Movie Awards : The Ultimate, Unofficial Guide to the Oscars, Golden Globes, Critics, Guild and Indie Honors (Paperback)

by Tom O'Neil (Author), Peter Bart (Foreword) "There is no such thing as a Best Picture of the Year..." (more)
Key Phrases: New York, Los Angeles, National Board of Review (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly
Every movie buff knows that it's not just the blockbusters that take home the awards; often the films that get the least hype garner the prizes. But what's the inside track to winning an award, and what do they all mean? In Movie Awards: The Ultimate, Unofficial Guide to the Oscars, Golden Globes, Critics, Guild & Indie Honors, Hollywood expert Tom O'Neil (author of Variety's The Emmys and The Grammys) leads film aficionados through every annual awards race since the silver screen's earliest days, in which directors, producers, technicians and, of course, stars try to win as many trophies as they can before reaching the finish line at the Oscars.
Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal
This directory of film awards from 1927 to 1999 offers full coverage of the Academy Awards as well as the prizes given out by the Golden Globes, Directors Guild, Writers Guild, Screen Actors Guild, Producers Guild, National Society of Film Critics, New York Film Critics Circle, Los Angeles Film Critics Association, Broadcast Film Critics Association, National Board of Review, Independent Spirits, and the Sundance Film Festival. Chronologically arranged, each entry includes a critical commentary of the awards' procedures and voting, lists of nominees and winners, behind-the-scenes happenings, announcement dates and places, and one or two small black-and-white pictures. Movie Awards concludes with a two-page commentary on each of the above groups, a chronological list of best pictures (great for quick comparisons), "kudos counts" (most awards, most nominations, trivia), nonwinners, journalists' awards, voters, and a title and name index. O'Neil writes in the breezy Variety style, which makes for good browsing, but he always zeroes in on the significant factoids and quotes. Numerous excellent books chronicle the Oscars (Robert Osborne's 70 Years of the Oscar, Abbeville, 1999) or cite awards (Peter Mowrey's Award-Winning Films, McFarland, 1993), but none combines pure pleasure and fact so well, at such a good price. Essential for all libraries. Anthony J. Adam, Prairie View A&M Univ. Lib., TX
Copyright 2001 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 816 pages
• Publisher: Perigee Trade; 1st edition (January 9, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 039952651X
• ISBN-13: 978-0399526510
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #1,623,619 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Beware of factual errors, April 4, 2001

By	Safado "brazilboy" (Brooklyn, NY United States) - See all my reviews

While this book is fun for movie trivia fans, a reader has to wonder how much fact-checking was done. In addition to a number of typos, MOVIE AWARDS also claims that Cecil B. DeMille was in charge of "Ben-Hur" and "Count Your Blessings" won the Oscar as best song of 1954. ("Three Coins in the Fountain" won.)

A number of other equally careless errors that should have been caught prior to publication make MOVIE AWARDS unreliable as a reference.

4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This Is GREATEST Oscar Book Ever!!, January 13, 2001

By	ShowbizNut (New York) - See all my reviews

Finally, all of these awards are in one book so we can see how they all affect each other! Author O'Neil likes to say "the Oscars are just the finish line in the annual film-awards derby" -- and he's right. What's really neat, though, is that, in this book, we get to see how all of the horses run in the big race year by year. I've got Tom O'Neil's other two books too (about the Emmys and Grammys) and they're really good, but this time he's outdone himself! The book came today and I CAN'T STOP reading it! The critics' awards are really SCANDALOUS. The best part of the book is the trivia section in the back. It covers who's won the most Golden Globes, DGA awards, NY critics circle awards and all that stuff. It's interesting to see how all the awards disagree on what movies (and how they all agree on Jack Nicholson -- why Jack?)

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Incredible Resource!, February 16, 2001

By	"jaobrien" (Birmingham, Alabama USA) - See all my reviews

Finally, we have a resource which discusses a lot of the other so-called "precursor" awards to the Oscars ... finding information on the history of these various awards has been somewhat difficult in the past. With this book, however, it's all together in one place. It's very well written, and leads you through the movie awards seasons, allowing one to see exactly how the different trends for certain films began, and we finally see the path they took until they finally took home the Oscar Gold! Definitely one of the best overall resources for those interested in all aspects of the film awards season.