Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1969

The Contenders:

Anne of the Thousand Days
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid
Hello, Dolly!
Midnight Cowboy (winner)
Z

Hello, Headache

Film: Hello, Dolly!
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I knew this one was going to be rough. I was braced for it to be one of those musicals where all of the men are drips and the women are all “sassy,” and indeed that’s exactly what Hello, Dolly! is. Hello, Dolly! encapsulates everything I dislike about musicals in general and wraps them up in a package that runs for close to 150 minutes. I suspected this going in. You can fault me for all sorts of things, but you can’t accuse me of avoiding films like this one. I dive head first into shit like this all the time and do it consciously most of the time when I do it, although I am blindsided at times.

Ah, but wait. There’s a pedigree with this one that needs to be mentioned. The director of Hello, Dolly! is Gene Kelly. Even in a case where I’m fairly sure I’m going to dislike the plot and most of the characters and where I’m going to rapidly be overcome by Barbra Streisand’s sassiness, Gene Kelly’s not going to disappoint with the musical numbers. It’s at least going to be a spectacle, right?