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Oscar Vault Monday – A Room with a View, 1986 (dir. James Ivory)
So when I first rented this film about seven years ago, I thought it was pretty, but boring. I watched it again last night hoping maybe my opinion would change. This was not the case. There are moments in this film that are truly wonderful, but as a whole it, for me, feels lifeless. It’s a pretty sexy subject, too, so it’s a shame they didn’t find a way to capture that (see The House of Mirth for a film that does it right). The film was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three: Best Art Direction (won), Best Costume Design (won), Best Cinematography, Best Adapted Screenplay (won), Best Supporting Actor Denholm Elliott, Best Supporting Actress Maggie Smith, Best Director and Best Picture. The other films up for Best Picture that year were Children of a Lesser God, Hannah and Her Sisters, The Mission and winner Platoon.
Oscar Vault Monday – Four Weddings and a Funeral, 1994 (dir. Mike Newell)
I’m pretty sure I’ve seen Four Weddings and a Funeral at least forty times. I used to have it on VHS tape and I would watch it A LOT as a child. Re-watching it for the first time in years recently, I realized just how much it affected me as a person. I love when I go back and look at the things I loved as a child and realize that even if I didn’t realize it, a film really impacted me. I’ll go into more details about how what I mean later in this piece. The film was only nominated for two Academy Awards: Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay. The only other film I can think of that was nominated for so few Oscar, but was in the running for Best Picture is the 1931 winner Grand Hotel, which was only nominated for Best Picture. Richard Curtis lost the Best Original Screenplay award to Tarantino for Pulp Fiction. The other films nominated for Best Picture that year were Pulp Fiction, Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption and winner Forrest Gump. Despite its few Oscar nominations, it received nine BAFTA nominations, winning four, included Best Film: Best Original Screenplay (lost to Pulp Fiction), Best Music (lost to Breakbeat), Best Supporting Actor Simon Callow, John Hannah (lost to Samuel L. Jackson for Pulp Fiction), Best Supporting Actress Charlotte Coleman, Kristin Scott Thomas (she won), Best Actor Hugh Grant (won), Best Director (won) and Best Film (won).
the diary of a film history fanatic 