1975 Poll: SCFZ does the Oscars

[flip]

Overview:

We often deride the Oscars for many reasons, and the question I thought a poll could answer is: how often do they get it right? Do they pick the right winner (by SCFZ opinion) from the choices? Do they pick the right choices to begin with?

So the poll is in two parts:

• poll #1: from their nominees, we'll pick a Best Picture.
--> to vote in this poll, award to every nominee you've seen a rating from 1 to 5 stars
--> you should assign ratings as follows (do not use your ordinary ratings scale) :
5 stars: in the top 10% of best picture nominees from this decade
4 stars: in the top 30%
3 stars: in the middle
2 stars: in the bottom 30%
1 star: in the bottom 10%

So if you generally dislike Best Picture nominees (as I do!), you should still be giving roughly one film per year (when they nominate 8-10) a 5-star rating, and only one or two a 1-star rating. I'm encouraging ratings like this so we're not measuring whether generous voters have seen a film, but how a film, in SCFZ's view, ranks against its competition. The film with the highest average rating will win our parallel Best Picture (from the nominees). The nominees are (copy/pasting from this list is preferable to me than typing things up from scratch) :

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
Nashville (Robert Altman)

• poll #2: what should the Academy have nominated? for this poll, you can list up to 5 films that should have received a Best Picture nomination but did not. From these nominations, I'll count up the film with the most mentions, and it will win our alternative Best Picture, and I'll also compile a slate of alternative nominees. The point is not to pick our favourite films of the year (that's what the year poll is for). The point is to pick only films that you might reasonably expect could have been nominated in real life. So bear in mind that foreign films are nominated on average about once every seven years, and those that are have a particular character. Most nominations should be English-language productions, and probably none should be all that experimental.

In the end, I might have a runoff vote to decide whether we prefer our Best Picture (from the nominees), or our alternative Best Picture, but I haven't thought that far ahead.

[flip]

5 stars
Nashville

4 stars
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

3 stars
Barry Lyndon
Jaws

2 stars
Dog Day Afternoon

alternate ballot:
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
Night Moves (Arthur Penn)
French Connection II (John Frankenheimer)
Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger)
Conduct Unbecoming (Michael Anderson)

[grabmymask]

These Oscars/Cannes polls are pretty fun actually.

5
Barry Lyndon

4
Jaws

3
Dog Day Afternoon

2
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest


alternate ballot:
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Night Moves
Mahogany
Mandingo
Tommy

[Silga]

4 stars

Jaws (Steven Spielberg)
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)

alternate ballot:

Night Moves (Arthur Penn)
Love and Death (Woody Allen)
The Sunshine Boys (Herbert Ross)
Three Days of the Condor (Sydney Pollack)

[john ryan]

5 Stars
Nashville (Robert Altman)
4 Stars
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)

3 Stars
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)

2 Stars
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)

Ballot:
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
Shampoo (Hal Ashby)
French Connection II (John Frankenheimer)
Monty Python and the Holy Grail (Terry Jones)
Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller) - Got 4 Academy nominations that year, so I don't feel bad about ignoring the Academy's history of ignoring non-English language films.

[wba]

5 stars
Barry Lyndon

4 stars
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

3 stars
Jaws



alternate ballot:
Posse (Kirk Douglas)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

[Curtis, baby]

4 stars
Nashville (Robert Altman)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)

2 stars
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)

1 star
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)

==============================

Grey Gardens (Albert Maysles/David Maysles/Muffie Meyer/Ellen Hovde)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)

[lineuphere]

5 Stars
Nashville

4 Stars
Barry Lyndon

3 Stars
Dog Day Afternoon

2 Stars
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Jaws

___________

The Day of the Locust
Picnic at Hanging Rock
Cooley High
Tommy

[ofrene]

very rare year which all the best picture nominees are above average to me

5 stars

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick)
Jaws (Steven Spielberg)

4 stars

Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet)
Nashville (Robert Altman)
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman)

---------------

Night Moves (Arthur Penn)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)

[RogerTheMovieManiac]

Poll #1
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman) - 4/5
Jaws (Steven Spielberg) - 3/5
Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick) - 4/5
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet) - 5/5
Nashville (Robert Altman) - 4/5

Poll #2
Pasqualino Settebellezze (1975, Lina Wertmüller)
Professione: reporter (1975, Michelangelo Antonioni)
The Day of the Locust (1975, John Schlesinger)
Night Moves (1975, Arthur Penn)

[flip]

results

something a bit remarkable this time: every one of the five actual nominees ended up with an above average rating (over 3.00). since the voting system asks voters to compare films to average nominees, the probability five oscar nominees will all be considered above average by scfz is roughly (1/2)^5 = 1/32, and with roughly 90 years of oscars, you'd only expect that to happen about three times overall. so i think it's safe to say that scfz considers the 1975 nominees one of the strongest slates the academy ever produced.

SCFZ's Awards the 1975 Best Picture to...

Nashville (Robert Altman) - 4.50

the rest of the nominees, in order of finish:

Barry Lyndon (Stanley Kubrick) - 4.25
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Milos Forman) - 3.44
Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet) - 3.12
Jaws (Steven Spielberg) - 3.11

The actual winner, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, finished a somewhat distant third in our vote.

Seven films received at least two mentions in our alternate poll (but only four received at least three, so seven films make up our alternate slate) :

The Day of the Locust (John Schlesinger)
French Connection II (John Frankenheimer)
Night Moves (Arthur Penn)
The Passenger (Michelangelo Antonioni)
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)
Seven Beauties (Lina Wertmuller)
Tommy (Ken Russell)

and we have a tie for the winner of SCFZ's Alternate Best Picture (five mentions apiece) :

Night Moves (Arthur Penn) - 2 tiebreaker votes
Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir) - 3 tiebreaker votes

and after the tiebreaker the winner is...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)

[flip]

if anyone wants to help break our Alternate Best Picture tie, you can vote for either Night Moves or Picnic at Hanging Rock here, but only if you've seen both films. My vote:

Night Moves

[grabmymask]

Picnic at Hanging Rock

[RogerTheMovieManiac]

I like them both but I'll go with 'Night Moves'.

[Curtis, baby]

Picnic

[ofrene]

Picnic

[flip]

Accounting for the results of the tiebreaker vote, the winner of SCFZ's Alternate Best Picture for 1975 is...

Picnic at Hanging Rock (Peter Weir)