Word: oscared
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Citizen Kane is the definitive litmus test, and Oscar failed it. At the top of nearly every critics' poll as the best film of all time, Orson Welles' debut movie was praised to the skies when it opened in 1941. But the resemblance of Charles Foster Kane to publisher William Randolph Hearst cued a campaign to suppress the movie, and Kane flopped in its initial release. In addition, many in the industry rankled at Welles' boy-genius rep and may have resented the freedom this first-timer was given by his studio, RKO. Under these circumstances, it's probably...
...Kane quandary illustrates some of the problems with the Academy Awards: political pressure, suspicion of outsiders, resistance to innovation. But the main and abiding limitation is the people who pick the Oscars. We're not saying that the Academy members are ignorant, that they don't know their business. That's the problem: they all know that movies are a business. And they're a part of it. The people whose names are on the ballot may be their friends or their enemies or their potential employers. In addition, lobbying in Hollywood at Oscar time is as pervasive...
...voters live or work in the Los Angeles area, there is little motive to reward foreign-language films. Few movie lovers would deny that some of the medium's greatest works have been in tongues other than English. Yet no foreign-language film has ever won the top Oscar; only eight have been nominated--and one of them was directed by Clint Eastwood. That's less than 2% for the best films from the rest of the world...
...members of the Academy, they are usually much older than the people they are making their movies for. The advanced average age of the voters--and the gradual conservatizing of their tastes--is one explanation for the films they give prizes to. They not only wouldn't give an Oscar to, say, a Judd Apatow film but probably haven't seen...
...Apatow movie like The 40 Year-Old Virgin or Knocked Up would labor under another handicap: it's designed to make people laugh. The top Oscar has gone to a handful of comedies (including It Happened One Night and Annie Hall), but generally the Academy prefers to be edified. The year of Citizen Kane, 1941, was also the year of Preston Sturges' The Lady Eve, today regarded as one of the great American comedies, with Stanwyck and Henry Fonda brilliant as a cardsharp predator and her millionaire prey. None of them got even a nomination for this supreme farce...