Word: oscars
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...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...
...actor could encapsulate the limitations of the Oscar mind-set, it would be Stanwyck, who in the early '30s all but created the movies' image of the tough broad, surviving and thriving in the Depression through a wily, earthy cynicism. Stanwyck was sensational in grimy melodramas, from Illicit and Night Nurse to the immoral, immortal Baby Face. But she didn't get an Oscar nomination until 1938, when she broke from her normal screen character to play the nobly sacrificing mother in Stella Dallas. Seven years later, when she was a finalist as the rotten femme fatale of Double Indemnity...
Time and again, given the choice between an actor who does great work as a meanie and another who does good work as a cutie or victim, Oscar went for the latter. Marlon Brando's Stanley Kowalski in the 1951 A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the major revolutionary performances in movies; it announced the arrival of the Method actor and the sexy brute in one galvanizing package. Yet Brando lost to Humphrey Bogart in The African Queen. The Academy went for old style over new, as it did in withholding Oscars from Brando's more sensitive brethren, Montgomery...