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

Hippie Hippie Shakedown

Film: Inherent Vice
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

I knew that Inherent Vice was going to be trouble. I’ve read a little Thomas Pynchon and he’s not an easy author to understand. I knew there would be shades of Naked Lunch here since Pynchon is pretty close to unadaptable. Inherent Vice at least has something like a plot, but it goes in a million directions at once. Since all of the characters are heavily drug fueled, there’s a sense of altered reality throughout. It’s impossible to really know what is going on and what might simply be paranoia. That’s a part all a part of Pynchon. Some of the paranoia is justified and some of it is just the drugs.

I’m not going to attempt much of a plot summary because I don’t know if I could come close to doing it justice. At its heart, Inherent Vice is a film noir told from the perspective of Larry “Doc” Sportello (Joaquin Phoenix), a pot-soaked private investigator given a trio of interlocked and intertwined cases. The first comes from Shasta (Katherine Waterston), Doc’s ex-girlfriend. Her boyfriend Mickey Wolfmann (Eric Roberts) is in trouble. Specifically, Wolfmann’s wife and her boyfriend want to have him committed so they can take his wealth created from housing developments.

Doctor, Doctor, Please

Film: Arrowsmith
Format: Turner Classic Movies on rockin’ flatscreen.

I tend to be ambivalent to medical dramas as a rule. I know virtually nothing about medicine, so there’s a part of me that always feels like I’m playing catch up with any drama that turns on medical knowledge. This is often less true of older medical dramas like Arrowsmith. Based on an earlier novel and dumbed down for a general audience, I didn’t have any real issues following the plot of Arrowsmith, which is a nod in the film’s favor.

We essentially fast-forward through the medical education of Dr. Martin Arrowsmith (Ronald Colman), learning only that he is smart and is more interested in research than in actual medical practice. We also get a meet-cute between him and nurse Leora (Helen Hayes) which soon blossoms into a romance. In fact, it blossoms into such a romance that it immediately alters the course of his life. Offered a research position by his mentor Dr. Gottlieb (a suitably wizened and foreign-y A.E. Anson), Martin declines. Instead, he marries Leora and the two move to South Dakota near her parents. Why South Dakota? Because in Leora’s old home town there is no doctor.

My Cherie Amour

Film: Silver Linings Playbook
Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.

Silver Linings Playbook has been sitting on one of my DVD shelves since before I started focusing on Oscar films. Actually, that’s not quite true; it’s actually been sitting on the shelves shared by my daughters. My older daughter was mildly obsessed with this movie for a short time in part because she was also a huge fan of Hunger Games, and thus loved everything Jennifer Lawrence did. However, when I decided to finally watch it, it was nowhere to be found. Streaming, here we come.

As one of the last people in the country to see this, I’m likely covering known territory when I talk about the story, but that’s what I do here. Pat Solitano (Bradley Cooper) is being released from an 8-month stint in a mental institution caused by his complete breakdown when he found his wife Nikki (Brea Bee) with another man in the shower. Pat has used his time in the institution to get back in physical shape and to try to work on his anger issues, some of which he seems to have inherited from his father, Pat Sr. (Robert De Niro).

The Asylum's Nemo

Film: Shark Tale
Format: DVD from Putnam County Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

I knew when I added Best Animated Feature to my list of categories that eventually I would have to sit through Shark Tale again. I really do try to be as upbeat and open minded as I can be when it comes to this project, but this is a movie I’ve seen before and it’s a movie I know that I really hate. There is nothing I find appealing in what comes off as a combination of The Godfather and Finding Nemo. I don’t like the story, the characters, or the artwork, and with an animated movie, there’s not much left.

Let’s get this over with. Oscar (Will Smith), a wrasse, works in the underwater equivalent of a car wash as the guy who scrubs the tongues of whales. What he really wants is money and fame, and so he has a variety of get rich quick schemes that he finances by borrowing heavily from Sykes (Martin Scorsese), his pufferfish boss. Angie (Renee Zellwegger), an angelfish who also works at the whale wash, carries a torch for Oscar for, frankly, unknown reasons.

Planned Obsolescence

Film: The Man in the White Suit
Format: DVD from Sycamore Public Library through interlibrary loan on rockin’ flatscreen.

When I was a kid, I knew who Alec Guinness was because of Star Wars. Now that I’m older, I can appreciate Guinness for who he really was. A lot of that is his roles in the classic Ealing comedies like The Man in the White Suit. Whenever I watch one of these films from the earlier part of Guinness’s career, I’m always a little surprised. It’s not that Guinness couldn’t do comedy. He could and he was great at it. What surprises me is that half a decade after a fun little goof like The Man in the White Suit, he pulled off one of the greatest acting performances in history in The Bridge on the River Kwai. Proof, if it was needed, that the man was a real talent.

The Man in the White Suit is a simple little film that touches lightly into the genre of science fiction. We get three roughly equal acts—a set-up, a slow realization of the implications of a discovery, and a conclusion. And, while the film isn’t laugh out loud funny, it escalates into a ridiculous situation very quickly.

Pucker Up!

Film: The Princess and the Frog
Format: DVD from Rockford Public Library on rockin’ flatscreen.

There was a time when Disney was the gold standard for animated movies. In a way, with Pixar as a part of their stable, they still are, but the titles that come out specifically under the Disney label are more hit or miss. There are great modern Disney films, of course, but there are some terrible ones, too. So with The Princess and the Frog, I really didn’t know what I was getting. I remember the release of this and the news that Disney was finally getting an African-American princess. There’s a lot of pressure in a situation like this; even an innocent misstep is going to be treated very harshly.

This is the story of the Frog Prince, of course, but since it’s a movie, that fairy tale is going to be taken in a different direction. After a short refresher on the basic story and an introduction to our main character as a child, we jump to the film’s present day of the mid-1920s in New Orleans. Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) is a hard-working young woman juggling two full-time waitressing jobs to save up for her dream of opening a restaurant. This is a dream she shared with her father (Terrence Howard), a man we see in the opening scenes of the film but who has died in the meantime, most likely a casualty of World War I.