1929 poll: SCFZ does the Oscars

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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) :

Broadway Melody (Harry Beaumont)
Alibi (Roland West)
In Old Arizona (Raoul Walsh and Irving Cummings)
Hollywood Revue (Charles Reisner)
The Patriot (Ernst Lubitsch)

• 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.

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not sure what to do about voting for The Patriot -- the trailer survives at least, so maybe we can vote based on that?

i find this a strange year -- this and 1968 are the only two years from which i haven't seen even one nominated film (unless the patriot tralier counts), and i'm not sure i've ever heard anyone even mention any of the nominees, besides the patriot of course. i'd have to check some of the 1980s-1990s nominations, but i think 1929 and 1931 might have the least-remembered-by-history slates of nominees

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Alibi - 2
The Patriot - 2

alternate ballot:

The Cameraman (Buster Keaton/Edward Sedgwick)
Piccadilly (Ewald Andre Dupont)
The Wind (Victor Sjostrom)
The Docks of New York (Josef Von Sternberg)
The Power of the Press (Frank Capra)

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

To make matters even more complicated, this is one of those weird early Oscar years that covered part of 1928 and part of 1929! Specifically, it was for films released between August 1, 1928, and July 31, 1929, so many of our favourite 1929 films would not qualify (including Applause). Not sure if it's even helpful to mention this, mind you...

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To make matters even more complicated, this is one of those weird early Oscar years that covered part of 1928 and part of 1929! Specifically, it was for films released between August 1, 1928, and July 31, 1929, so many of our favourite 1929 films would not qualify (including Applause). Not sure if it's even helpful to mention this, mind you...

oh rats... the alternate poll is meant to be for films the academy might actually have considered, so if they had a weird cutoff date back then, that makes it harder to work out what's eligible! it appears from wikipedia release dates that neither lucky star nor applause should count (though borzage's street angel does). i'll have to check my 1928 viewings to see if there's anything from that year that i might want to include...

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actually it looks like a lot of really famous 1928 films were released nearer to the end of that year, and so should be eligible for the 1929 alternate awards - i added a few to my ballot, seems strange to me that none of them got a nomination in the 1929 awards in any category though, so i'm wondering if i've misinterpreted sth

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But I mean whether an ignored film ends up on our 1928 or 1929 list, we're still showcasing the film right? I think the only problem is if ppl vote for a 1929 film that then DOES appear on the actual 1928 ballot. If it doesn't appear on either then it doesn't matter where we highlight it right?

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i agree with that when it comes to the year polls. i guess the way i'd been thinking about these "scfz redoes the academy awards" polls, we're pretending we were the academy voters, so for the polls to be what i'd imagined, we should be considering eligible exactly the films the academy thought eligible.

[john ryan]

2 Stars
Alibi
Broadway Melody
Hollywood Revue

1 Star
In Old Arizona


Alternates (I checked the imdb dates):

Thunderbolt (von Sternberg)
The Docks of New York (von Sternberg)
The Wind (Sjostrom)
The River (Borzage)
Street Angel (Borzage)

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not seen any
===============
A Cottage on Dartmoor (Anthony Asquith)
Lonesome (Paul Fejos) ... LATE 1928
The Cameraman (Buster Keaton/Edward Sedgwick) ... LATE 1928

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it took about 20 days, but i finally finished alibi, which was a chore, redeemed slightly by a few interesting sound and image elements and one truly impressive shot right at the very end that i have no idea how they pulled off. it's really the acting and pacing (and the writing) that made it hard to sit through - i wonder how many films from the first year of sound have acting that seems normal to modern audiences? and i also wonder why, when so many good 1929 films appear to have been eligible, the best picture slate was so poor this year. i haven't seen any of the other films, but they all have 2.5 overall ratings or less on letterboxd, i think.