' ' Cinema Romantico: 12 Times Oscar Got It Unequivocally Right

Thursday, February 16, 2017

12 Times Oscar Got It Unequivocally Right

It's the heart of Academy Award season, that dangerous ground between nominations and the awards themselves, when the social media knives come out and everything is absolutely awful no matter how great, good, mostly good, or, like, "nice, but not really getting yourself all in a lather about" it might have been in reality. My least favorite part of Academy Awards season is the inevitable mudslide of 10 Times Oscar Got It Wrong lists, which sometimes are 5 times, or 15 times, or 25 times, whatever the WE NEED CLICKS!!! editors demand. I hate those lists. I hate, hate, hate them. How about all those times Oscar did it get right? Like, you know, these...

12 Times Oscar Got It Unequivocally Right

Kate Winslet, Best Actress for The Reader (2009)

Like this list would start anywhere else.


Van Heflin, Best Supporting Actor for Johnny Eager (1942) 

Like William Powell of "The Thin Man" crossed with Christopher Plummer of "Star Trek VI" crossed with Heather Davis of "Crazy Ex-Girlfriend" and on sedatives scored from the Palm Springs black market, this is one of the great turns no one ever talks about. 


Jack Lemmon, Best Actor for Save the Tiger (1974)  

Lemmon probably deserved Best Actor for something else, like "The Apartment", or "Some Like It Hot", but got it for this instead, which was a cosmic squaring for what was owed, which was fine, even if it did prevent Al Pacino for earning the statue on the basis of "Serpico."


Al Pacino, Best Actor for Scent of a Woman (1993) 

But the cosmos squared with Pacino a couple decades later when it gave him the Best Actor for "Scent of a Woman" even though performatively speaking Denzel Washington deserved Best Actor for "Malcolm X."


Denzel Washington, Best Actor for Training Day (2002) 

But the cosmos squared with Washington a decade after that. See how this works?


Ingrid Bergman, Best Supporting Actress for Murder on the Orient Express (1975) 

Some actors richly deserve an Oscar, a few special ones deserve a couple Oscars, and a few really, really special ones deserve an Oscar trio. Ingrid Bergman deserved the trio. Whatever the hell she got the third one for is fine with me.


Marcia Gay Harden, Best Supporting Actress for Pollock (2001)

Kate Hudson in "Almost Famous", sure, of course, naturally, I would have voted for her too. But then, Kate Hudson is Penny Lane and Marcia Gay Harden is the descendant of a norse goddess who slays dragons. So......


Marisa Tomei, Best Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny (1993) 

With each passing year the more I become convinced, per Cinema Romantycs, an extraordinarily in-depth empirical analysis of the empyrean that takes into account qualitative performability while including all inherent emotional biases, that this is the greatest performance of all time.


Donna Reed, Best Supporting Actress for From Here to Eternity (1954) 

Don't come at me, bro. Do not come at me on this one. If you do then, to quote Melissa McCarthy in "The Heat", "put your head in the door and I’ll slam it about 157,000 fucking times."


Humphrey Bogart, Best Actor for The African Queen (1952)

Take your He Got It For The Wrong Movie rubbish movie somwhere else. Whatever movie Bogart got his Oscar for is the right movie and anything else is just gaseous listicle excrement.


Jennifer Lawrence, Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook (2013)

I'm telling you right now, if this performance starts showing up on 10 Times Oscar Got It Wrong lists 10 years from now then I am coming for you, content creators. Do you hear me?! I am putting cherry bombs in your goddam content management systems! YOU WILL ALL HAVE TO RECKON WITH ME!!!


Nicole Kidman, Best Actress for The Hours (2003)

Like this list would end anywhere else.

No comments: