash Gordon episodes where space royalty were common.
It was only later that I found out about the elements imported from Japanese movies. But it wasn't at all obvious that Leia and the droids had Japanese roots, and Obi-Wan just seemed like a sci-fi version of Merlin or maybe Gandalf. All the characters were very American (less exotic than even the American characters in TOS, who were from some unbelievable advanced society without all the prejudices I was used to) except for Chewie, who was obviously Mexican (bandolier) and the bad guys (who had British accents to tell us they were bad guys - even James Earl Jones made a stab at a British accent, which was soooo cute).
The structure of the story was very familiar, the classic Hero's Journey. I didn't know about the mythic background to it, but I'm sure I recognized it, since I'd seen The Wizard of Oz and other stories that follow a similar structure: young green adventurer is whisked away to a magical place, where a mentor figure provides a totem of power; the hero is threatened by an evil figure in black and gains a motley collection of allies along the way. The point of the journey is that the hero learns to trust in his/her own abilities, that "you already have everything you need." This realization signifies maturity.
The only truly original elements were the lightsaber (I don't remember anyone thinking of a laser-sword before that point) and Princess Leia's cinnabuns - very original hairstyle!
Yeah, I enjoyed the hell out of it but was amazed over and over that someone had gotten a studio to pony up the money to do an old-fashioned science fiction story.
I think the audience that I saw it with - opening night in Washington, DC, midnight show - may have been largely composed of attendees at Disclave, an annual sf convention held at the nearby Sheraton. When Han announces that they're going to hyperspace, the theater became really still - as if people knew that this should be a spectacular moment, and maybe expected to be disappointed. And when the Falcon actually shot away into the center of all those streaking stars everybody jumped up, whooping and applauding.
The place also reeked of pot smoke.
I think the audience that I saw it with - opening night in Washington, DC, midnight show - may have been largely composed of attendees at Disclave, an annual sf convention held at the nearby Sheraton. When Han announces that they're going to hyperspace, the theater became really still - as if people knew that this should be a spectacular moment, and maybe expected to be disappointed. And when the Falcon actually shot away into the center of all those streaking stars everybody jumped up, whooping and applauding.
The place also reeked of pot smoke.
It was alien because it was in a galaxy far, far away! And those points are all valid, it was a concoction of familiar elements, and intentionally so: during production Lucas even showed the crew old movies that he wanted to emulate. But that was part of what was so novel and engaging. Those touches of ordinariness were what disarmed the audience and suspended disbelief. In previous science fiction films, the alien and futuristic was emphasized, in Star Wars it is de-emphasized to an extreme degree. There are so many fantastic elements in the background that are shot so matter-of-factly that you almost forget they're there. There's a giant dinosaur-like skeleton in the desert; most older SF movies would have centered it in the shot and emphasized it in every way possible. Lucas's camera barely frames it, like it's the most ordinary thing ever. A bug-headed robot walks by in the Death Star, the conventional SF movie would track it through the shot, "Look at that weird robot!" In Star Wars it's just treated like another extra.
A lot of other conventions of science fiction were disregarded or subverted. Instead of sleek and clean and futuristic, the art design often looks clunky, weathered and old. The locked-off camera in VFX shots, a strong subconscious clue that what you're seeing isn't real, was eliminated. And of course the music was a throwback to classic movie scores. It all created a powerful verisimilitude that was a big reason for the film's phenomenal popularity, IMO.
--Justin
Shakespeare in Love was a cute movie. Cute would have been enough to get it by with far less controversy in another year. It wouldn't be so resented had it beaten something like American Beauty or The English Patient. But for it to beat out Saving Private Ryan is a travesty! Both then & now, it was clear that Saving Private Ryan was an instant game-changer. It would be the movie that all war movies past & future would be compared to.
"Something like American Beauty"?! American Beauty is a great movie and one of the few deserving Oscar-winners in the last 20 years! To have it be beaten by a "cute" movie would have been a travesty!