Frankly, Scarlett, I Don't Give a Damn

What is your worst Best Picture?

OK, it’s been a shit week, so we’re gonna do the most doofus Fun Friday imaginable. Try and stop me! Better yet, join me, run with me through verdant fields of doofdom!

As some of you may know, the Oscar nominations came out on Thursday. And as most of you must know, I’m a big old Oscar nerd. When I was a school-play actor I dreamed of one day winning one. In fact I had this particular book of Academy Award winners, with a format pitched right down my street, an anal-retentive’s dream: For every year, one page each, with a photo, of the Best Picture, Actor, and Actress winners; one page shared, with photos, of the Supporting Actor and Actress winners; and a page or two without photos of all the other winners — in every case accompanied by, in mouse type, the other nominees, which in those pre-internet days was kind of amazing — where was I going to look those up in 1970, the Encyclopedia Brittanica? How else could I have possibly learned that there were 17 nominees for Best Score in 1940? (Pinocchio beat Meredith Wilson, Aaron Copland, and Miklós Rózsa! That still blows my mind.)

Year after year I’d watch the show with my mother, dazzled by the celebrities and the glamor; later, in my slum apartments, usually alone (my friends just didn’t get it), I’d watch on a tiny shit TV, swigging from a bottle of champagne. Well, my dreams of glory are all ended, but I can still dig the tinsel and glamor; also the nominations get me to watch more movies than I might have made time for otherwise, on the excuse of keeping you good people up to date — but really, mostly, because it ignites my movie-love, otherwise suppressed by overwork and old age but rising reliably like sap in the spring whenever the glittering prizes are dangled.

I’ve also backfilled, as I could, old Oscar winners for days gone by. I’ve now seen 86 of the 96 Best Picture winners. So, when I make this statement, while it is not fully informed or definitive, it is a reasonably good bet to be accurate, or at least defensible:

I say Gone With The Wind is the Worst Best Picture.

Mind you, I’ve seen some stinkers. The Broadway Melody is a dull artifact of the age before movie musicals learned how to swing; You Can’t Take It With You makes the Kaufman and Hart comedy, which should have been played with Marx Brothers brio, rather stodgy (though I understand the director picked up his stride later); Chariots of Fire is, besides Ian Holm, a sludgy River Thames of neo-patriotic bullshit.

And CODA, oy. I was generous when I reviewed it in 2022 but:

Ruby tries out for the school choir because a boy she thinks is cute is doing it too, but she can’t seem to relax and let her voice out around people (stop) and the imperious music teacher (stop) not only gets her angry enough to open up (STOP) but discovers she has a gift and wants her to audition for Berklee (STAHHP!)

Like I said then: strictly from Hallmark.

But I’ve always hated Gone With The Wind. When I first saw it, in one of its many theatrical revivals, I hated its forced grandeur and what, even as a teenager, I sniffed out as its con for sympathy — why, exactly, was I supposed to feel bad for this bitch? Because she lost control of her slaves and had to eat a turnip?

It's dramaturgically overstuffed, in the way one would expect of a massive mid-list mid-century best-seller once the Hollywood juice-squeezers got hold of it. The Melanie and Ashley subplots zip by without making any kind of emotional impact, leaving audiences to wait for Rhett Butler to come back or Scarlett to do something interesting besides vomit.

Also: I am not one to minimize antique spectacle because it doesn’t come up to contemporary technological standards — the Douglas Trumbull effects in 2001: A Space Odyssey still slap because they’re clear and consistent and suit the look and feel of the movie, and if anything the old-fashioned camera mechanics of Shanghai Express, Great Expectations, and She Wore a Yellow Ribbon just make the visuals more delicious. But the allegedly great GWTW showpieces have never done anything for me; I find the Burning of Atlanta corny (even when I turn off my natural disposition to feel they had it coming) and the field hospital scene I mainly read as “wow lookit all them extras.”

The actors are good and the Max Steiner music is gorgeous. But, look, the picture had three directors — all major talents — two cinematographers, and a monomaniac producer; the strain of its stitching-up is visible. I really believe its inflated reputation has to do with the amount of money dumped on it, a desire to sanctify the 1939 Hollywood Annus Mirabilis (in which all the other Best Picture nominees are better), an attempt in the industry to push Technicolor and, frankly, a way to show sympathy to the South, which was a major money generator for the film industry but whose citizens were mainly portrayed in motion pictures as slack-jawed yokels and pig-eyed plantocrats. (And, I would submit, part of the whole GWTW revival impetus had something to do with how much worse the South would be portrayed in the 1960s and 70s.)

OK, guys, your turn! Surely there’s a Best Picture winner that you think is shit. Or maybe you’d prefer to tell us about an Oscar winner in another category you dislike. Sing out! Don’t be shy! After all, these people are all laureled and rich — even if still alive they won’t be wounded by your disapprobation.

BTW, my first three reviews of BP nominees — Conclave, A Complete Unknown, and The Brutalist — are already up, and I have a few in the chamber — watch this space!