Word: oscars
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...five films have their charms, or their poignancy, or their political message, or their steely fury--elements Oscar has often rewarded. None would shame the Academy by winning. No Country for Old Men has earned a ton of early awards, so it must be considered the favorite. It's marvelously assured, wonderfully gripping and acted to the hilt. It would be among the worthiest winners of the Best Picture award in the 80 years of Oscar...
...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...
...least Clift, Dean and Ledger had the luck to be making serious dramas from Oscar-winning directors. Anyone who worked in other kinds of movies ran into the wall of the Academy's genre snobbery. Crime movies (later known as film noir) had a dark glory, a stinging postwar fatalism, but flew under the Academy's radar and beneath its contempt. Of the hundreds of westerns in the '50s, some were superb, like Ford's The Searchers and Howard Hawks' Rio Bravo, but even those A-list directors could not interest Oscar in their oaters--zero nominations for those...
...brought a new breed of director, steeped in movie lore and movie love, making smart films that were huge hits--and for the longest time, Oscar ignored them too. The Godfather won Best Picture, but its auteur, Francis Ford Coppola, was not named Best Director. (He won for The Godfather Part II.) Nor did the Academy give Spielberg an Oscar for Jaws, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Raiders of the Lost Ark or E.T. (He had to wait till 1994, when Schindler's List took Best Picture and Best Director.) Martin Scorsese, by general acclamation the most intense...