A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1932-33 And The Year's Must-See And Recommended Movies

Okay, so we're done with the award year 1932-33. It was the longest "year" in Oscar history, covering the seventeen months running from August 1, 1932 to the end of 1933. Starting with 1934, the Academy and I will both be handing out awards for a single calendar year.

But we'll get to that later.

In the meantime, in case you've forgotten, these are the winners of the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards for 1932-33:

Picture (Drama): King Kong (prod. Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack)
Picture (Comedy/Musical): Duck Soup (prod. Herman J. Mankiewicz)
Picture (Foreign Language): Zero For Conduct (prod. Jean Vigo)
Actor (Drama): Paul Muni (I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang)
Actor (Comedy/Musical): The Marx Brothers (Horse Feathers and Duck Soup)
Actress (Drama): Greta Garbo (Queen Christina)
Actress (Comedy/Musical): Jean Harlow (Red Dust, Dinner At Eight and Bombshell)
Director (Drama): James Whale (The Old Dark House and The Invisible Man)
Director (Comedy/Musical): Ernst Lubitsch (Trouble In Paradise and Design For Living)
Supporting Actor: John Barrymore (Dinner At Eight)
Supporting Actress: Margaret Dumont (Duck Soup)
Screenplay: Bert Kalmar, Harry Ruby, Arthur Sheekman and Nat Perrin (Duck Soup)
Best Song: "The Gold Diggers Song (We're In The Money)" music by Harry Warren, lyrics by Al Dubin (Gold Diggers Of 1933)

Special Awards: Busby Berkeley (Career Achievement); Three Little Pigs (prod. Walt Disney) (Short Subject/Animated); Murray Spivak (King Kong) (Sound); Max Steiner (King Kong) (Score); Willis O'Brien, Marcel Delgado and E.B. Gibson (King Kong) (Special Effects); Willis O'Brien, Sydney Saunders and Linwood Dunn (King Kong) (Visual Effects); Carroll Clark and Alfred Herman (King Kong) (Art Direction/Set Decoration); Ted Cheesman (King Kong) (Film Editing); Rudolph Maté (Vampyr) (Cinematography); John Armstrong (The Private Life Of Henry VIII) (Costumes); Jack P. Pierce (The Mummy) (Makeup)

Must-See and Recommended Films: Baby Face; The Bitter Tea Of General Yen; Blonde Venus; Boudu Saved From Drowning; Counsellor At Law; Design For Living; Dinner At Eight; Downstairs; Duck Soup; Fanny; Footlight Parade; 42nd Street; Gold Diggers Of 1933; Horse Feathers; I Am A Fugitive From A Chain Gang; I'm No Angel; The Invisible Man; Island Of Lost Souls; King Kong; Liebelei; Little Women; Love Me Tonight; The Most Dangerous Game; The Mummy; The Old Dark House; One Way Passage; Peg O' My Heart; The Private Life of Henry VIII; Queen Christina; Red Dust; She Done Him Wrong; Sons Of The Desert; The Testament Of Dr. Mabuse; Three Little Pigs; Trouble In Paradise; Vampyr; Zero For Conduct

Which brings the Early Sound Era to a close. Normally I write a summary about the year's winners, must-see movies, disappointments, etc. But I just spent seven months and eighty thousand words on the topic; I've got nothing left.

Up next: The Silent Oscars.

A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1931-32 And The Year's Must-See And Recommended Movies

Picture: Frankenstein (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
Actor: Fredric March (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Actress: Norma Shearer (Private Lives)
Director: René Clair (À Nous La Liberté)
Supporting Actor: Lionel Barrymore (Grand Hotel)
Supporting Actress: Miriam Hopkins (The Smiling Lieutenant and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde)
Screenplay: Ben Hecht; continuity and dialogue by Seton I. Miller, John Lee Mahin and W.R. Burnett; from a novel by Armitage Trail (Scarface)

Special Awards: À Nous La Liberté (prod. Frank Clifford) (Best Picture-Comedy/Musical); Mae Clarke (Waterloo Bridge) (Best Actress-Drama); The Music Box (Best Short Subject); Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy (Best Actors-Comedy and Career Achievement); Lee Garmes (Shanghai Express and Scarface) (Cinematography); C. Roy Hunter (Frankenstein) (Special Achievement In the Use Of Sound); Charles D. Hall and Kenneth Strickfaden (Frankenstein) (Art Direction-Set Decoration); Jack Pierce and Pauline Eells (Frankenstein) (Makeup); Wally Westmore (Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde) (Special Effects)

Must-See and Recommended: À Nous La Liberté; The Champ; Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde; Emma; Five Star Final; Frankenstein; Freaks; Grand Hotel; The Guardsman; I Was Born, But ...; Mädchen In Uniform; Marius; Monkey Business; The Music Box; One Hour With You; Private Lives; Scarface; Shanghai Express; Skyscraper Souls; The Smiling Lieutenant; Tabu: A Story Of The South Seas; Waterloo Bridge; What Price Hollywood?

As you can see from the list of winners and must-see movies, the year running from August 1, 1931 to July 31, 1932 was a great one for horror films. Frankenstein, Freaks and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all hit the big screen during the year (albeit, Freaks only briefly—it was withdrawn from circulation just days after its premiere and didn't surface again until the 1960s). Throw in Dracula, another 1931 horror film released in the previous awards cycle, and you can see that what we think of as the horror genre was pretty much defined during this time period.

Of the four of them, Frankenstein is the most indispensable. As I wrote recently, not only was it the top grossing film of the year, "it defined its genre for generations with imagery and film language so much part of the vocabulary of Western culture that even people who've never seen it know what it's about" and more than any other film released during 1931 or 1932, be it horror or otherwise, Frankenstein "is a fundamental building block, not just of movie literacy but of cultural literacy. Its look, its feel, its conventions and its concepts have so permeated the bedrock that even if you've never seen the 1931 version of Frankenstein, you've drunk from its well."

You don't want to miss Freaks, though, which while a cult movie that for years was more spoken of than seen, is perhaps the most modern of all the movies that was released during the year. Helmed by Tod Browning, who not only directed Dracula but also ten Lon Chaney vehicles, Freaks is a story of exploitation and revenge centering on the lives of those circus performers once described as "sideshow freaks." Despite Browning's sensitive treatment of his stars, the combination of sex, horror and forbidden love proved too much for audiences and censors alike, and after a brief release, the film was withdrawn from circulation for more than thirty years.

Admittedly the acting is at times amateurish, but if you like your horror genuinely disturbing, this is a must-see movie. And I don't mean faux disturbing like Hostel or Saw or any of those other slaughterhouse cheesefests with stock characters and recycled plot lines. Freaks is too real to dismiss as playacting and no pose of ironic detachment can shrug off the violence done to the "freaks" and in turn by them. It's a movie that will get under your skin—or anyway, it got under mine.

On a wholly different note, the year also gave us some fine comedies, including René Clair's À Nous La Liberté (the first foreign language film to be nominated for an Academy Award); Ernst Lubitsch's naughty pre-Code musical, The Smiling Lieutenant; a good Norma Shearer movie, Private Lives; and Laurel and Hardy in the Oscar-winning short, The Music Box.

As was usually the case during the early sound era, the best comedy of the year starred the Marx Brothers. The story of four stowaways who wreak havoc during an ocean voyage, Monkey Business represents the Brothers at their most transgressive—if you can use a word like "transgressive" when referring to a man wearing a grease-paint moustache. Instead of playing a hotel owner, college president, petty dictator or some other reputable scion of society, Groucho is an out-and-out bum who happily hires himself out as a gunman for a mobster, and his brothers are even worse, stealing, chasing women and making everyone around them miserable simply because they can.

In other words, it's great stuff.

The plot of Monkey Business is mercifully slight, and the shipboard setting is merely an excuse to move the Brothers from one comic situation to another. But that's true of every Marx Brothers movie—the good ones anyway—and the audience only suffers when the focus turns to irrelevant matters, such as story and motivation. In fact, given that the appeal of the Marx Brothers is the subversive anarchy of their caustic wit and arbitrary actions, plot and motivation only undercut what they're trying to do. Of all their movies, Monkey Business came the closest to their vaudeville roots (the wonderful Maurice Chevalier bit, for example, was a variation on a routine that the Brothers had performed years before) and was the first to shed the trappings of the Broadway musical, freeing them for even greater efforts—Horse Feathers and Duck Soup—in the eighteen months that followed.

And then there are a couple of movies, Shanghai Express and Waterloo Bridge, that critics, Academy voters and fans of the Saturday night fun-stupid movie might dismiss as "women's pictures," "three-hanky weepers" or "chick flicks," but which we here at the Monkey refer to as stylish, well-acted romances that get right to the heart of the only thing that's really important in this crazy, mixed-up world—love. Marlene Dietrich never looked better in the former, and in the latter, Mae Clarke gave the best performance of her criminally-overlooked career. I highly recommend both and I wouldn't say that lightly.

Among the movies I've listed as must-see, three are must must-see movies—Frankenstein, Scarface and Grand Hotel. Frankenstein, I've just mentioned. Of the other two, Scarface, directed by Howard Hawks (more about him in the coming years), was the best gangster movie of the decade, which is saying something considering James Cagney, Edward G. Robinson and Humphrey Bogart all made their mark in the genre during the 1930s. I consider it indispensable, though, not just because it's a great movie, but because it influenced so much that came after it.

Similarly, Grand Hotel may be a bit dated by modern standards but it boasted the first all-star cast and without it, there may well have been no Dinner At Eight, no Stagecoach, no Airport, or any of the other big cast potboilers, good and bad, that have imitated Grand Hotel over the years. As with Scarface and Frankenstein, I consider Grand Hotel indispensable not just because I think it's good, but because so much of what we think of as the Hollywood movie flows from it.

Besides, it gives you a chance to see Joan Crawford at her loveliest and, dare I say it, sweetest before her face hardened into that kabuki mask of unbridled ambition and paranoid rage we so often associate her with.

Coming up next are my nominations for the movie year 1932-33. Because the Academy was preparing to abandon the crazy split-year format it followed for the first six years of the Oscars, the next award season covered seventeen months rather than the usual twelve, with everything released between August 1, 1932 and December 31, 1933 being eligible.

And what a great year it was, too. Not only did such classic movies as Duck Soup, King Kong, Trouble in Paradise and Dinner at Eight premiere during these seventeen months, but Katharine Hepburn broke into pictures (and won her first Oscar), Busby Berkeley revived and redefined the movie musical, and Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers danced together for the first time. It was a big year for movies, ranking with 1939 as one of the greatest "years" in film history.

Too big, in fact, for the standard Oscar format I've been following to cover it all. But that's a subject for my next post.

A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1930-31 And The Year's Must-See Movies

Picture: City Lights (prod. Charles Chaplin)
Actor: Charles Chaplin (City Lights)
Actress: Marlene Dietrich (Morocco)
Director: Fritz Lang (M)
Supporting Actor: Peter Lorre (M)
Supporting Actress: Joan Blondell (Sinners' Holiday, Other Men's Women and Night Nurse)
Screenplay: René Clair (Le Million)
Special Awards: M (prod. Seymour Hebenzal) (Best Picture-Drama); Edward G. Robinson (Little Caesar) (Best Actor-Drama); Marie Dressler (Min and Bill) (Best Actress-Comedy); René Clair (Le Million) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Makin' Whoopee" (Whoopee!) (Best Song); Fritz Arno Wagner (M) (Cinematography)
Must-See: L'Age d'Or; Animal Crackers; The Big Trail; City Lights; The Dawn Patrol; Dracula; Little Caesar; M; Le Million; Morocco; The Public Enemy

In retrospect, the twelve months running from August 1, 1930, to July 31, 1931 (in the Academy's odd Oscar season of the day) turned out to be a year of beginnings and endings.

The best movie of the year, Charlie Chaplin's delicate, poignant comedy City Lights was the last silent movie Hollywood ever produced (like the website "Silent Era," I judge Modern Times to be a "mute sound picture"). For all practical purposes, the silent era had come to close by 1929, and only Chaplin's enormous popularity and the brilliance of City Lights could have induced an audience to accept the anomaly of a silent movie in 1931.

1931 marked the last gasp for a German film industry that had given the world F.W. Murnau, Fritz Lang, Marlene Dietrich, Peter Lorre, Expressionism, and such films as The Cabinet Of Dr. Caligari, Nosferatu, Metropolis and M. Within two years, the Nazis would come to power and those artists who didn't flee or collaborate soon found themselves censored, arrested or murdered. Many German filmmakers, such as writer-director Billy Wilder, emigrated to Hollywood and had successful careers. But the German film industry as a whole would never again have the impact on cinema that it had in the 1920s and early years of the 1930s.

But 1930-31 was also a year for beginnings. James Cagney and Edward G. Robinson burst onto the scene, dazzling audiences in two of the essential gangster flicks of the early sound era, and continuing to dominate the Hollywood scene for years to come. American audiences also became acquainted with Marlene Dietrich for the first time. And in the space of twelve months, Clark Gable would rise from uncredited bit player to major star with tough but sexy roles in A Free Soul and Night Nurse.

I've written at length about all the titles on my list of the Must-See Movies of 1930-31. I leave to you the pleasure of hunting for them through the last three months of this blog's archives.

As great as 1930-31 was, the next twelve months would prove even better, especially for Hollywood which was at last getting the hang of the sound technology that had turned the old order upside down in 1927. On the horizon are Frankenstein, Scarface, Grand Hotel and many others. I'll have the list of nominees for you tomorrow in celebration of the New Year.

Oh, and later today: an end-of-year top ten list! Even the Monkey is not immune to the demands of traditional movie criticism.

A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1929-30 And The Year's Must-See Movies

Picture: All Quiet On The Western Front (prod. Carl Laemmle, Jr.)
Actor: Ronald Colman (Bulldog Drummond)
Actress: Louise Brooks (Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl)
Director: Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Supporting Actor: Wallace Beery (The Big House)
Supporting Actress: Marie Dressler (Anna Christie)
Screenplay: George Abbott, Maxwell Anderson and Dell Andrews (All Quiet On The Western Front)
Special Awards: Hallelujah! (prod. King Vidor) (Best Picture-Comedy or Musical); Maurice Chevalier (The Love Parade) (Best Actor-Comedy/Musical); Jeanette MacDonald (The Love Parade) (Best Actress-Comedy/Musical); "Swanee Shuffle" (Hallelujah!) and "Falling In Love Again" (The Blue Angel) (Best Song); Arthur Edeson (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Cinematography); Rouben Mamoulian (Applause) and C. Roy Hunter and Lewis Milestone (All Quiet On The Western Front) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound)
Must-See: All Quiet On The Western Front; The Big House; The Blue Angel; The Cocoanuts; Diary Of A Lost Girl; Hallelujah!; Pandora's Box

"Must see" in this case depends on what you mean by must. If it means "boy, you're absolutely going to want to see it no matter whether you're a casual movie goer or a film fanatic," then we're talking All Quiet On The Western Front and possibly nothing else. It's not just an intense, insightful and historically important movie, it's also one of the most entertaining and watchable movies of the entire era. I've written about it at length here, here and here.

If, on the other hand, by "must see" you mean "what you'll need to see to get a real sense of this moment in movie history and prepare you for what comes next," then I'd say the movies on the above list would do you.

Pandora's Box and Diary Of A Lost Girl show Louise Brooks at her peak. The Big House was Hollywood's first great prison drama, it's packed with action and it features a career-making performance by Wallace Beery. The Blue Angel and The Cocoanuts introduced Marlene Dietrich and the Marx Brothers, respectively, to audiences for the first time. And Hallelujah!, the King Vidor musical starring an all-black cast gives you a chance to see talent, particularly Nina Mae McKinney, that thanks to Hollywood's racism you might never see again.

After that there are a handful of movies I'd give thumbs up to without necessarily calling them essential.

Anna Christie, Bulldog Drummond and The Love Parade I've written about, although in the case of the latter, not extensively. Judging by my readers' reaction to Maurice Chevalier, perhaps that's a good thing.

Our Modern Maidens, which along with Our Dancing Daughters and Our Blushing Brides forms what I'd call Joan Crawford's Flapper Trilogy, is a slight but amusing tale of rich kids in formalwear dancing, drinking and, in general, behaving badly. The only downside is that apparently the trilogy is nearly impossible to come by. None are available on DVD and Our Dancing Daughters, the best of the bunch, is selling for nearly fifty bucks as a VHS tape. I happened to catch all three one weekend on YouTube before they were deleted again, not knowing how lucky I was. If any of them show up again, I'll let you know.

Under The Roofs Of Paris is René Clair's oddball French comedy about a few weeks in the lives of four young Parisians—a street singer, the girl he fancies, her abusive beau and a pickpocket. Clair obviously hadn't quite made up his mind how he felt about the introduction of sound into movies and this is a combination musical, silent pantomime and slap-and-tickle love story that amounts to exactly nothing, like drinking and people-watching in an all-night café. But sometimes drinking and people-watching can be an awfully pleasant way to pass ninety minutes and, if you're like me and that's your idea of a good time, so is Under The Roofs Of Paris.

Raffles is an amusing caper flick starring best actor winner Ronald Colman as a retired safecracker who must elude the police one more time to save a friend from ruin. Raffles's nickname, "The Amateur Cracksman," makes him sound more like the star of a straight-to-video porn movie but it's actually a pretty nifty showcase for Ronald Colman and is readily available on YouTube.

You might also check out The Virginian, Gary Cooper's first talkie (which gave us the oft-misquoted line, "If you're going to call me that, smile!"), and Rouben Mamoulian's Applause, starring Helen Morgan as a stripper who reunites with her convent-raised daughter.

And finally, you may recall that I mentioned Man With The Movie Camera during my two-part discussion of the avant garde movies of the late 1920s. This experiment in film editing by Russian Dziga Vertov is highly regarded by some, including Roger Ebert. Not by me, though.

One problem with following the split-year format the Academy used for the first six years it handed out Oscars is that it obscures the fact that between the release of The Jazz Singer on October 6, 1927, and the premiere of Frankenstein on November 21, 1931, Hollywood only produced one truly great talking picture, and that was All Quiet On The Western Front. Everything else I've written about so far is either silent, foreign or flawed.

The next set of awards won't change things much—1930-31 pretty much shakes out as a three-way slugfest between Charles Chaplin's silent masterpiece City Lights and two foreign-language films, M, Fritz Lang's portrait of a serial killer, and Le Million, René Clair's delightful musical comedy—but at least the stars who eventually gave us the great movies of the Early Sound Era (Cagney, Robinson, Gable, Crawford, Stanwyck, Blondell, etc.) finally make their mark.

I, for one, am ready.

A Recap Of The Katie Award Winners For 1928-29, A List Of Must-See Movies And A Word About Erich von Stroheim

The last of the Katies for 1928-29 have been awarded—and it only took six weeks! At this rate, I'll reach the present day in, hmm, let's see, nine years.

Well, better get to it.

In case you've forgotten who won Katies for 1928-29, here's a recap of the year's winners:




Picture: The Passion of Joan of Arc (prod. Société générale des films)
Actor: Buster Keaton (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
Actress: Lillian Gish (The Wind)
Director: Carl Theodor Dreyer (The Passion of Joan of Arc)
Supporting Actor: Ernest Torrence (Steamboat Bill, Jr.)
Supporting Actress: Anita Page (Our Dancing Daughters)
Screenplay: Frances Marion (The Wind)
Special Award: Walt Disney and Ub Iwerks (the creation and marketing of Mickey Mouse); Steamboat Bill, Jr. (prod. Joseph M. Schenck) (Best Picture-Comedy); Erich von Stroheim (The Wedding March) (Best Actor-Drama); Marion Davies (Show People) (Best Actress-Comedy); Douglas Shearer (The Broadway Melody) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "The Broadway Melody" (The Broadway Melody) (Best Song); Un Chien Andalou (prod. Luis Buñuel) (Best Short Subject); John Arnold (The Wind) (Cinematography)

And because a list of awards doesn't tell the whole story, here's another list, this time my selections for the "must-see" movies of the year:

Must-See Movies Of 1928-29: The Cameraman; Un Chien Andalou; The Docks Of New York; The Iron Mask; Our Dancing Daughters; The Passion Of Joan Of Arc; Show People; Steamboat Bill, Jr.; Steamboat Willie; The Wedding March; The Wind

I've written about each of the listed Katie Award winners and in doing so I've also written about each of the must-see movies—except The Wedding March, the last movie directed by Erich von Stroheim that can be reasonably said to work. It's the story of a young aristocrat forced to marry for money rather than love. Von Stroheim was surprisingly sympathetic in the lead role, reminding you, as he would again in Sunset Boulevard, that he wasn't just a pretty face in a monocle. For his performance in The Wedding March, I nominated him for a Katie (he lost to Buster Keaton).

Like most of his work (see, e.g., Greed and Queen Kelly), the version of The Wedding March that wound up on the screen was quite a bit less than what von Stroheim had envisioned. Most film buffs have heard tales of von Stroheim's nine (nine, Mrs. Bueller!) hour cut of Greed that the studio whittled down to 130 minutes. In this case, The Wedding March is only the first third of what von Stroheim, who was not one to learn a lesson, conceived of as a six-plus hour movie tracing the reluctant courtship and subsequent marriage of the young aristocrat and a rich industrialist's crippled daughter (Zasu Pitts). The studio shut down the production after nine months and ordered von Stroheim to split the film as conceived into three parts, with The Wedding March at two hours to be followed by its sequel, The Honeymoon, and an unnamed third film to complete the trilogy. The Honeymoon was started but apparently never completed; its elements were destroyed by fire in the 1950s.

Contrary to conventional wisdom, I suspect the studio's intervention, rather than destroying a work of art, may well have saved von Stroheim from himself.

In retro- spect, I think it's clear that von Stroheim was attempt- ing, with all these six and nine hour cuts of his movies, to invent the HBO miniseries. And he was absolutely right that there is artistic merit to taking time to tell a nine-hour story—I mean, think of The Sopranos reduced from a thirteen-hour season to a two-hour movie. Instead of having a deeply-layered, nuanced story, you would wind up with the same slam-bang surface-level gangster fluff that routinely shows up in the theaters, here for a disappointing opening weekend and then gone forever.

But unfortunately for von Stroheim, HBO and the miniseries hadn't been invented yet. Hell, they hadn't invented television yet. He was stuck with what he had, silent movies, a brevity-is-the-soul-of-wit medium. And while I support an artist's right to chase a vision no matter how impractical, there is no way von Stroheim could have expected in his wildest fantasies that an audience was going to sit still for nine hours while he threw shadows on a screen. In that context of the world he worked in, von Stroheim was not so much an artist pushing the edge as a gasbag who couldn't get to the point. (Or in his case, most likely a pompous poseur with a pathological need to prove himself superior to a public he regarded as rabble. But I digress.)

But let's say for the sake of argument that von Stroheim was a genius and further that some scientist somewhere is working on a time machine that would bring von Stroheim, contract and camera in hand, to the home offices of HBO. The fact is, he still couldn't make a miniseries for HBO because he'd insist on a $100 million budget. Need to film a scene in a nondescript San Francisco boarding house? Go to San Francisco! Have a desert scene in the screenplay? Move your entire company to the desert for months to shoot a scene that winds up looking like something shot on a Hollywood backlot. He was extravagant beyond all reason, insisting on a fidelity to realism that didn't translate to the screen. With the way he spent money, on what in the end were tiny little art films, he never had a hope of turning a profit. No wonder he drove people like Irving Thalberg nuts.

"What's that about?" Thalberg asked von Stroheim as they watched the rushes from the director's 1925 movie, The Merry Widow, referring to one of the odder scenes in a movie heavily censored before its release.

"That is a foot fetish," von Stroheim said.

"You, Von," replied Thalberg, "have a footage fetish."

In all fairness, I should point out that Cecil B. DeMille routinely spent more money than von Stroheim. But I also have to point out that DeMille routinely made more money than von Stroheim. And as nasty a notion as that is to an artist, when you're making pictures with somebody else's money, you have to create the possibility that the guy writing the check will turn a profit or he's soon going to stop writing those checks.

Which really brings me to the most important point, that what survives of von Stroheim's work really isn't that pretty. Von Stroheim's characters may have indulged a wide variety of fetishes—the panty sniffing of Queen Kelly, the foot fondling of The Merry Widow—but von Stroheim himself had a fetish for the grotesque, grotesque in the true sense of the word, "characterized by the fanciful," distorting "the natural into absurdity, ugliness or caricature." For all his blather about realism, von Stroheim was attracted to the fantastic, and the problem with a fetish is that it is inaccessible to anyone who doesn't share the fetish, a serious problem if you're looking for an audience of millions to defray the cost of your particular brand of lunacy.

I'm willing to concede that it's possible that the nine (nine!) hour version of, say, Greed was subtle and brilliant and absorbing (that is, if you didn't have to watch it in a single sitting). As I said, The Sopranos whittled down to two hours would never have had the same impact that the full series had. We'll never know.

But I think it's more likely that von Stroheim needed someone to rein him in, control his impulses, find the movie buried within the miles of footage. The director needed direction.

In any event, von Stroheim only directed nine movies (two of which he didn't finish; five others were heavily cut). His last movie, 1933's Hello, Sister, was mostly reshot after the studio fired von Stroheim. I think to a degree his reputation is based on a sense of what-might-have-been rather than on what-was, the romantic cliche of the great artist with the corporate boot on his neck; but I think based on the what-was I've seen, the-what-might-have-been is a bit overblown.

All of which is an appropriately long-winded way of saying that The Wedding March might be the best movie Erich von Stroheim ever accidentally made.

The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards For 1927-28

PICTURE: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans (prod. William Fox)

ACTOR: Lon Chaney (Laugh, Clown, Laugh)

ACTRESS: Mary Pickford (My Best Girl)

DIRECTOR: F.W. Murnau (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans)

SUPPORTING ACTOR: Jean Hersholt (The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Clara Bow (Wings)

SCREENPLAY: King Vidor and John V.A. Weaver; titles by Joseph Farnham (The Crowd)

SPECIAL AWARDS: The Circus (prod. Charles Chaplin) (Best Picture-Comedy); Al Jolson (The Jazz Singer) (Best Actor-Comedy or Musical); Eleanor Boardman (The Crowd) (Best Actress-Drama); George Groves (The Jazz Singer) (Special Achievement In The Use Of Sound); "Toot Toot Tootsie" (The Jazz Singer) (Best Song); Charles Rosher and Karl Struss (Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans) (Cinematography)

MUST-SEE MOVIES OF 1927-28: Sunrise: A Song Of Two Humans; The Man Who Laughs; The Student Prince In Old Heidelberg; The Circus; Wings; The Crowd; Laugh, Clown, Laugh

The most popular movie of 1927 was The Jazz Singer, which introduced synchronized sound to the movies at last. Audiences were thrilled not just to see Al Jolson singing but to hear him singing—and after plowing through dozens of silent movies in the past couple of weeks, I can't say I blame them. You forget how much information you process through your ears and how much pleasure you can get from a human voice—at least until you do without for a while.

Only one problem with The Jazz Singer: it's a terrible movie. Really. I mean, yeah, being able to put sound in a movie was a tremendous breakthrough and audiences ate it up with a spoon, but beyond it's importance now as a historical footnote, I can't recommend it.

As for everything else that was released between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928 (I'm following Oscar's convention of straddling the two years), the Academy actually did a pretty good job of distinguishing the wheat from the chaff even if the awards were largely parceled out as a result of insider politicking and studio manipulation.

Wings (Best Production) and Sunrise (Unique and Artistic Production) won the two best picture awards, Emil Jannings was a well-respected actor and won for The Way Of All Flesh and The Last Command (remember, the award in those days was handed out for a body of work rather than a specific picture), and best actress winner, Janet Gaynor, was the star of the best movie of the year, Sunrise.

There were two best director trophies that year, one for comedy, one for drama. Lewis Milestone, who would win another Oscar for directing the classic All Quiet On The Western Front, won for the former; Frank Borzage, another two time winner, won the latter.

All respectable choices. With the benefit of more than eighty years worth of hindsight, however, I think the Academy could have done better.

That's where the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards come in.

I've done away with the splitting of categories—one director instead of two, one best picture award instead of the unexplained and unexplainable Best Production and Unique and Artistic Production awards.

I'm also doing away with Academy's habit of spreading the award for writing across a wide variety of ever-changing categories, including best original screenplay, best adapted screenplay, motion picture story, story and screenplay, screenplay and even this year's award for "title writing." With the Katies, it's one award, Best Screenplay, regardless of whether it's based on another source, wholly original or, as is often the case, a thinly disguised rip-off of last year's popular movie.

As I did with the career achieve- ment awards for the Silent Era, I will explain my choices in a series of essays over the next couple of weeks.

I've also included here a list of what I think are the must-see movies of the year, and will include a must-see list for each year I hand out awards.

Finally, I have included choices for best supporting actor and actress even though the Academy did not create those categories until 1936. I felt I otherwise would have ended up ignoring too many performances worth recognition. Besides, it gave me another excuse to see even more movies—and what could be wrong with that?

Notes: I don't have an official Fun-Stupid movie pick for 1927-28, but two might fit the bill: Wings is overly long for a silent movie and a bit corny but it also has at least an hour's worth of some of the best stunt flying and aerial dogfights ever filmed; and Charlie Chaplin's The Circus features a lot of physical comedy and acrobatic stunts and is readily available.

Career Achievement Awards For The Silent Era (films released prior to August 1, 1927)

PICTURE: The General

ACTOR: Charles Chaplin

ACTRESS: Lillian Gish

DIRECTOR: D.W. Griffith

Maybe this is what the Academy should have done to honor the three decades of movies that preceded the Oscars, instead of what they did do, which was to allow thousands of movies to molder away in the vaults as if they had never existed, until many of them did in fact no longer exist, having turned to liquified film and ashes long ago.

With the exception of The General, which I consider to be the best movie made before Charles Chaplin's City Lights in 1931, the Katie-Bar-The-Door career achievement awards are for a body of work accomplished prior to August 1, 1927 (the cutoff date for the first Oscars) rather than for a specific film. I'll explain my choices—next week—along with a brief essay on the problem of watching silent movies and finally a selection of "must-see" films from the Silent Era.

Enjoy your weekend. See a movie.

Oscars Anonymous: From Alternate Oscar Insanity To The Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards

For many movie fans, second-guessing the Academy Awards is not just a once-a-year Monday morning conversation, it's a national pastime. Before the awards ceremony, we discuss the nominees, handicap the races, enter contests, place bets; after the ceremony we argue about the results. Judging by the flame wars on various message boards, people take this stuff pretty seriously.

As much fun as all this betting and arguing is, though, eventually it dawns on you—almost as a rite of passage—that while the awards given do sometimes correspond to greatness, more often than not, they are disappointing, odd and, on occasion, downright bizarre. That's because, as I explained in my previous post, the Oscars exist to sell tickets and slap a veneer of artistic respectability onto what is, for the studios that make the movies at least, as noble an exercise as stuffing ground-up animal scraps into sausage casings.

Yes, sometimes the Academy gets it right, but when they do, it's by accident, not by design.

If you're lucky, you eventually realize the Oscars are meaningless, at least when it comes to guiding your movie-watching choices, and if you're smart, when it comes to the Academy's annual screw-ups, you learn to let it go.

That's if you're smart.

If you're me, on the other hand, the Oscars become an obsession, and you spend years trying to figure out who should have won what when, and before you realize you have a problem, you've filled dozens of shelves with books, DVDs and videotapes in pursuit of an answer you're never going to find.

I've been keeping a list of my alternate Oscar picks since I read a book in 1992 called Alternate Oscars by Danny Peary. Peary wrote essays about the movies and performers he thought should have won for best picture, actor and actress for every year since the Academy started handing out those awards in 1928.

Some of Peary's choices were no doubt as nutty as the ones the Academy settled on, but some were brilliant and all of them were interesting. The book has been out of print for years, but if you can find a copy, I highly recommend it. Peary inspired me and, for me, a list of alternate Oscars became, in the beginning anyway, a way to organize my movie-watching habits and point me in directions I otherwise might not have considered. The list got me outside of my comfort zone and both broadened and deepened my enjoyment of movies.

But then the list took over and when I say I've been picking alternate Oscars, I don't just mean that, like Peary, I have been picking the awards for picture, actor and actress, I mean I have been picking all of them—costumes, cinematography, the 1936 Oscar for dance direction, you name it.

You know how many movies you have to see to have an opinion about every award given for every year since they started handing out Oscars? About four thousand, I think. 4650 if my vote total on the Internet Movie Database is any indicator. And I have this nagging suspicion I need to see a couple of thousand more, you know, just to really make sure.

That's not just a labor of love, that's some sort of neurological disorder.

Then I woke up in February, the day after this year's Oscar telecast, and realized that not only did I not know who should have won the award for best achievement in sound editing, I didn't care. And what's more, when I was honest with myself, something I rarely try to be, I had never cared. Or, outside of a couple of movies, even really had an opinion.

At this point, a sane person would throw in the towel, admit his addiction and check himself into a clinic. But it turns out there is no cure for an Oscar addiction, only ways to manage it, like trading a heroin habit for a methadone habit.

In lieu of a cure, it was time to start a new list, something simpler, something I could manage, something my friends and family could tolerate without shame and disgust.

For one thing, I had to divorce myself from the Oscars themselves. The rules change every year, are applied unevenly and lead to inconsistent and confusing results. I mean, why, for example, should Francois Truffaut's Day For Night have won the Oscar for best foreign picture of 1973 but then have been nominated for best director, screenplay and supporting actress of 1974?

For another, I had to limit myself to the categories I really care about, and by that, I mean the categories I know I care about every single year—for best picture, best direction, screenplay and the four acting categories.

Finally, I had to come up with a new name. I mean, "Oscar"—what is that? Oscar Madison? Oscar Meyer? On a good day, I'd like to think it has something to do with Oscar Robertson, one of the greatest basketball players of all time. But in reality, it's either named for some forgotten secretary's uncle, Bette Davis's ex-husband or the men's room attendant at the Brown Derby. That won't do.

But you have to call them something. And since this is my exercise in futility, I'm naming my awards after the only thing I love more than the movies. I'm naming my annual film awards after the person who saw nearly all of those four thousand movies with me, enjoyed them, offered opinions and never once suggested I see a doctor.

Thus are born the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards.

And like Danny Peary, I figure to write a series of essays explaining each of my Katie-Bar-The-Door Award picks.

In chronological order.

That is, I intend to begin with the films of the silent era, and sometime around the turn of the next century, arrive at my picks for the best movies and performances of the year just past, 2008.

Start with your weakest material, drive off any potential audience and build toward complete anonymity, I always say. That's the course I've followed throughout my writing career. No reason to mess with that formula now.

So, on to it, the Katie-Bar-The-Door Awards. This is going to take a while.

Warning: there is no cure.