The Oscar Project #6: Cavalcade (1933)

by Chris Marshall:

Why couldn’t King Kong have won? It was released the same year, and it’s an all-time classic. Instead I had to watch Cavalcade, adapted from the Noel Coward play, and it was a chore. It was more like a series of vignettes set during various important moments in British history between 1900 and 1929 than a single narrative. The net result was a disjointed mishmash of events that couldn’t hold my interest, no matter how hard I tried.

In general, I object to describing a movie as “boring,” particularly if it’s used as a pejorative. When people say a film is boring, they generally mean that it is unexciting, which is a major difference. Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, one of the greatest of all films, is extremely slow and methodical. It could quite accurately be called boring. But that’s exactly what it means to be. The characters’ lives were, for the most part, dull and uninteresting, so it only made sense for the movie to reflect that.

Here lies the problem with Cavalcade. This is presumably a very exciting—if tragic—period in British history. Yet, despite everything that happens, from the Second Boer War to the sinking of the Titanic to the outbreak of World War I, I never cared about anything that happens. It was slow, unexciting, and, yes, boring, but it made no sense within the context of the movie. I kept praying for it to be over already, but it seemed like the end would never come.

The Oscar Project #5: Grand Hotel (1932)

by Chris Marshall:

Grand Hotel is the gold standard for Rich People Problems movies. The entire story takes place within Berlin’s fanciest hotel, and two of the main male characters are a Baron and an Industry Magnate. But at least there’s a twist: the Baron’s Rich Person Problem is that he has no money. How he affords to spend so much time in Berlin’s fanciest hotel is never directly addressed, but I suppose it’s best not to ask too many questions.

If nothing else, Grand Hotel was the first star-studded Best Picture winner, featuring five recognizable names: Joan Crawford, Greta Garbo, Wallace Beery, and John and Lionel Barrymore. Crawford, Beery, and Lionel Barrymore all won Oscars for lead acting in their careers (Garbo was nominated four times but never won), and they all delivered solid performances here. Beery was particularly effective at portraying the sleazy, villainous Industry Magnate, but based on everything I know about him, that hardly required acting.  

The Oscar Project #2: The Broadway Melody (1928)

Talking! What a novelty!

by Chris Marshall:

Movies have come a long way in the past 84 years, but at least some things have stayed the same. If you look at the list of Best Picture winners, you’ll see that almost all of them fall into some combination of three categories: War Film, Rich People Problems, or Historical Epic.[1] Wings took care of the first, so it’s only fitting that the second winner, The Broadway Melody, would take care of the second. In this case the rich people are two sisters with the completely normal names Hank and Queenie. Their “problems,” such as they are, are that they’ve just moved to New York to try and star on Broadway, and god forbid, they aren’t given top billing in their first show. Oh, and somebody mispronounces their last name.

Granted, the real conflict in the story centers around the love lives of the protagonists. The problem was that the film tried to set up Hank as the heroine (in the loosest sense of the word), but she came across as shrewish and intensely unlikeable. Hank and Eddie, a performer in the show, were “together,” I guess, I don’t know, we’re just supposed to accept it, and meanwhile, a wealthy socialite named Jock (or Jacques, depending on the scene) began courting Queenie. Both Hank and Eddie are opposed to this blossoming relationship, for reasons that are clear in Eddie’s case and utterly baffling in Hank’s. It turns out that Eddie is secretly in love with Queenie, while Hank just badgers her and tells her not to see him, ad nauseum, without ever explaining why. And they sang songs every now and then.