Oscars 2018

People don’t like The Sting?

Patton is gr8

no idea. I'd be happy if they did but you are right to correct me. if you look at 60s and 70s best film winners then most are still well regarded.

xp

i think you basically have the bulk of two decades best-pictures that are still well regarded. that was my not-very-well thought out point.

Patton sparked Dick Nixon to bomb Cambodia.

i stand by my review

By my estimation, these are the post-1970 Oscar winners you could probably praise in polite ILX company without being snorted at. Sorry, 80s and 90s.

The French Connection
The Godfather
The Sting
The Godfather Part II
One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest
The Deer Hunter
Amadeus
Silence of the Lambs
Unforgiven
The Departed
No Country for Old Men
The Hurt Locker
The Artist
12 Years a Slave
Moonlight

Oh, and Annie Hall, ya ya.

Id beat you with a platter if you praised Amadeus within earshot

There you go! I was trying to be lenient and felt bad for the 1980s. I've never actually seen Amadeus.

Or hardly any 80s winners, in fact. They looked bad. I liked Ordinary People, but this isn't about what I like.

I'm going to throw Terms of Endearment on to my list too and see if it sticks.

We were shown Amadeus in music class and it was obviously bollocks when I was 13

Until quite recently I thought the soundtrack featured Rock Me Amadeus.

Amadeus is good.

I broadly agree with jed about the 70s and (especially) 60s winners btw. The 60s Academy made a smart choice in being so musicals-heavy.

from the whole of the 60's and 70's there are only 3 or 4 you could disregard as not having a cultural impact in a significant way. Tom Jones (maybe) A Man for All Seasons, Patton, The Sting (Probably) In the Heat of the night (maybe)

No offense, jed, but this is completely wrong about In the Heat of the Night, especially in the South.

Cultural impact smultural impact

Are they remembered yes are they watched yes are they worth the 90-180 mins of your time yes

The insipid selections of the millennium era, none of that holds true

None taken, I've never seen it, i've just never heard anyone talk about it.

Alablalba, The Artist?!

The Artist is great!

A few years ago the 2009 Oscar winner was the question for Final Jeopardy and no one got it (I didn't either).

Conceding my own bias upfront, the run of Best Picture winners from '69-'78 was the most relevant ever. There were two old-fashioned winners, The Sting and Rocky, that I don't think were especially noteworthy (backlash winners, almost); a third, Patton, kind of had one foot in both the old and new. But every other winner from Midnight Cowboy to The Deer Hunter was new and interesting and a big topic of conversation in the culture at large, as were lots of other nominees that didn't win. Why this happened--I assume the electorate was still mostly made up of Old Hollywood people--I don't know.

Rocky wasnt a topic in the culture?

"Topic" "culture"

Cmon man

I know you balk at these statements, darraghmac, but there are certain films that get talked about and debated much more than others. Do the Right Thing, Thelma & Louise, Get Out--such films are big deals. (Rocky was, to resort to cliche, a feel-good Bicentennial film. I guess it got a lot of attention that year, and it launched a franchise, but there's no way it had the long-term impact of Taxi Driver, All the President's Men, or even Network, which I'm not a big fan of.)

"The movies," past or present, have lost more than half of their cultural primacy even since the '70s. In the '70s they had at most half of what they had in the early '50s.

Maybe overall, but I don't think there are any single films from the '50s--not Waterfront, Blackboard Jungle, The Defiant Ones, or anything--that had the large-scale impact of The Godfather or The Exorcist in terms of how much they were talked about and how much they were seen. And I'd add at least two or three others to that list.

@clemenza - I would hazard that in daily life, Rocky gets invoked far, far more often than those other films, and not just in terms of like "yo, adrian!" impressions. the resolution/meaning of the final fight and going the distance and all that, the redeemed schmuck, etc., people relate to all that and it's a useful symbol. it launched a franchise because millions of people loved it. dunno if those people were part of "the conversation" but it's a different kind of thing from nobody remembering or wanting to watch Crash/English Patient/etc.

also not sure how conventional/old-fashioned it is. in its overall arc, sure, but it's very much a gritty urban 70s movie and iirc it's not really paced or lit or shot like i expected from an underdog sports movie. its closest peer in terms of palette is probably Midnight Cowboy.

The Sting had an impact too, just less enduringly and less significantly. as i realized in the claustrophobic poster thread, there were a LOT of 20s-era caper films, and/or period heist films, hoping to replicate its return-on-investment. basically all of them are forgotten now of course. also sold a lot of ragtime records. minor, but still more significant to the culture at large than idk Driving Miss Daisy.

but it's very much a gritty urban 70s movie

It did have a director who'd made Joe and Save the Tiger. So that's fair--it wasn't exactly the rah-rah Reagan stuff that came a decade later.

(But I still see it as a much more conventional film than the three runners-up I mentioned.)

Both of you are right.

According to the new Saturday Night Fever Bee Gees bio I just finished, Avildsen was first pick to direct but was fired for already trying to turn every project into a Balboa picture.

Saturday Night Fever is a film that I'd be more inclined to describe the way casino describes Rocky--misremembered as just a big box-office entertainment, but in fact very much aligned with its era, almost as dark and nasty as Taxi Driver at times.

agreed.

it's funny that Rocky won, looking at the rest of the awards which were basically the Network show....

know you balk at these statements, darraghmac, but there are certain films that get talked about and debated much more than others. Do the Right Thing, Thelma & Louise, Get Out--such films are big deals.

I ball, if I do, because you've already admitted this is at best subjective and at worst and a little less generously wilfully....if not elitist call it rather selective....about what counts as "talked about" and, I'd suspect, by whom

I ball baby u better believe it

Rocky is as iconic a film as it gets, imo. Unlike many best picture winners. From theme to several scenes, if only for the training montage.

Agree that Saturday Night Fever is daaaaaark, a gritty '70s films juxtaposed with the least gritty '70s music.

SNF is a tough movie I'd say moreso than taxi driver which at least has an outsider protagonist

Rocky was iconic to Tony Manero, who had the poster up in his bedroom in SNF

Rocky is one of the most popular films the second half of the 20th century, spawned a franchise that earned Stallone an Oscar nod in 2015 fergodsake

Here's a list of Best Picture winners ranked by estimated tickets sold (source here: http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm?adjust_yr=1&p=.htm):

1. Gone with the Wind (1st overall)
2. The Sound of Music (3rd overall)
3. Titanic (5th overall)
4. Ben-Hur (14th overall)
5. The Sting (20th overall)
6. The Godfather (25th overall)
7. Forrest Gump (26th overall)
8. Around the World in 80 Days (50th overall)
9. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (55th overall)
10. My Fair Lady (61st overall)
11. The Greatest Show on Earth (62nd overall)
12. West Side Story (75th overall)
13. Lawrence of Arabia (79th overall)
14. Rocky (81st overall)
15. The Best Years of Our Lives (83rd overall)

As you can tell, I'm not much of a Rocky. So maybe I'm letting my own opinion interfere too much there.

Oops! "much of a Rocky fan"--the other goes without saying.

(I think I want "As you can tell, I'm not much of Rocky" on my tombstone, though.)

Ha

Rocky still >> Network

Network is sooooo good except for the stuff that's pretty dumb. Or rather, there's a mismatch between the OTT satire stuff and the human drama stuff with Bill Holden (which both are viable in themselves). They collide in his big talking-at-her takedown speech with Faye Dunaway and it suddenly becomes a much meaner-spirited, lecturey movie. A slower build with the craziness of the Beale Show would also work better. I'd be okay with it winning but I also think Rocky is cool.

See: 1976 Oscar Nominees

Rocky owes a considerable debt to every boxing picture ever made (especially the shallow ones) as well as On the Waterfront.

(and Marty)

(haha Paddy Chayefsky, you got played by your own formula)

1969 Oscars: Actresses sound off on lack of roles for women. pic.twitter.com/5Gxilt3CKZ

— izzycc (@lookwhoitiz) March 5, 2018