1943 Poll: SCFZ does the Oscars

[flip]

The 2015 edition of this poll attracted quite a few votes, so I'll assume the exercise is sufficiently interesting to continue with it - sorry I forgot until now to tabulate that poll or to start this one! Fortunately there was no Cannes in 1943, but there were Academy Awards, so we'll have a parallel Academy poll to go with the year poll. The overview of this poll:

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) :

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
The Song of Bernadette (Henry King)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood)
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin)
The More the Merrier (George Stevens)
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)
In Which We Serve (David Lean and Noel Coward)
Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy)
The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown)

• 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]

i actually really like all five of the nominees i've seen from this year:

5 stars
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)

4 stars
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
The More the Merrier (George Stevens)

3 stars
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)
The Song of Bernadette (Henry King)

alternative nominees:
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
His Butler's Sister (Frank Borzage)
Jane Eyre (Robert Stevenson)
Stormy Weather (Andrew L Stone)

[flip]

and to be sure everyone saw - i revived the 2015 oscar and cannes versions of this poll, for anyone who hasn't vote in those, results will be posted in a couple of days!

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

This is fun! Alas, only seen 3, but I can contribute.

5 stars
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

3 stars
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)

1 star
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)

Alternate selections:
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley)
Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder)
Northern Pursuit (Raoul Walsh)

[wba]

This sounds like a really fun exercise!!



poll #1

5 stars
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

3 stars
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)

1 star
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin)


poll #2

Phantom of the Opera (Arthur Lubin)
Five Graves to Cairo (Billy WIlder)
Above Suspicion (Richard Thorpe)

[flip]

I'm not quite sure how to decide which films are eligible though, as the Oscars usually nominate films from the previous year (thus we should probably vote for 1942 movies...), but of course there are also films from 1943 on the list...

so the poll is of the 16th academy awards, the awards held in early 1944 to award films from 1943. so for the most part, 1942 films shouldn't be eligible (though i am under the impression there was some inconsistency about eligibility back then).

i think if a 1942 film was nominated for something the previous year, which you can check here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/15th_Academy_Awards

then it shouldn't be considered eligible for an alternate nomination here. so now voyager and to be or not to be will both be great alternate noms when we do the 1942 version of this exercise, but shouldn't count for 1943 (and i didn't check any other suggestions but i'll check mine now).

[flip]

and i just learned from the wikipedia page: in the nearly eighty years since the 1943 academy awards, the ox-bow incident is the only film to be nominated for best picture, but to not receive a single other nomination

[wba]

So back then the awards were really for films of the previous year. Good to know!

But when did that change? Cause I always thought that films released in early January were also eligible for the Ceremony (which was usually in February or March). Or am I wrogn?

[flip]

i don't know exactly, but i think these days at least, there's a rule that for a film to be eligible for, say, the post-2009 awards, it needs to have a cinema screening in (maybe) los angeles or at least in some major us market in the 2009 calendar year, i don't know the technicalities. so that means often films will screen once around dec 29th of 2009, then get a wide release in january or february of 2010 and be eligible for the awards that are happening one or two months after their release that award 2009 releases.

that's just from vague memory, didn't look it up, i'm sure someone knows the specifics, and i have no idea how long those eligibility rules have been in place!

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

I also haven't looked it up, but if memory serves, it was at this time based on when it was given general release in LA or New York but the big difference is that movies would have gala premieres sometimes months before it would receive general release to help generate buzz and also because distribution networks were slower back then. So Casablanca really is a 1943 movie by most metrics, opening for general release in January of 1943, but it had a gala premiere in New York in November of 1942, so IMDB lists it as 1942.

[...]

5 Star
Madame Curie
Heaven Can Wait

4 Star
The More the Merrier

3 Star
Casablanca
The Ox Bow Incident
Song of Bernadette

2 Star
Watch on the Rhine

1 Star
For Whom the Bell Tolls

[Silga]

5 stars:
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

4 stars:
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)

Alternative nominations:

The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)
I Walked with a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)

[---]

5/5
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)

3/5
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)

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

Stormy Weather (Andrew L. Stone, 1943)
The Gang's All Here (Busby Berkeley, 1943)

[john ryan]

5 star
Casablanca (Michael Curtiz)

4 star
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman)
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch)
The More the Merrier (George Stevens)

3 star
The Song of Bernadette (Henry King)
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood)
In Which We Serve (David Lean and Noel Coward)

2 star
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin)
Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy)

1 star
The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown)

I'd keep my top 4, but these would have made a better bottom half:

This Land is Mine (Jean Renoir)
The Ghost Ship (Mark Robson)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell, Emeric Pressburger)
Sahara (Zoltan Korda)

[flip]

i'll be tallying this on friday or thereabouts, so if anyone else wants to participate, please post a ballot soon!

[flip]

it would be great to keep a couple more ballots for this poll (for either part of it), and if anyone else might want to participate, you still have a chance! i've tallied the results so far, and i'll post them in about five hours' time, so the poll will stay open for that much longer.

anyone editing ballots: please quote the old ballot and make a new post with the new one, thanks!

[RogerTheMovieManiac]

Hi flip!

Poll #1:

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz) - 5/5
The Song of Bernadette (Henry King) - not seen
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood) - 3/5
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin) - not seen
The More the Merrier (George Stevens) - not seen
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman) - 5/5
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch) - 5/5
In Which We Serve (David Lean and Noel Coward) - seen a long time ago; I'll go with 3/5
Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy) - not seen
The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown) - not seen

Poll #2:

I Walked with a Zombie (1943)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943)
Shadow of a Doubt (1943)
Hello Frisco, Hello (1943)
Sahara (1943)

[flip]

i just saw something i found interesting on the wikipedia page for the 1943 (16th) academy awards: in the category, 'Best Scoring of a Dramatic or Comedy Picture', sixteen films were nominated... and there was a separate category for 'Best Scoring of a Musical Picture' in which a further ten films were nominated. so 26 different films got a best score nomination in 1943. and going back a couple of years, the number of noms in 1943 was slightly low for the era. i guess for several years they were really impressed with the fact that they could add music to movies...

[flip]

Results

SCFZ Awards the 1943 Best Picture to...

Casablanca (Michael Curtiz) - 4.37

the rest of the nominees, in order of finish:

The More the Merrier (George Stevens) - 4.00
The Ox-Bow Incident (William Wellman) - 3.75
Heaven Can Wait (Ernst Lubitsch) - 3.71
Madame Curie (Mervyn LeRoy) - 3.50
The Song of Bernadette (Henry King) - 3.00
In Which We Serve (David Lean and Noel Coward) - 3.00
For Whom the Bell Tolls (Sam Wood) - 2.33
Watch on the Rhine (Herman Shumlin) - 1.67
The Human Comedy (Clarence Brown) - 1.00

The actual winner was Casablanca, so SCFZ agreed with the Academy.

Eight films received at least two mentions in our alternate poll:

Five Graves to Cairo (Billy Wilder)
The Gang’s All Here (Busby Berkeley)
I Walked With a Zombie (Jacques Tourneur)
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger)
Sahara (Zoltan Korda)
The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson)
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)
Stormy Weather (Andrew L Stone)

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

The Seventh Victim (Mark Robson) -- winner
Shadow of a Doubt (Alfred Hitchcock)

[flip]

i don't know if it's worth the effort to break the tie for our alternate best pic, but i suppose it's easy enough - if anyone cares to cast a vote either for the seventh victim or for shadow of a doubt (you must have seen both to vote), post here!

the seventh victim

[Silga]

I love both films, but I'll vote for Shadow of a Doubt because I've seen it twice and it definitely holds up.

[---]

Shadow of a doubt

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

Seventh Victim!

[nrh]

seventh victim

[grabmymask]

Didn’t vote in this poll, but I’ve seen both and I’d vote for The Seventh Victim