GuessWho

Best Picture should be about the overall execution of the film--the acting, the look, the story, everything as a whole. The whole night's earlier awards are about individual ingredients (acting, cinematography, directing, music, costumes, etc), but this award is for all of that mixed up and put together as one.

That's not an issue with remakes--it's just about making a good piece of cinema.


If you're trying to reward story originality, that's what the Best Original Screenplay is for.

Jay G.

The key is you called them TV "programs," i.e. shows. There are three types of material produced for TV: Show, mini-series, and movies. It's that last one that I'm talking about, movies made for TV. Just because it's made for TV doesn't mean it's not a movie.

It's pretty simply really: one draws the line at things called movies. Plays are never called movies, even when they've been recorded.

I don't get this line; are you saying that Drive-in movies don't count as actual films either?

caligulathegod

I am very liberal in what I consider a remake. I'm just saying that one must compare apples to apples and oranges to oranges. A movie is a movie and a TV program is a TV program. Ultimately, they are all scripts (libretto, book, teleplay, screenplay, etc.) and are acted and directed by people and are either recorded or not. One either draws a line, or one doesn't.

Jay G.

I am comparing apples to apples. I'm comparing movies to movies, regardless of the media they were first shown on. You, however, seem to want to call apples, oranges and peaches (movies, series, and mini-series) all pears (or "TV programs") simply because they all appear on the same media.

Let's take Steven Spielberg's movie Duel. Would you argue it's not actually a "movie" since it was originally intended for solely TV exhibition, or did it somehow gain its "movieness" through its theatrical release overseas? If someone made a new film based on the same story, would you not consider it a remake since the original was made for TV and thus not really a movie in your mind?

Or how about Trucks, a TV-movie based on the same short story that the film Maximum Overdrive was based on. IMDB labels Trucks as a remake:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120380/

However, by your definition, the remake shouldn't be called a remake, even though it was made over a decade later, due to the fact that it was "made for TV" and thus not a real movie.

To me movie=movie. One can quibble about what actually constitutes a movie, but delivery medium really shouldn't be a factor.