Ratszapoppin!

I have wanted to write this blog item for literally months now, but I didn't have what they call in the news business a "peg."

Well, now I have a peg. Oh, boy do I have a peg.

I'm sure at least some of you have seen the gruesome images broadcast on New York TV of a dozen rats scampering around inside a KFC/Taco Bell store in Greenwich Village the other day. The story got a huge amount of press, and if you go on You Tube and type in "KFC rats" I'm sure you'll be able to find some of the footage.

This is not to bash KFC or Taco Bell or the parent company that owns the store in the Village. They're just the scapegoats here. The real problem is much bigger.

The problem is that, at the moment, New York City, and Manhattan in particular, is swarming with rats. Thousands of them. There are more rats running around in plain sight in Manhattan right now then there have been at any time in living memory -- it's an epidemic.

If you take the N or the R local train uptown late at night, sit in the first car right behind the motorman. Wait until the train pulls into the 34th Street station. As the doors open, keep your eyes on the floor. Chances are that you're going to see a rat on the platform scampering right in front of you. The odds are better than 50/50. I refer to it as "the floor show."

My street is swarming with rats. If you walk down it late at night you're apt to be run over by one of them -- which is why, if it's late enough, I've taken to walking in the middle of the street rather than the sidewalk. I'd rather take my chances with an oncoming cab than with the rats. The rats are bigger.

A lot of this has to do with the frenzy of construction that's been going on of late in Manhattan. Whenever there's a lot of construction the rats are driven out of their hiding places and they have to find new ones -- so they scatter. Lately they have scattered into my building, where they have been making a concerted effort to enter the apartments of myself and my neighbors. When the sound of rats trying to claw into your apartment is so loud that it wakes you up out of a sound sleep, you know that you have a serious problem.

It remains to be seen what the mayor and the city is planning to do, if anything, about this problem. I complained to the MTA about the rat problem at the Penn Station subway stop and got a placebo-esque e-mail in response.

But they better do something, because what we saw, and were sickened by, at the Greenwich Village KFC is just the tip of the iceberg.

Tom Moran

Note: I was laid up with the flu this past week, so I've gotten a little behind in my revisionist Oscar survey. I'll take it up again this coming week, as well as a discussion of the AFI's upcoming special on "100 Years, 100 Films." This is the second time they're doing this poll, and the last time was a disaster. Will they do better this time? I'll discuss it at length.

What Should Have Won, Part III: The 1950s

We are now entering Part III of our revisionist journey through the history of the Oscars. This time we deal with the 1950s.

First, a reminder of the rules: a given film has to have been nominated for at least one Academy Award in any category (not necessarily Best Picture) to be given the Oscar, and no foreign films are eligible.

Still with me? Then let’s move on to the 1950s:

1950

What film won Best Picture: All About Eve
What film should have won: Sunset Boulevard

Both the Oscars and the New York Film Critics agreed this year on Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s elegant and literate comedy about the theater, All About Eve. But I can’t help but think that they were both wrong and that the Golden Globes got it right. In retrospect, it’s pretty clear that Billy Wilder’s Sunset Boulevard is the better film – from the dazzling cinematography of John Seitz to the gorgeously baroque performance of Gloria Swanson as the delusion silent film diva Norma Desmond, it teems with the larger-than-life excess of 20s Hollywood (which makes the workaday film industry of the late 40s seem pretty pedestrian by comparison).

1951

What film won Best Picture: An American in Paris
What film should have won: A Streetcar Named Desire

Musicals almost never win Best Picture, so why am I being so churlish in denying Vincente Minnelli’s An American in Paris the Oscar? Well, the fact is that An American in Paris is pretty much my least favorite MGM musical, and I’ve always found it particularly ironic that MGM made a film about an American going to Paris to become a painter at the very time that New York was supplanting Paris as the capital of the art world. It’s a little too arty and pretentious for my taste, and the ballet at the end butchers Gershwin’s music. My vote would have gone to Elia Kazan’s masterful adaptation of Tennessee Williams’ play, with Marlon Brando immortalizing his Broadway performance as Stanley and Vivien Leigh deserving her second Academy Award for playing Blanche – which, as Brando once pointed out, wasn't much of a stretch for Ms. Leigh.

1952

What film won Best Picture: The Greatest Show on Earth
What film should have won: Singin’ in the Rain

It’s hard to believe that what most people think of as the greatest musical ever to come out of Hollywood wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture, but to give the Oscar to Cecil B. DeMille’s idiotic Ringling Bros. travesty, one of the worst films ever to win Best Picture, is adding insult to injury. Of the films nominated for Best Picture that year, John Ford’s The Quiet Man is easily the best, but I have to go with Kelly and Donen’s loving homage to 1920s Hollywood. In case you’re wondering, the New York Film Critics gave their award to High Noon, and while Singin’ in the Rain was nominated for a Golden Globe in the Comedy or Musical category, it lost to With a Song in My Heart.

1953

What film won Best Picture: From Here to Eternity
What film should have won: Stalag 17

Giving the Oscar to Fred Zinneman’s cleaned-up adaptation of the James Jones novel was a defensible choice (it was the choice of the New York Film Critics as well), but I would have gone with Billy Wilder’s taut P.O.W. saga, which includes William Holden’s definitive anti-hero as Sefton, and director Otto Preminger as the snarling Commandant who wishes that he could have given his prisoners a white Christmas: “Just like ze vonz you used to know.”

1954

What film won Best Picture: On the Waterfront
What film should have won: On the Waterfront/Rear Window

It’s pretty obvious that the Academy got it right when they voted for Elia Kazan’s noir-ish dockworker drama (which was the choice of the Golden Globes and the New York Film Critics as well), but I can’t help feeling that Hitchcock’s elegant study in voyeurism deserved the award just as much. So I’m calling it a tie.

1955

What film won Best Picture: Marty
What film should have won: East of Eden

Marty was the Rocky of its day – the little film about a lower-class guy that you rooted for in his quest for bourgeois domesticity, and the Academy went for it, as did the New York Film Critics. Oddly enough, the Golden Globes got it right, and gave their award to Elia Kazan for East of Eden. The mid-50s were definitely the Age of Kazan in Hollywood: he dominated the era as only Griffith had dominated it before, and as no director has dominated it since.

1956

What film won Best Picture: Around the World in 80 Days
What film should have won: Baby Doll/Written on the Wind

There are some years when I’m not sure the Academy should give out a Best Picture Oscar at all. Sometimes I wish they would take after the Pulitzer Prize, which in some years just doesn’t give out an award for drama if they don’t think the competition is strong enough. 1956 is one of those years where none of the nominated films really hold up (as we’ll see, 1988 is another such year). I don’t think I could have stomached voting for Mike Todd’s banal adaptation of the Jules Verne novel, but none of the other Best Picture nominees were much better. So I’m calling it a tie between Elia Kazan’s black comedy of pedophilic lust in the deep South (from a Tennessee Williams original screenplay), and Douglas Sirk’s scathing melodrama, Written on the Wind.

1957

What film won Best Picture: The Bridge on the River Kwai
What film should have won: Witness for the Prosecution

Not one but two of the best films released this year were not nominated for a single Oscar – Kazan’s A Face in the Crowd and Alexander Mackendrick’s Sweet Smell of Success. Either one of them would be preferable to any of the films nominated in the Best Picture category, including the overrated David Lean film that actually won. But if I had to choose one of the films nominated for an Oscar that year to give the Best Picture award to, it would be Billy Wilder’s Witness for the Prosecution – a taut murder mystery with a plot that keeps you guessing until the very last minute and a bravura performance by Charles Laughton.

1958

What film won Best Picture: Gigi
What film should have won: Vertigo/Some Came Running

I have Vincente Minnelli beating himself this year, for while I have a fondness for Gigi (in particular because it spells the end of an era of musicals at MGM), I can’t help but thinking that Some Came Running, from the James Jones novel, is the better film. But along with that I have to give a nod to Hitchcock’s classic tale of obsessive love, Vertigo. This might have been a good year for a three-way tie, but Orson Welles’s Touch of Evil wasn’t nominated for a single Oscar. Both the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes gave their Best Picture award to The Defiant Ones.

1959

What film won Best Picture: Ben-Hur
What film should have won: Some Like It Hot

Ben-Hur was the Titanic of the 1950s, winning just about every award in sight. But it’s clear, almost fifty years later, that its sword and sandal glories are a little faded, and the chariot race pales beside the silent version, where the Romans don’t speak with British accents. The film that should have won Best Picture that year was Billy Wilder’s cross-dressing comedy Some Like It Hot, with brilliant performances by Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon and a dazzling one from Marilyn Monroe.

That ends the 1950s. I’ll move on to the 60s in a few days.

Tom Moran

What Should Have Won, Part II: The 1940s

We’re in decade two of our revisionist look at the Oscars. A reminder of the rules: I can only choose films that were nominated for at least one Oscar that year (although it doesn’t have to be for Best Picture), and no foreign films are eligible.

Still with me? Okay, let’s proceed:

1940

What film won Best Picture: Rebecca
What film should have won: The Grapes of Wrath/The Philadelphia Story

1940 was a tough year to make a Best Picture choice. At least five of the nominated films were legitimate contenders and have become classics. While the Academy chose Alfred Hitchcock’s Rebecca (the only Hitchcock film to win Best Picture, but since the producer picks up the Best Picture Oscar David O. Selznick won for the second year in a row), the New York Film Critics Circle went with John Ford’s film of Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath. But how can you choose between that and George Cukor’s elegant adaptation of Phillip Barry’s effortlessly sophisticated The Philadelphia Story, with a dream cast including Katharine Hepburn, Jimmy Stewart and Cary Grant? You can’t, obviously, so I’m calling it a tie. There will be more ties as we go along.

1941

What film won Best Picture: How Green Was My Valley
What film should have won: Citizen Kane

1941 is pretty universally considered the greatest injustice in the history of the Academy Awards. While Citizen Kane is thought by almost everyone to be the greatest film of all time, the fact is that, as Andrew Sarris has noted, How Green Was My Valley is the greatest film ever to win the Best Picture Oscar (if you don’t count Sunrise, which technically didn’t win Best Picture). Nonetheless, I’m going with Orson Welles.

1942

What film won Best Picture: Mrs. Miniver
What film should have won: The Magnificent Ambersons

The Oscar went to William Wyler’s propaganda film about the stiff upper lip the Brits were keeping in the face of the Nazi onslaught, and the New York Film Critics went with another such film, Noel Coward’s In Which We Serve. But it’s clear that the best film of the year, even if its truncated form, is The Magnificent Ambersons, the Orson Welles masterpiece about the decline and fall of a once-proud American family. The biggest shame since the film was butchered by RKO is that it is still not available on DVD in America.

1943

What film won Best Picture: Casablanca
What film should have won: Casablanca

This year the Academy got it right: while the New York Film Critics shut out Michael Curtiz’s WWII epic entirely (opting instead for Watch on the Rhine), but the Oscar for Best Picture went to Warner Bros. romantic saga of star-crossed lovers in the deserts of North Africa. But shockingly, one of the greatest casts ever assembled for a Hollywood film was shut out altogether – and Ingrid Bergman wasn’t even nominated for Best Actress for her work on the film (she did get a nomination that year, but for another film entirely – For Whom The Bell Tolls). It’s too bad that the Academy can’t do what they sometimes do at Cannes, and give an award to the entire cast.

1944

What film won Best Picture: Going My Way
What film should have won: Double Indemnity

This is another incomprehensible injustice perpetrated by the Academy. While Leo McCarey’s feel-good piece of Catholic schmaltz won both the Best Picture Oscar and the award from the New York Film Critics, it’s blatantly obvious in retrospect that the best film that year was Billy Wilder’s prototypical film noir, Double Indemnity. Incredibly, the film was totally shut out at the Oscars – director Billy Wilder, writers Wilder and Raymond Chandler, cinematographer John Seitz and actress Barbara Stanwyck all lost in their respective categories – and Fred MacMurray wasn’t even nominated in his. The Academy seemed to realize that they blew it this year, because they made it up to Wilder the next year, the way they made it up to Jimmy Stewart for not giving him the Oscar for Mr. Smith Goes to Washington by giving him the award for The Philadelphia Story the next year. If Double Indemnity had any real competition for the Best Picture Oscar, it should have come from the Preston Sturges classic The Miracle of Morgan’s Creek, but with Sturges gone from the studio by then (and not on the best of terms) Paramount wasn’t in much of a mood to promote him for an award.

1945

What film won Best Picture: The Lost Weekend
What film should have won: They Were Expendable

As I’ve said, the Academy made it up to Billy Wilder for the Double Indemnity debacle by giving him Best Picture for his harrowing portrayal of an alcoholic, The Lost Weekend. But had I been voting I would have given the award to a film that wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture that year (in fact, it only got two nominations – for Sound Recording and Special Effects): John Ford’s They Were Expendable. Shot while the war was still being fought, released after it was over, it was a film that was easy to neglect in the months after the surrender of the Japanese, but in retrospect it’s one of John Ford’s finest and most heartfelt films.

1946

What film won Best Picture: The Best Years of Our Lives
What film should have won: Notorious

It was probably inevitable that William Wyler’s bloated paean to returning vets should win the Best Picture Oscar the year after the war ended (it won the award from the New York Film Critics as well), but I would prefer to go with a very different film – Alfred Hitchcock’s Notorious. Not only a suspense film but arguably the greatest love story Hitchcock ever filmed, to me it represents the zenith of Hollywood filmmaking in this era. Ben Hecht’s script, the performances of Cary Grant and Ingrid Bergman and Hitchcock’s direction all combine to make one of the greatest film ever to come out of Hollywood. And you know what the amazing thing is? Neither the film nor any of the people I just mentioned (with the exception of Hecht) were even nominated for Oscars that year.

1947

What film won Best Picture: Gentleman’s Agreement
What film should have won: Monsieur Verdoux

Just as The Best Years of Our Lives, with its focus on the lives of returning veterans, was the natural choice in 1946, the following year saw Elia Kazan’s hymn to religious tolerance, Gentleman’s Agreement, take home the Oscar. But if you’ve seen it lately you’ll notice that while it’s well intended it doesn’t wear particularly well: it’s all too slick, too mannered for its incendiary subject matter. I would have given the Oscar to a film that, while similarly flawed, had the virtue of telling the postwar audience something they weren’t prepared to hear – Charlie Chaplin’s sardonic comedy of murders, Monsieur Verdoux. Just the notion of making an analogy between serial killing and war was probably too much for triumphant Americans, bracing for a Cold War with the Russians, to deal with at the time, but even though it may be flawed in some serious ways, the message of the film is more pertinent now than ever.

1948

What film won Best Picture: Hamlet
What film should have won: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre

Olivier’s Freudian adaptation of Shakespeare’s tragedy took home the Oscar, but I think the New York Film Critics got it right when they awarded their Best Film to John Huston’s masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. In the prosperity of the postwar era, was anyone prepared to accept Huston’s unsparing depiction of the destructive effects of human greed? Not bloody likely. But there’s no question that Olivier’s reductive Shakespeare pales besides Huston’s harrowing portrayal of what men will do to each other, and to themselves, for riches.

1949

What film won Best Picture: All The King’s Men
What film should have won: Battleground

The Academy and the New York Film Critics agreed on the merits of Robert Rossen’s adaptation of the Robert Penn Warren novel, but Rossen didn’t win either for writing or directing (those awards went to Joseph L. Mankiewicz for A Letter to Three Wives). But I would have given the Oscar to a far different film – William Wellman’s unsparing depiction of the Battle of the Bulge, Battleground. Maybe it came out when the audience was tired of war films, but after almost 60 years it holds up as one of the best portrayals of World War II by the generation that fought it.

That’s all for the 1940s. In a few days I’ll move on to the 1950s.

Tom Moran

Oliver Stone on the Bush Dynasty

I don't know how long this quote has been out there (I read it online but the quote originates from Esquire magazine), but the minute I read it I knew that I had to post it here because it's so brilliant and so spot-on (as the British say).

It's Oliver Stone discussing the Bush Dynasty:

The march of time is stunning. It's been one surprise after another. No one could ever have predicted President Reagan and his success. Never. We knew him as a General Electric actor. No one could have predicted the Bush dynasty, either. Such a strange story. In a sense, it's totally Manchurian Candidate. There's George Bush Sr., pushed around by his strong and stunning wife, a perfect match for the Angela Lansbury character. Barbara Bush is the brains and strength of that family, a true matriarch. Young Bush is like the Laurence Harvey figure. Very scary. Very spooky. Brainwashed. He has a vacancy in his eyes. We've all seen it. I don't know why more people didn't see it in the first place.

Can't do better than that, can you?

Tom Moran

Anna Nicole Smith: 1967-2007

When I heard that Anna Nicole Smith had died, and that people on the news were comparing her to Marilyn Monroe, I couldn't help but think of what Karl Marx wrote in The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte:

Hegel remarks somewhere that all great, world-historical facts and personages occur, as it were, twice. He has forgotten to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.

That's really it, isn't it? Marilyn Monroe was the tragedy. Anna Nicole Smith was the farce. It's hard, though, to turn on the news and look at the photo of Anna Nicole with her son and newborn baby and realize that two of the three people in that photo would be dead within six months. Then you think about the little girl she left behind -- and that's when the farce turns back into a tragedy.

Tom Moran

My New My Space Page

I just wanted to let some of my faithful readers know that I have finally put up a page on My Space. Figured it was about time.

So if you're at all interested in learning a little more about me than can be discerned from reading this blog, feel free to check it out:

http://www.myspace.com/tommorannyc

Tom Moran

What Should Have Won, Part I: The 1930s

Since the Academy Awards are this month, I thought I would spend February hosting a little experiment.

What kind of experiment, do you ask?

Well, pretty much everyone knows that the Motion Picture Academy almost always chooses the wrong film to win the Best Picture Oscar. You can probably think of about a dozen examples at random. So what I thought I would do is spend this month going through the Oscars decade by decade (starting in 1934, the first year that the Oscars were given out for films made in a single year) and choose what I think should have won the Academy Award for Best Picture that year.

First the rules: in order to win Best Picture the film has to have been nominated for an Oscar that year in at least one category (not necessarily Best Picture). Ironically, some classic films were not nominated for a single Academy Award: City Lights, Modern Times, A Face in the Crowd, Touch of Evil and Mean Streets leap to mind.

Also, to simplify things, I’m not going to consider foreign films. Only American-made films qualify for an Oscar.

Have we got the rules straight? Good.

We’ll start off with the 1930s:

1934

What film won Best Picture: It Happened One Night
What film should have won: The Gay Divorcee

Frank Capra’s film won Best Picture and Capra won the first of three best Director Oscars (and in a five-year period, something no other director has equaled) for his prototypical screwball comedy, It Happened One Night. But if I had been around and voting, I think I would have given the Oscar to the Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers musical The Gay Divorcee. Musicals almost never win Best Picture (and when they do, it’s usually the wrong ones), but you have to think that Academy voters might have been swayed by the fact that Capra had utterly humiliated himself the year before by rushing up to the stage when presenter Will Rogers yelled out, “Come and get it, Frank!” only to realize when he was halfway to the stage that he meant Frank Lloyd, the director of the now-unwatchable Cavalcade. Ironically, Astaire-Rogers musicals made in the following two years are arguably better than The Gay Divorcee, but it’s all about timing. I might have been persuaded to give it to The Thin Man, had the filmmakers only cut the first ten minutes from the film and opened the story where the book opens, with the speakeasy scene. Those ten wretched minutes, in my opinion, cost them an Oscar.

1935

What film won Best Picture: Mutiny on the Bounty
What film should have won: Mutiny on the Bounty

This is one of the few times that the Academy got it right. Frank Lloyd’s seafaring epic, with two great performances by Clark Gable and Charles Laughton, was the clear first choice. Out of the dozen films nominated for Best Picture (and some of them are great films, such as Top Hat, Captain Blood and David O. Selznick’s adaptation of David Copperfield), this is the one I would most want to see again. By the way, I think the Academy should go back to the idea of having a dozen films nominated for Best Picture.

1936

What film won Best Picture: The Great Ziegfeld
What film should have won: Fury

Once again Selznick had an adaptation of a Dickens classic up for Best Picture (this time it was A Tale of Two Cities), and other Best Picture nominees included Libeled Lady, San Francisco and Romeo and Juliet. And while I’m tempted to go with several films, including Swing Time and Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, I think I would opt for Fritz Lang’s Fury – one of the most atypically savage films ever to be released by MGM. A harrowing tale of a man falsely accused and almost lynched for a crime he didn’t commit, it has a shattering performance by Spencer Tracy as a man who’s lost everything except the desire for vengeance. Tracy was nominated that year, but not for Fury – his relatively benign Catholic priest in San Francisco earned him a nomination, but not the Oscar. Not that year, anyway. Ironically, a film I would have seriously considered for Best Picture (Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times) wasn’t even nominated for a single Oscar. I guess the Academy didn’t want to take a chance on silent pictures coming back.

1937

What film won Best Picture: The Life of Emile Zola
What film should have won: The Awful Truth

I’ll tell you a guilty secret: I’m a big fan of Warner Bros. biopics of the 1930s and 40s. Seriously – you put me in front of a TV set and put on Dispatch from Reuters and I’m in heaven. And Paul Muni hamming it up under a big bushy beard as the great French naturalist novelist is just magnificent. So why am I choosing The Awful Truth over The Life of Emile Zola? I know the Academy likes to choose Big Important Films on Big Important Topics to win Best Picture, but the fact is that sometimes it’s the smaller films that wear better, and The Awful Truth is a joy to behold. It’s the kind of sophisticated romantic comedy that they just don’t make anymore – maybe they took this kind of film for granted at the time, but they don’t make them like this anymore.

1938

What film won Best Picture: You Can’t Take It With You
What film should have won: The Adventures of Robin Hood

Capra won his second Best Picture Oscar for his adaptation of the Kaufman and Hart comedy about a house full of misfits who live the way they want to live, but the clear first choice (barring Renoir’s Grand Illusion, which received an unusual Best Picture nomination for a foreign language film) was the magnificent The Adventures of Robin Hood, with Errol Flynn as the prince of thieves cutting a colorful swath through Sherwood Forest. Great action, superb sword fighting (you can’t beat Flynn and Basil Rathbone in a sword fight) arguably the best score in the history of Hollywood (by Erich Wolfgang Korngold) and three-strip Technicolor used as it’s never been used before or since. It’s one of the most entertaining films ever, and it should have won.

1939

What film won Best Picture: Gone With the Wind
What film should have won: Gone With the Wind

1939 is universally regarded as the greatest year in the history of Hollywood, and when you look at the films nominated for Oscars that year you have to agree. The list of films released that year is dazzling – there had to have been at least half a dozen films that in any other year would have deserved to win Best Picture. But this is one of those years when the conventional wisdom was right – Gone With the Wind was the culmination of 30s filmmaking, and deserved all the Oscars it won.

In a few days I’ll take on the films from the 1940s.

Tom Moran