A film critic presents his choices for who should have won the Oscars and did not, including Citizen Kane for Best Picture, listing the actual nominees and winners and explaining why the wrong person or picture is frequently honored.
Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Library Journal
This is the book that all film buffs will wish that they had written. Peary, critic and author of numerous film books including the Cult Movies volumes (Vol. 1; LJ 10/1/81), is the kind of person one wants to sit and talk film with. Here, in year-by-year format, he gives the Oscar recipients and nominees for best motion picture, best actor, and best actress. He then follows with his choices and worthy runners-up. Each pick includes a review in Peary's lively and frequently amusing style. He points out standard Oscar mistakes: e.g., Citizen Kane (1941) and Dr. Strangelove (1963) should have each won best picture awards; Henry Fonda should have won best actor for Grapes of Wrath (1940). He notes that not only did Psycho (1960) and Singin ' in the Rain (1952) not win, they weren't even nominated. This consistently fun and interesting book is absolutely essential for film collections.
- Sherle Abramson, Williamsburg Regional Lib., Va.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
- Sherle Abramson, Williamsburg Regional Lib., Va.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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More About the Author
As a boy I was passionate about sports, movies, television, and music, and now I make my living by writing about each of these topics. Pretty amazing. I was born in West Virginia, grew up in South Carolina and New Jersey, got a B.A. in History at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and an M.A. in Cinema at USC. I have been living in New York City since 1977 with my wife Suzanne (our married daughter Zoe and granddaughter Julianna live too far away in Maryland), publishing books and articles on movies and sports (mostly baseball). I watch an insane number of movies and politely root for the A's, Lakers, Giants, and UConn women in basketball. I am the writer-researcher on the long-running television interview show, "The Tim McCarver Show," and have done three books with Tim, who is a close friend. I also worked with the dear Ralph Kiner on his autobiography, "Baseball Forever." My twenty-first book, written with Tom Clavin, is my first biography, "Roger Maris: Baseball's Reluctant Hero" for Touchstone/Simon&Schuster. We have a facebook fan page for the book, for which we interviewed 130 people. I also contribute celebrity interviews on brink.com and am the New York correspondent for the Australian magazine, "FilmInk." I love to write, but there's nothing more exciting than creating a project or more satisfying than finishing it.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Brilliant Idea with Great Alternate Suggestions,
By
This review is from: Alternate Oscars (Paperback)
Have you ever watched an older movie and enjoyed it so much that you looked it up to see how many Oscars it won? How many times did you come away wondering why it wasn't even nominated for a single one? What makes a great movie great, what makes an over-rated movie over-rated, and what movies over the years have been most egregiously overlooked? "Alternate Oscars" is a book that explores these questions in a most enjoyable and enlightening way.
The author, Danny Peary, looked over the films of 1927 (the first year of the Academy Awards) through 1991 (the year he put the book together) and gave us his thoughts on who the real Academy Award winners should have been. He limited his choices to the awards for Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress and many of the alternate award winners he came up with I whole heartedly agreed with. Mind you, Peary enthusiastically agrees with some of the Oscars awarded over the years and he discards some classic movies in favor of some obscure ones. He meets his critics head on because he writes an essay explaining each of his choices. The format lists the original winner and other nominees followed by Peary's choice for winner and others that he felt worthy of nomination. The author gives himself the freedom of having one or two other nominees or seven to eight other nominees if he felt they were worthy. I the case of 1963, Peary determined that there was no winner for Best Picture because there was none worthy even of his nomination. One of the reasons that I enjoyed this book is because I had seen enough of Peary's more obscure choices to know that he was right on the money. For example, he cites with nominations for best actor, James Cagney in "One, Two, Three", Groucho Marx in "Duck Soup", and (as a co-winner for 1951) Alastair Sim in "A Christmas Carol". I was bothered by some of the great movies that he eliminated from competition but I was also pleased to see some greatly over-rated movies take the fall. I enjoy good movies just like I enjoy good books. There are far too many books out there for me to read in my brief lifetime. Therefore I do my best to understand what are the better reliable sources for me to find the books I'm more apt to enjoy. Likewise with movies, I don't have time to watch everything that's shown on Turner Classic Movies nor, I've found, would I really enjoy most of them if I did. I have found several good guides for what movies are probably worth taking the time to see. I gave this book 5 stars because, from what movies I'm already familiar with, Danny Peary seems to be able to pick 'em.
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The Power of Hindsight,
By
This review is from: Alternate Oscars (Paperback)
Is 1979's Manhattan artistically better than 2001's Joe Dirt? That's easy. Almost any film is artistically superior to the bottom-feeding Joe Dirt. But is Manhattan superior to the same year's Norma Rae? That's hard to decide. Both are credible candidates for awards from that year. I would select Norma Rae over Manhattan; on the other hand, Danny Peary prefers Manhattan. The point is that in such matters as artistic awards, the best that can be hoped for is credibility, not the finality of a Joe Dirt. Danny Peary's alternate Oscars have more credibility, in my view, than the Academy's.I'm concluding this on the basis of his selections from the 1940's, 50's, and 60's, the era I'm most famitiar with. This is also an era of studio domination, when the five major studios and the two minors engineered selections based on the money side of the industry, not the artistic. For example, big budget, prestige films dominated the nominations of 1956, including the syrupy The Ten Commandments, the Broadway hit musical The King and I, the over-produced Giant, and the eventual winner, the highly mercandised and gimmicky Around the World in 80 Days. Except for James Dean in Giant, how many of those films are remembered today. Yet anyone who has seen Peary's picks--The Searchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, and The Killing-- remembers them distinctly. Because of both theme and handling, these films register at a deeper, more lasting level than the passing spectacle of the former, a good indication of superior artistic merit. This is not meant to extrapolate into a theory of merit nor a blanket dismissal of Academy selections. Some years the picks were more credible than others. But it does point up the reigning dichotomy of that era between A-movies on one hand and B-movies on the other, with B-films by dint of their inferior budget deemed unworthy of Award consideration. Yet in retrospect, the lowly B-budgeted Body Snatchers and the independently produced The Killing have proved a staying power far beyond the A-budgeted, highly merchandised nominees of that year. And Danny Peary is dead-on in trying to right this historical wrong. Other examples of grievous B-movie neglect could be cited. My reasoning here applies only to the studio era when B-movies were produced. Nonetheless, the decline of that centralised system into today's more decentralised system doesn't mean that engineering the Awards has given way to artistic merit. I expect the mechanics are just as venal now as then, but because the industry has spread out, are harder to generalise about. Anyway, Peary's is a good, thought-provoking book that should provide plenty of grist for anyone interested in the movies. He rates in three categories: Best Picture, Best Actor, and Best Actress, explaining his choices in each, and wisely avoiding the convoluted minefields of Best Director. He not only has an appreciation of film, but a feel for movies that affect the audience. After all, in retrospect, how could the Best Film Award of 1960 have gone to any movie other than the B-budgeted Psycho. Thanks Mr. Peary for paying that long overdue bill.
7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not my choices, but WHO CARES?,
This review is from: Alternate Oscars (Paperback)
This book, as the title states, is a compilation of the author's choices for Best Picture, Actor, and Actress from 1927-1991. It's not on the same level as Peary's "Guide for the Film Fanatic," because cult films aren't included (obviously) and it's Peary's love for more obscure, curious films that I feel rates his books higher than Ebert's or Kael's. I don't think the book is meant to degrade the Academy as much as it is to expose readers to some lesser-known or underappreciated performances (I can only assume he's a big fan of Chaplin). Whatever Peary's reason for writing it, his analyses of the films and of the performances that he cites as best in every year are well-written and thorough, and this book is a treat for anyone who enjoys reading about film.
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