Tonight, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, better known as “those guys who hand out Oscars,” celebrates the movies of the previous year for the 88th time and, also for the 88th time, most people will complain that they got it all wrong. In fact, most people started complaining about this year’s awards weeks before we even got to the ceremony. And let me be perfectly honest, I’m one of those people. I complain about how lousy Oscar’s choices have been far more than I have ever given Oscar credit for getting it right. Another annoying pastime is how almost all of the complaining focuses on the major awards (Best Picture, the Best Acting categories, and Best Director), as if nothing else gets handed out. And so, today, in the spirit of the season, the Oscar season that is, let me count the times that I felt Oscar could not have gotten it more right and stick only to the non-major categories. No acting, no directing, no Best Pictures. And a warning: I’m listing only a smattering of favorites. This is not intended to be, by any means, a complete list. What I leave off, please, add on in the comments.
Let’s begin at the very first ceremony ever to get things rolling. In that ceremony the cinematography award went to Charles Rosher and Karl Struss for Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans and I can’t imagine another movie in that year, and in most any other year period, doing a better job. The film is a personal favorite (and I’ve written a slew of articles on it for TCM) and the visuals are simply magnificent. Not magnificent in a “wow, look at those vistas” kind of way. Magnificent in how Rosher and Struss, with guidance of course from director F.W. Murnau, use different framings for city and country and for Janet Gaynor and Margaret Livingston. How they light the love scenes, the deathbed scene, and the scene of the woman from the city seducing the malleable George O’Brien in the marsh. Hell, they do an extraordinary job keeping the action tight in a scene of an escaped, drunken piglet. It’s expert work all around and one of the most deserved Oscars ever.
Best Art Direction, Stephen Goosson for Lost Horizon. Not just one of my favorite movies of all time, perhaps my favorite sets of all time period. I am in awe of the stunning art deco design of Shangri-La. Does it make sense that a community living in a strangely weather-protected zone in the Himalyayas for hundreds of years should have happened upon art deco long before anyone else? No, not at all. Do I care? Check the answer to the first question. It’s an incredible set and add to that the amazing set decoration of each space as well as the incredible design of the snowy mountain pass that the plane lays to rest in and you’ve got one of the most deserving art direction winners ever.
Best Song, The Wizard of Oz, 1939. Well, for my money, the most perfect moment in the history of that award was when they handed over the Oscar to Harold Arlen and E.Y. Harburg for 1939’s winner, Over the Rainbow from The Wizard of Oz. It doesn’t get any better than that.
Best Documentary Short, Glas, 1958. This short doc about the glass making industry in the Netherlands was directed by Bert Haanstra and mixes jazz and early electronic music with scenes of glass making. You can watch the whole thing here. There’s a line on its Wikipedia page that says this: “It is often acclaimed to be the perfect short documentary,” followed by “citation needed.” Okay, here’s your citation, Wikipedia, courtesy of Greg Ferrara, writer for Turner Classic Movies and its blog, Movie Morlocks: Glas is the perfect short documentary. Done. *
Best Visual Effects, 2001: A Space Odyssey, 1968. Let’s face it, there was a way outer space looked in movies before 2001 and a way it looked after 2001. As much as I love sci-fi from the fifties, movies like my favorite of that period, Forbidden Planet, never looked anything like this. The earth looks weirdly white and overly cloudy to our eyes now, yes, but it still looks like an actual planet in space unlike anything that came before. The ways the astronauts move about their space station, done with a massive rotating set, or enter into the airlock, soundless and bouncing around as if actually in outer space, are still amazing to watch because none of it comes off as obviously fake. It was an incredible visual achievement and richly deserved the Oscar.
Best Film Editing, Jaws, 1975. There’s a scene in Jaws, the Alex Kinter shark attack scene, that was broken down in an old film textbook I have, Analyzing Films, where the author details everything Verna Fields did to make it so memorable. Not only the length of the shots, from a full 30 seconds down to the shortest shot possible on film, a single frame, but also the placement of the shots, and how she uses a mixture of long shots building to short, quick ones to twice build up a false sense of security before leading into a long shot of the Kintner raft being overturned, leading to the Vertigo zoom effect Spielberg employed for his reaction shot of Brody. The book spends three pages detailing the editing in this scene alone and the genius of Verna Fields. It won the Oscar and to this day, I think Jaws is one of the best edited movies in existence.
Best Musical Score, Star Wars, 1977. John Williams gets a lot of smug derision from a lot of people for the bombast and obviousness of his scores. Obvious as in they strike exactly the chord you would expect them to every time they need to blatantly underline the emotions of a scene. Well, I don’t know about that, but I do know that the music composed for Star Wars is one of the most perfectly fitted scores to material I’ve ever come across. Even with all the innovation in visual effects, I don’t know if the movie would have been as successful without that score. It did indeed underline every moment perfectly and in an action adventure like Star Wars, that’s not only perfectly acceptable, it’s expected and commendable.
And, surely, there are many more. We not only focus on the top awards almost exclusively, we spend too much time talking about where they went wrong. And they do go wrong, often. We shouldn’t be surprised. It’s a group of industry insiders patting themselves on the back. Of course they’re going to get it wrong a lot of the time because a lot of the time they’re simply voting for what makes the industry look good to itself. But every now and then, they get it right. It may not happen a lot but it’s enough to keep me hoping that every now and then, there will be a truly deserving winner. Maybe two.
*someone please contact Wikipedia and let them know the citation they are looking for has arrived.