Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1999

The Contenders:

American Beauty (winner)
Being John Malkovich
Magnolia
The Sixth Sense
Topsy-Turvy

Song and Dance

Film: Topsy-Turvy
Format: Streaming video from Hoopla Digital on The Nook.

Over the past six years, I’ve become much less of a musical hater and have found a number of them that I appreciate. That doesn’t mean that I was especially enthused about the prospect of Topsy-Turvy about the almost break-up of lyricist William Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan and the creation of the comic opera The Mikado. The more than 2 ½ hour length was off-putting as well. But I had to watch it eventually, and today was as good as any other day.

As the movie starts, Arthur Sullivan (Allan Corduner) is seriously ill, but still manages to drag himself to the Savoy Theater to conduct the opera for Princess Ida, the latest Gilbert and Sullivan production. William Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) is unable to watch the opening night and paces the streets of London as usual. Princess Ida receives flat reviews and the general thought is that perhaps Gilbert and Sullivan have run out of ideas. Nothing seems to match the strength of H.M.S. Pinafore or The Pirates of Penzance. Sullivan retires to the continent to convalesce. When ticket sales for Princess Ida dry up in the summer heat and no new production to put on, theater owner Richard D’Oyly Carte (Ron Cook) reprises an earlier work called The Sorcerer.