They still don’t make ’em like they used to
Here, by something like popular request, are more classic movie awards that Oscar overlooked:
Best car chase – Bullitt – Steve McQueen careened across 1963 San Francisco without a care or even much of a plot, as if to say that car chases self-justify.
Best cartoon character – Daffy Duck – He lacked the emotional stability of Bugs Bunny but was arguably funnier.
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| Best Hair Ever? |
Most original comedy pairing – W.C. Fields and Baby Leroy – The story about Fields spiking the child’s orange juice is not apocryphal. Fields actually did it.
Best hair job in movie history - Else Lanchester in Bride of Frankenstein.
Sappiest tearjerker of all time – An Affair to Remember – Plangent title song attempts to redeem script, fails.
Most patriotic – Yankee Doodle Dandy – Warner Brothers asked Jimmy Cagney to transition from gangster roles to this bio of George M. Cohen. Released in 1940 with the Grand Old Flag flying, the picture prepared the way for the war we were about to fight.
Best performance by a horse – Khartoum in The Godfather – Head-in-the-bed sequence ended his career.
Most heroic in real life – Audie Murphy who fought to a Medal of Honor standard in World War II Italy. He later played himself as a GI in To Hell and Back.
Best story involving death of central character – Garbo in Camille; John Wayne in Sands of Iwo Jima.
Most resonant prop – The Maltese Falcon, aka, the stuff that dreams are made of. The blackbird statue was phony looking but it carried the story.
Best top to bottom casting – From Here to Eternity – Even the smallest roles were impeccably cast and acted. And regardless of how Sinatra got the part of Maggio (I tend to believe the gangster version), he played it to perfection.
Coolest actor ever – Toss-up between James Dean and Steve McQueen goes to the latter, who had the good sense to avoid Dean’s Actor Studio mannerisms.
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