Documentary Movie Reviews
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And the Oscar Goes To... (2014)
Rate:
7
Viewed:
12/16
12/16:
And the Oscar Goes To... brings back a lot of memories, and there are clips of many films that are nice to see.
However, I wish they're confined to movies that are at least twenty years old. The recent stuff is the reason
why the Oscars aren't the same anymore because the quality of cinema has gone down big time the last fifteen years.
Another negative is the absence of several famous moments such as what happened with Jack Palance, Cuba Gooding, Jr., and
Louise Fletcher. When Marlon Brando's Oscar win for On the Waterfront was shown,
it looks chopped up. His acceptance
speech was short but special that should have set an example for future winners of how to get it right.
The most spontaneous moment ever in Oscars history is Roberto Benigni's walk over the chairs. It's, once again,
garbled in the documentary. Worse, the dark side of the Academy Awards isn't presented as there were campaigns
by stars to drum up voter support for the coveted award. A good example is Humphrey Bogart's completely
undeserved win for The African Queen over Marlon Brando of
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Another infamous incident is the snub of Hoop Dreams for Best Documentary in 1995. Anyone
who has seen the basketball documentary knows it was a definite Oscar winner. From IMDb:
"According to Roger Ebert, after the film failed to receive an Oscar nomination for Best Documentary, he and Gene Siskel
learned about the nominating process. He said that members of the Academy's documentary committee held flashlights when they
watched documentaries, and anyone who had 'given up' could wave it against the screen. The movie was turned off if a majority
waved their flashlights. Hoop Dreams (1994) was turned off after 15 minutes."
Really? 15 minutes? Is it because everybody in the documentary was black? Here's another one:
"When the film failed to be nominated for Best Documentary, even though it was nominated for Best Film Editing,
Entertainment Weekly ran a story about how the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences selected
documentary nominations. Most of the voting members were not documentary filmmakers, and many worked against
nominating the film. As a result, the rules were changed to allow documentary filmmakers to vote in that category."
Now, you know why the awards show is a joke today. Many Oscar-worthy performances and films have gone unnoticed in the
past while there are scores of undeserving Oscar winners. The main reason is politics. An example of what I'm talking about
is Sean Penn's Best Actor win for Milk over The Wrestler's Mickey Rourke because
the former was heavily connected while the latter had burned bridges with so many.
Elsewhere, there's too much of Jane Fonda (ugh!), Helen Mirren, Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Cher, etc. This is as liberal
as it gets. Why can't they get more famous people to drop a line or two to keep the documentary balanced as much
as possible? Am I correct to say there are almost no black, Hispanic, or Asian commentators in this? There you go: racism has
always played a huge part in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Here's a pop quiz: name a black movie that won
Best Picture during the 20th century. You can't because there isn't any. Nope, it wasn't
The Color Purple which got robbed big time, winning exactly zero out of eleven nominations.
All in all, although worth watching for nostalgia, And the Oscar Goes To... is a one-sided documentary.