Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Adapated Screenplay 1960

The Contenders:

Elmer Gantry (winner)
Inherit the Wind
Sons and Lovers
The Sundowners
Tunes of Glory

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Director 1960

The Contenders:

Billy Wilder: The Apartment (winner)
Jules Dassin: Never on Sunday
Alfred Hitchcock: Psycho
Jack Cardiff: Sons and Lovers
Fred Zinnemann: The Sundowners

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actress 1960

The Contenders:

Shirley MacLaine: The Apartment
Elizabeth Taylor: Butterfield 8 (winner)
Melina Mercouri: Never on Sunday
Deborah Kerr: The Sundowners
Greer Garson: Sunrise at Campobello

Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Picture 1960

The Contenders:

The Alamo
The Apartment (winner)
Elmer Gantry
Sons and Lovers
The Sundowners

Waltzing Matilda

Film: The Sundowners
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

It’s entirely possible that I did The Sundowners a little bit of a disservice by watching it on a laptop instead of on a large television. This is a movie that trades at least in part on the big, sweeping panoramas and massive landscapes of the Australian outback. It’s similar in a lot of ways to a standard Western, although it’s a more modern story. Actually, I’m not precisely sure when the story takes place. I think (although I’m not sure) that it essentially takes place around the time the movie was made, despite the lifestyle of the people depicted.

The Sundowners concerns a family of, well, sundowners. The term refers to people in Australia who are more or less nomads, moving from place to place and taking jobs as they come to them. Specifically, the term means people whose home is wherever the sun goes down on a given day. This family is headed by Paddy Carmody (Robert Mitchum), who is the Australian equivalent of an itinerant cowboy. He frequently works as a sheep drover, moving large herds of sheep to market for shearing. He also often finds work as a shearer, but he doesn’t like that work so much because it means staying in one place for months at a time.