The 16th Annual Academy Award Movie Challenge (February 8 - March 27 2022)
03-29-22, 06:46 AM
#101
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Re: The 16th Annual Academy Award Movie Challenge (February 8 - March 27 2022)
I wish I had more time to do the challenge. I was hospitalized the day the challenge started with complications from long COVID. I started on March 10th and still got 37 entries in, including the nine Best Picture nominees I didn't see before being admitted. Not bad in my opinion.
Thanks to LisaDoris. Hope everyone had fun!
Thanks to LisaDoris. Hope everyone had fun!
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popcorn (03-29-22)
03-30-22, 08:38 AM
#102
DVD Talk Hall of Fame
Re: The 16th Annual Academy Award Movie Challenge (February 8 - March 27 2022)
Looking Back
This year, I concentrated primarily on first time viewings of past winners. Most of the ones that were repeat viewings were of movies I hadn't seen since I started keeping track of at-home viewings. Some, I hadn't seen since VHS! I tried to overlap in February with the Romance/Music/Musical challenge. That led me to four musicals, including...
Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady
These two were infamously pitted against one another in 1964. I've hated Mary Poppins since childhood but wanted to give it a fair shake. I've changed my feelings about lots of movies over the years, after all. I ended up not hating it and upgraded it to dislike. I have an inexplicable but visceral repulsion of the chimney sweep sequence. I largely dig My Fair Lady, but I hate that its very final scene undercuts Eliza's entire arc, up to her grand declaration of independence in just the previous scene. My head canon is that it's only Higgins's daydream that Eliza returns after telling him off. Anyway, the two competed in nine categories and My Fair Lady took seven of them (Art Direction; Cinematography [Color]; Costume Design [Color]; Directing; Music [Scoring of music--adaptation or treatment]; Best Picture; and Sound); Mary Poppins took one (Film Editing); and they both lost to Becket for Writing [Screenplay--based on material from another medium).
There were some other categories where only one of the two fetched a nomination, most notoriously Best Actress, with Julie Andrews winning and Audrey Hepburn snubbed altogether. I think My Fair Lady asked more of Audrey Hepburn than Mary Poppins asked of Julie Andrews and I'm firmly in the camp that it was unfair to Audrey that her singing vocals were dubbed--and had been planned to be dubbed from the start--without her knowledge, and that that was a key contributing factor in her snub. I mean, Rex Harrison won Best Actor and he more or less just spoke his songs! We may not hear Audrey Hepburn's actual voice, but it's clearly her acting and dancing in those numbers, and she was fantastic in the role.
Ordinary People
As I discussed in this thread, this was the biggest standout for me. I was rapt and moved by it. Completely bowled over by it. I was pleased to find out that I've become a fan of it just in time for its Blu-ray debut. (Though I'll wait for a sale; Paramount Presents titles are a bit steep in my estimation.)
1992
I occasioned to watch four films celebrating their 30th anniversaries: Basic Instinct; Bram Stoker's Dracula; The Crying Game; and Unforgiven. Instinct and Game were first time viewings for me. Unforgiven was one I hadn't seen since VHS. They're something of an odd quartet that seemingly have only their release year in common. Taken together, though, they all hit on an underlying theme that preoccupies us today perhaps more than then: gender and sexuality. Not all of what the films had to say has held up, but I think most of what they ask has. There's a pronounced strain of social anxiety running through them: bisexual women are killers; transgender people are deceptive; and Dracula's vampirism can be read as a reaction straight people finding out they could get AIDS and HIV, too. Somewhat ironically, it's the Western Unforgiven that asks us to reconsider how harmful some of our norms about masculinity have been.
2022 Live Action & Animation Short Films
The night before the awards, I went to a friend's house to stream these shorts. They were the only current nominees I watched during the challenge; I'd seen No Time to Die already, and that was it for me this year. We didn't realize that they weren't available in groups as in previous years. Thank you, Mao, for your handy dandy directory of where to find them à la carte. I was not on the same page as the voters this year at all. There was the fifth live action short we couldn't access until the day after the awards (which I haven't bothered to do), but of the four we did see, I found the winning The Long Goodbye largely unremarkable. It's basically a vignette with a monologue. I do care about the topic of the short. But I've seen this seemingly ad infinitum and there wasn't anything new here. Hell, it's been a subplot in the last two weeks of Star Trek: Picard. My favorite of the live action shorts was The Dress. I thought Anna Dzieduszycka gave a hell of a performance; one of the stronger ones I saw all month.
Of the animated shorts, I was genuinely angered (on whatever level one is angered at all by what wins awards) that they went with The Windshield Wiper. My friend and I both found it self-indulgent, self-important, clumsy, and pretentious. Neither of us understood nearly enough to really grasp Bestia, but after doing some cursory research I believe it was the strongest of the group. We were both charmed by Boxballet, too, which fits in the middle of the Venn diagram of The Wrestler and Black Swan.
I hit several other films, but those were the highlights. Thanks for organizing this again, Lisa!
Also, I remember at the start there were some concerns about whether the challenge would run too long this year. I didn't find that to be the case at all. I doubled up on romances and musicals in February and switched over to crime flicks in March. Sometimes I picked stuff that wasn't an Oscar nominee just because I wanted to watch it. I was comfortably able to complete the checklist and most of my objectives. Had I made the effort to catch up on this year's nominees, I think the extra time would have been even more beneficial.
This year, I concentrated primarily on first time viewings of past winners. Most of the ones that were repeat viewings were of movies I hadn't seen since I started keeping track of at-home viewings. Some, I hadn't seen since VHS! I tried to overlap in February with the Romance/Music/Musical challenge. That led me to four musicals, including...
Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady
These two were infamously pitted against one another in 1964. I've hated Mary Poppins since childhood but wanted to give it a fair shake. I've changed my feelings about lots of movies over the years, after all. I ended up not hating it and upgraded it to dislike. I have an inexplicable but visceral repulsion of the chimney sweep sequence. I largely dig My Fair Lady, but I hate that its very final scene undercuts Eliza's entire arc, up to her grand declaration of independence in just the previous scene. My head canon is that it's only Higgins's daydream that Eliza returns after telling him off. Anyway, the two competed in nine categories and My Fair Lady took seven of them (Art Direction; Cinematography [Color]; Costume Design [Color]; Directing; Music [Scoring of music--adaptation or treatment]; Best Picture; and Sound); Mary Poppins took one (Film Editing); and they both lost to Becket for Writing [Screenplay--based on material from another medium).
There were some other categories where only one of the two fetched a nomination, most notoriously Best Actress, with Julie Andrews winning and Audrey Hepburn snubbed altogether. I think My Fair Lady asked more of Audrey Hepburn than Mary Poppins asked of Julie Andrews and I'm firmly in the camp that it was unfair to Audrey that her singing vocals were dubbed--and had been planned to be dubbed from the start--without her knowledge, and that that was a key contributing factor in her snub. I mean, Rex Harrison won Best Actor and he more or less just spoke his songs! We may not hear Audrey Hepburn's actual voice, but it's clearly her acting and dancing in those numbers, and she was fantastic in the role.
Ordinary People
As I discussed in this thread, this was the biggest standout for me. I was rapt and moved by it. Completely bowled over by it. I was pleased to find out that I've become a fan of it just in time for its Blu-ray debut. (Though I'll wait for a sale; Paramount Presents titles are a bit steep in my estimation.)
1992
I occasioned to watch four films celebrating their 30th anniversaries: Basic Instinct; Bram Stoker's Dracula; The Crying Game; and Unforgiven. Instinct and Game were first time viewings for me. Unforgiven was one I hadn't seen since VHS. They're something of an odd quartet that seemingly have only their release year in common. Taken together, though, they all hit on an underlying theme that preoccupies us today perhaps more than then: gender and sexuality. Not all of what the films had to say has held up, but I think most of what they ask has. There's a pronounced strain of social anxiety running through them: bisexual women are killers; transgender people are deceptive; and Dracula's vampirism can be read as a reaction straight people finding out they could get AIDS and HIV, too. Somewhat ironically, it's the Western Unforgiven that asks us to reconsider how harmful some of our norms about masculinity have been.
2022 Live Action & Animation Short Films
The night before the awards, I went to a friend's house to stream these shorts. They were the only current nominees I watched during the challenge; I'd seen No Time to Die already, and that was it for me this year. We didn't realize that they weren't available in groups as in previous years. Thank you, Mao, for your handy dandy directory of where to find them à la carte. I was not on the same page as the voters this year at all. There was the fifth live action short we couldn't access until the day after the awards (which I haven't bothered to do), but of the four we did see, I found the winning The Long Goodbye largely unremarkable. It's basically a vignette with a monologue. I do care about the topic of the short. But I've seen this seemingly ad infinitum and there wasn't anything new here. Hell, it's been a subplot in the last two weeks of Star Trek: Picard. My favorite of the live action shorts was The Dress. I thought Anna Dzieduszycka gave a hell of a performance; one of the stronger ones I saw all month.
Of the animated shorts, I was genuinely angered (on whatever level one is angered at all by what wins awards) that they went with The Windshield Wiper. My friend and I both found it self-indulgent, self-important, clumsy, and pretentious. Neither of us understood nearly enough to really grasp Bestia, but after doing some cursory research I believe it was the strongest of the group. We were both charmed by Boxballet, too, which fits in the middle of the Venn diagram of The Wrestler and Black Swan.
I hit several other films, but those were the highlights. Thanks for organizing this again, Lisa!
Also, I remember at the start there were some concerns about whether the challenge would run too long this year. I didn't find that to be the case at all. I doubled up on romances and musicals in February and switched over to crime flicks in March. Sometimes I picked stuff that wasn't an Oscar nominee just because I wanted to watch it. I was comfortably able to complete the checklist and most of my objectives. Had I made the effort to catch up on this year's nominees, I think the extra time would have been even more beneficial.
