1964's Oscar Nominees

Looking to get our first unanimous choice.

Previous Oscar category polls:

Picture 1939: 1939's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1940: 1940's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1950: 1950's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1962: 1962's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1967: 1967's Oscar Nominees (inspired by "Pictures at a Revolution")
Picture 1969: 1969's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1970: 1970's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1971: 1971's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1973: 1973's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1974: 1974's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1975: 1975's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1976: 1976 Oscar Nominees
Picture 1977: 1977's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1979: 1979's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1980: 1980's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1982: 1982's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1989: 1989's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1990: 1990's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1991: 1991's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1993: 1993's Best Picture Oscar Nominees
Picture 1994: 1994's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1995: 1995's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1996: 1996's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1997: http://www.ilxor.com/ILX/ThreadSelectedControllerServlet?boardid=40&threadid=76886
Picture 1998: 1998's Oscar Nominees
Picture 1999: 1999's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2001: 2001's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2005: 2005's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2007: 2007's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2011: 2011's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2012: 2012's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2013: 2013's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2014: 2014's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2015: 2015's Oscar Nominees
Picture 2016: 2016's Oscar Nominees
Worst Picture 80s: WORST of the Best Picture Oscar Noms (Only The '80s Edition)
Worst Picture 90s: WORST of the Best Picture Oscar Noms (Only the '90s Edition)
Worst Picture 00s: WORST of the Best Picture Oscar Noms (Only the '00s Edition ... except 2009)

Actress 1950: 1950 Best Actress Nominees
Actress 1992: Best Actress Nominees - 1992
Actress 1993: 1993's Best Actress Oscar Nominees
Actress 1996: 1996's Best Actress Oscar Nominees
Actress Overall 1990s: BEST of the Best Actress Oscar Noms (Only The '90s Edition)
Worst Actress Consistently Nominated: Who is the worst actress to have been consistently nominated for an Oscar?

Actor 1982: 1982's Best Actor Oscar Nominees
Actor 1997: 1997 Best Actor Oscar Winners
Actor Overall 1990s: BEST of the Best Actor Oscar Noms (Only The '90s Edition)
Worst Actor Consistently Nominated: Who is the worst actress to have been consistently nominated for an Oscar?

Supporting Actress 1976: 1976's Best Supporting Actress Oscar Nominees

Song 2011: Oscar-nominated "Best Original Song" 2012

Looking to get our first unanimous choice.

― Anne of the Thousand Gays (Eric H.), Thursday, November 2, 2017

Well, you can vote for Zorba if you want.

Um diddle diddle diddle um diddle ay.

have never seen Zorba or Becket

voted showoff

Have never seen anything showoff! Will probably use this as a reason to finally watch My Fair Lady, though I'd be amazed if it challenged my vote in any way.

*anything BUT

Becket is fairly explicit about the homo longing b/w Henry and his priest, and both actors are in their hammy prime.

hammy and hammered

Looking to get our first unanimous choice

On ILX? That would be a sign of the apocalypse.

I haven't seen Mary Poppins since I was eight.

Poppins is charming, as you might expect from the two lead actors. It has that Disney homogeneity and cuteness, but manages to transcend it -- to the extent that's possible.

Voting Poppins.

I don't know how I got out of my childhood without having seen it. I probably should, one day, just to see if it challenges my assumption that Disney live action invariably sucks.

https://www.theguardian.com/film/2017/jul/21/dick-van-dyke-sorry-for-cockney-accent-mary-poppins-disney

Voting Poppins.

*high five*

aw

The award will be presented at the 2017 AMD British Academy Britannia awards. Bafta’s Los Angeles chief executive, Chantal Rickards, said: “We look forward to his acceptance speech in whatever accent he chooses on the night. We have no doubt it will be supercalifragilisticexpialidocious.”

Poppins is remarkable for being a psychedelic anti-capitalist screed several years before such things became way more popular and much crappier

imagine if Poppins had sided with the Tories

also remarkable for being against women's suffrage

yeah the gender politics in it are p strange - Dad is a hard-nosed but unhappy trad-patriarch who learns to loosen up and not care about modern trappings of power, but otoh the suffragette Mom is portrayed as clownishly naive, little more than a child herself.

I am legit torn between Strangelove and Poppins

are Becket and Zorba worth watching?

Becket is bollocks.

Becket yes as an above average prestige costume picture, Zorba eh if you're curious about Anthony Quinn free of any restraint, acting or otherwise. Tony Unbound

Admiral Boom is kind of a Dr. Strangelove figure, now that I think about it

https://jacoblwilliams.files.wordpress.com/2016/02/tumblr_medako7zun1qlzduwo1_500.gif

We're being attacked by hottentots!

Mary Poppins is amazing. The songs are so damn good.

okay now someone defend The Sound of Music

The Sound of Music is a movie. The songs were so damn popular.

ther little girl asking "can i sing about my favorite things?" while they're hiding from the Nazis always got a laugh from me.

the first half of Sound of Music is great. the second half where they just reprise all the songs from the first half except with more Nazis is lame.

i do love My Fair Lady but i can't front here

Gebert: "The nuns sabotaged our Nazi trucks? How cute! Shoot them with our tiniest guns!"

Mary Poppins has good songs but is horribly paced and drags like fuck for adults, never mind kids

Strangelove is a superbly crafted tour de force. Poppins is Disney, along with all that implies, but it has a warm, beating heart that is hard to dismiss.

Zorba is self-congratulatory bombast. My Fair Lady is competent on all fronts, but suffers tremendously next to Poppins. I may have seen Becket, but if I did it slips my mind.

Prediction: Strangelove will grab all the formalist vote. Poppins will get all the sentimentalists. The winner will be the one that gets the centrist swing voters.

I don't remember much about Becket, pretty sure Richard Burton has a Saxon haircut and Peter O'Toole a Norman one, Burton is supposed to be the same age as O'Toole but looks 20 years older.

Voting Dr. Strangelove, btw.

horribly paced and drags like fuck

Any movie from prior to roughly 1993 at this point can be accused of this, I found out when trying to watch Young Frankenstein with some people who had never seen it.

Poppins has rum punch.

Burton is supposed to be the same age as O'Toole but looks 20 years older.

Too much hard living.

I watched Mary Poppins last year and it was a delight from start to finish.

Similarly, my wife got me the DVD of "Singin In The Rain" for my birthday since I couldn't make the theatrical rerelease and it also holds up; she had never seen it before and thought it was captivating.

(xp) Whereas nary a drop e'er passed O'Toole's lips.

Rewatched Poppins a couple years ago; maybe 15 minutes too long but no major complaints.

My Fair Lady is a very competent, rather uncinematic recording of a great Broadway musical and one of its lead performances (Harrison). That George Cukor could bring so little flavor to it is testimony against the worst aspects of 'big-budget battleship' filmmaking at the dusk of Old Hollywood.

Any movie from prior to roughly 1993 at this point can be accused of not being designed for gamers/ web-nursed dingalings.

yeah Mary Poppins is pretty well paced until just towards the end imo, and I've rewatched it many times in recent years with my kids (who have no problem sitting through it's entire length)

That chimney sweep dance routine on the rooftops is the fuckin' business.

(Eric, couldn't it be that half the gags in Young Frankenstein are dependent on basic familiarity with even older movies?)

Gentle-humor-to-the-max, but I got a few laughs outta this...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mFOTrwjSbBU

Not a great movie year for me--much more happening in music. My two favourite '64 films would be Band of Outsiders and The Best Man (which is better if you're really interested in political films--the electoral kind--and Nixon). A Hard Day's Night has great sequences, but I've never loved it--I'm more of a Help! guy because of the songs.

this is what I came up with last year:

Band of Outsiders (Jean-Luc Godard)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy)
A Hard Day’s Night (Richard Lester)
The Best Man (Franklin J. Schaffner)
Charulata (Satyajit Ray)
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (Stanley Kubrick)
Cheyenne Autumn (John Ford)
The Killers (Don Siegel)
Intentions of Murder (Shohei Imamura)
Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer)

Every time I re-watch Strangelove I remember that George C Scott gives the film's funniest performance (though Sellers as Lionel Mandrake runs him a close second - "the strings in my legs").

i remember reading somewhere that scott was planning a more measured performance but kubrick pushed him to give at least one insane line-reading in every setup, then ended up using all the over-the-top takes in the final edit

Scott >> Sellers

i'd say so too - scott's mix of apelike bravado and total idiocy is perfect

sterling hayden's utterly committed deadpan gets me every time too, his ramrod-straight recitation of his batshit delusions is amazing

Not that it matters, but Scott and Hayden play men whom I can believe Trump (and W, and Reagan) would surround himself with.

Gertrud (Carl Theodor Dreyer, Denmark)
The Naked Kiss (Samuel Fuller, USA)
I Am Cuba (Mikheil Kalatozishvili, USSR/Cuba)
Yearning (Mikio Naruse, Japan)
The Patsy (Jerry Lewis, USA)
Marnie (Alfred Hitchcock, USA)
Red Desert (Michelangelo Antonioni, Italy)
Scorpio Rising (Kenneth Anger, USA)
The Umbrellas of Cherbourg (Jacques Demy, France)
Strait-Jacket (William Castle, USA)

Top 4 are out-and-out masterpieces. The next two to four just behind. Great, great year.

oh yeah, i'm certain some knuckle-dragging oaf in trump circles has used a variation on 'mr president, i'm not saying we wouldn't get our hair mussed' when discussing the options for north korea xp

how'd you watch the Naruse?

On Hulu, back when they had the Criterion partnership (there was tons of unreleased Naruse there at the time).

I regret that I didn't watch more of them, tbh, because they were gone not long after.

yeah, he's impossible to find. I've only watched the Criterion edition of When a Woman....

Some cities have gotten retrospectives; mine wasn't among them.

Plenty of Naruse available on DVD:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_2?url=search-alias%3Ddvd&field-keywords=naruse

in the UK

I enjoy Scott's wild-eyed Turgidson, but Hayden plays General Ripper straight ("It was during the physical act of love") and lets the lines bring the laughs, much like Leslie Nielsen 1980-82, before he falsely believed himself to be a comedian.

Typo: you meant "1992."

nope he's hamming like your drunk uncle in the first Naked Gun movie ('88)

xpost
A fair number of those discs listed are either Region 1 coded, or Region free, and besides, all-region blu ray and DVD players are pretty cheap. I expect there are plenty of sellers on Amazon and elsewhere who will ship to the US.

Criterion/Filmstruck has 15 of the 16 Naruses that Criterion/Hulu had -- only missing Sound of the Mountain.

Eric's pref for The Patsy over Dr S and Shot in the Dark proves he likes good comedies where you laugh 3 times.

in some of my favorite comedies I don't laugh once.

Kwaidan shamefully overlooked in this thread (of course only shown in the US, mutilated, in '65); also Frankenheimer's The Train, and Goldfinger.

in some of my favorite comedies I don't laugh once

See: Gertrud

The Train is fine, I'd never include it in a top tetn.

I might, but at minimum it's better than 2-4 of the nominees above.

We discuss best-of-year to pad out these threads, when that has little to do with the Oscars, any damn year.

I think if you ask the mods politely they'll give you a badge.

Gertrud was, before the home video explosion, almost impossible to see in the UK. Eventually the National Film Theatre in London managed to unearth a French subtitled print that they screened with earphone commentary (ie a woman rather listlessly reading a translation of the French subtitles in real time) - one of the most maddening viewing experiences I've ever had in a cinema.

(ie The Train is v possibly one of the 5 best Anglo-American studio films of '64, but those people don't even recognize the best of Hollywood) xxp

I don't need no stinking rotten etc

see this thread worked because I got the crucial nudge into joining Filmstruck. I now get to watch Late Chrysanthemums later.

Nice! That was one of the ones I missed.

Great movies that haven't been mentioned so far:

Seduced & Abandoned
The Married Woman
The Americanization Of Emily"

Not great but I have fondness for Anthony Mann's Fall Of The Roman Empire too.

Carry on Cleo
Carry on Spying
The Gorgon (perhaps Terence Fisher's most beautiful film)
The Masque of the Red Death (perhaps Roger Corman's most beautiful film)
The Tomb of Ligeia

The Americanization of Emily is one of the most ideologically incoherent American films I've ever seen. (de rigueur for that putz Paddy Chayefsky)

yeah, I'm not huge on Corman/AIP stuff but Masque of the Red Death is classic.

It's certainly confused! Part of the appeal for me.

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

I've never gotten strangelove, nor sellers tbh. Have sat down manys the time and just can't get into it.

Becket is tawdry stuff

My fair lady has the dreadful main turn from Hepburn, despite the excellence of everyone else. Also lags a bit.

Ain't seen zorba but I do like the theme

It's Poppins, easy

I actually ended up liking My Fair Lady a bit better than Mary Poppins, although they are both victims of the bloat that had infected the big Hollywood musicals of the era (is the contemporary equivalent to the 60s musical the superhero film?). If anything, Mary actually felt even longer than Lady to me.

Doing 1950 and 1964 back to back does highlight one thing, though: Cukor sure loved this "lets refine an uncouth woman" plot.

So yeah, glad I could cross two more notable blindspots off of my watchlist, but my vote still goes to Strangelove, easily.

If anything, Mary actually felt even longer than Lady to me.

Seriously? My Fair Lady felt longer than War and Peace to me.

I think I might still be in the middle of watching it.

well you famously hate tuneful musicals, honeybunch.

Doing 1950 and 1964 back to back does highlight one thing, though: Cukor sure loved this "lets refine an uncouth woman" plot.

Except the plot of MFL dated back to 1913 (?) with Shaw, and lots further w/ Pygmalion and Galatea. It was a plum assignment to do the biggest musical hit of the era, but obviously the production intended nothing but a stuffed-and-mounted replication of Broadway wherever possible.

(Born Yesterday was also a big theatre success, tho not as gargantuan)

well you famously hate tuneful musicals, honeybunch

That accusation will not stand.

if someone offered you a time-travel orchestra seat to MFL in 1956 with Rex and Julie, would you spread your wings and do a thousand things?

if someone gave me a camera..

xp I'd be too busy contemplating whatever Lola wants.

Everyone should check the wiki for Gabriel Pascal, producer of the original Pygmalion, and the only guy Shaw trusted to turn his plays into film. The whole thing is kinda insane. Due to him Shaw is one of the only people who has won both an Oscar and a Nobel. He won for Best Script for Pygmalion. Pascal apparently contributed a single line to the script: 'The Rain in Spain Falls Mainly on the Plain'. He should have shared the Oscar.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

Pretty close to record participation fwiw.

champion to champion