1954 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) :

On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan)
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers (Stanley Donen)
The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk)
The Country Girl (George Seaton)
Three Coins in the Fountain (Jean Negulesco)

• 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 have only seen two of the nominees:

5 stars
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan)

2 stars
The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk)



alternate ballot (hopefully these are all properly eligible, i'll confirm that later) :

The Purple Plain (Robert Parrish)
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
Human Desire (Fritz Lang)
The Raid (Hugo Fregonese)
The Far Country (Anthony Mann)

[wba]

seen:

3 stars
On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan)

1 star
The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk)



alternate ballot:

Magnificent Obsession (Douglas Sirk)
Broken Lance (Edward Dmytryk)
Dawn at Socorro (George Sherman)
Apache (Robert Aldrich)
Track of the Cat (William Wellman)

[Evelyn Library P.I.]

4 stars
Seven Brides for Seven Brothers

3 stars
On the Waterfront

Alternate:
Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
Dawn at Socorro (George Sherman)
Creature from the Black Lagoon (Jack Arnold)

[Silga]

2 stars:

The Caine Mutiny (Edward Dmytryk)


Alternate ballot:

Rear Window (Alfred Hitchcock)
Dial M for Murder (Alfred Hitchcock)
An Inspector Calls (Guy Hamilton)
Executive Suite (Robert Wise)
The Barefoot Contessa (Joseph L. Mankiewicz)