Reimagining History

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Fandor is the home for thousands of handpicked, award-winning films from around the world, representing over 500 genres from more than 110 countries, ranging from 19th-century classics to the latest festival hits. Each film, short or feature comes with context from top film journalists via daily digital magazine Keyframe to provide viewers with greater depth and relevance. Fandor is available on set-top, desktop and mobile devices.

The Academy Awards® were born in 1927, the brainchild of

MGM’s Louis B. Mayer, a studio head whose original idea

for an organization to negotiate labor disputes and industry

conflicts evolved into the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts

and Sciences. The awards themselves were an afterthought

and initially more a public relations gimmick than egalitarian

celebration of the arts. Additional categories were added and

other refinements made over the years, but otherwise the

Academy Awards as we know them today were born: a glitzy

event that brought the stars out and handed out trophies.

But let’s imagine an alternate history of the Academy Awards.

What if awards had been given in the 1890s, when the first

films were made? What are films that really should have won

but were completely overlooked? What about those that were

nominated though ultimately snubbed? Here’s a fanciful look

at what could have been from Keyframe writers through the

eyes of Fandor’s diverse film collection.

The Silent YearsAn Imagined Awards for the Years Before Oscar’s® birth. By Sean Axmaker

Dickson Experimental Sound FilmA Trip to the MoonThe Cameraman’s RevengeThe Outlaw and His WifeBroken Blossoms and True Heart SusieNanook of the NorthThe Lost WorldMetropolis Mid-Century SnubsRighting Oscar® wrongs from the ’30s to the ’70s. By Shari Kizirian

Salt for SvanetiaPoor CinderellaJune NightScarlet StreetThérèse RaquinSilver LodeVisit to a Foreign CountryThe Red and the WhiteCousin JulesA Walk Through H

And Now, the NomineesThey made it to the party, but really: should they have won? By Sara Maria Vizcarrondo

MarleneBerkeley in the SixtiesMetropolitanThe Scent of Green PapayaBlack RiderThe Weather UndergroundDogtoothThe Invisible War

Oscars® 2015: Video EvidenceWho deserves to win? By Kevin B. Lee

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B Y S E A N A X M A K E R

The Silent Years An imagined Awards for the years before Oscar’s® birth.

We begin at the birth of the sound revolution. Long before the nickelodeons created a moviegoing audience, Edison Company engineer William K.L. Dickson married the early motion picture technology he had developed with Edison’s phonograph and recorded a scene with both devices simultaneously. It isn’t even a minute long. It never played for the public. And its entertainment value is negligible—it was a test, not a piece of theater—yet it imagined the possibilities of the technology three decades before its commercial potential began to be realized. Even I can’t come up with any fantastical explanation for the Academy Awards® existing back in this primordial era of early cinema, but what would have been more fitting for the first ever Academy Awards® to honor the man who developed Edison’s movie camera and created the first synchronized sound film?

Watch Dickson Experimental Sound Film on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1895/1927Special Academy Award to William K.L. Dickson for Technical Achievement

Dickson Experimental Sound Film

Georges Méliès’ landmark fantasy short, “the first international hit in motion picture history” (in the words of film historian Serge Bromberg), imagined space flight before the Wright Brothers took their first powered flight. Though ostensibly inspired by Jules Verne’s book, Méliès was a magician and showman before he was a filmmaker and he made the cinema’s first portrait of space travel a pure flight of fancy, complete with showgirls cheering on the first astronauts and insectoid moon monsters exploding into clouds of stage smoke. Constructed out of magnificent hand-painted stage flats and then-revolutionary special effects (a mix of technological discovery and stage magic tricks), it was the first special effects-driven spectacle of the movies. It’s also a delight, a work of pure, playful imagination with a whimsical portrait of science as wizardry by way of the industrial revolution. The restoration of the pulsating hand-painted colors of the day only enhances its creative energy.

Watch A Trip to the Moon on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1902 Best Picture

A Trip to the Moon

Animated cinema, pioneered by Émile Cohl in France and Winsor McCay in the U.S., was still something of a specialty when filmmaker Ladislas Starevich turned to stop motion techniques to create the first puppet-animated films. Who would have guessed that a director of natural history films could so adeptly transform the subjects of his early work (beetles, grasshoppers and other insects) into players in a satirical comedy of infidelity, jealousy and vengeance? It’s a wicked farce with a decidedly adult sensibility, early Cecil B. DeMille meets Mack Sennett yet made before either of those artists had established their careers, and created entirely with actual (dead) insects brought to life one frame at a time. Admittedly there wasn’t much competition in the animation category in 1912, but such a convergence of innovation, imagination and sophistication deserves some kind of recognition.

Watch The Cameraman’s Revenge on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1912Best Animated Short

The Cameraman’s Revenge

The upset of 1919 Oscars® as I’ve conjured them was this Swedish import taking the crown from superstar Charlie Chaplin, storytelling giant D.W. Griffith and favorite son Douglas Fairbanks (whose films with director Allan Dwan delivered American can-do spirit at its most energizing). But nothing Hollywood produced came close to the storytelling sophistication and dramatic intensity of Victor Sjöström’s masterpiece. Set in 19th-century Iceland and shot against the dramatic landscape of Mount Nuolja in Northern Sweden, Sjöström creates images both beautiful and elemental to match the burning passion between rugged farmhand Kari (played by Sjöström himself) and the generous and compassionate widow Halla (Edith Erastoff). But for all its beauty, the primordial majesty and spiritual purity of the natural world is as unforgiving as the society that would deny their love and marriage “in the eyes of God.” Sjöström set a new bar for Hollywood filmmakers.

Watch The Outlaw and His Wife on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1919Best Picture

The Outlaw and His Wife

Yes, back in the day performers could get two roles listed for a single nomination. It’s a little unfair but Ms. Lillian Gish, the first lady of American screen acting, certainly earns the honor. Working with director D.W. Griffith, she brought a subtlety and sophistication to screen acting, investing Griffith’s portraits of pure-hearted maidens with a glow of benevolence along with pluck and perseverance and fortitude. In Broken Blossoms, Griffith’s most tender film, she’s the forlorn daughter of an alcoholic brute who finds tenderness from a dreamy Chinese immigrant in London (played by American Richard Barthelmess), and in Griffith’s True Heart Susie she’s the epitome of the sweet, dreamy, naïve country girl as an eternal child oblivious to the social realities around her. Gish could do histrionics with the best of them, of course, wringing emotion from a passionate plea or an emotional outpouring, but was brilliant when stripping away artifice to create intimate shifts in a nearly still performance.

Watch Broken Blossoms and True Heart Susie on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1920Best Actress: Lillian Gish

Broken Blossoms and True Heart Susie

Admittedly, a documentary category might have been a little premature in 1922, but for the godfather of modern documentary filmmaking I’m making an exception. Robert Flaherty’s portrait of traditional life among the Inuit people of the Arctic Circle wasn’t the first documentary by far—the actualities of the Lumierès were nothing if not documentary recordings of their world and everything from major world events to glimpses of exotic places were filmed for interested filmgoers—or even the first feature-length non-fiction film. It was, however, the most influential. Flaherty discovered that the culture he wanted to show no longer existed so he recreated scenes of fishing, hunting, building an igloo and domestic life for the camera with the Inuit “subjects.” Which also makes it the first great documentary controversy. Flaherty and his actors deliver a drama of survival in a severe and unforgiving environment, and though it may seem naïve by modern standards it remains moving, involving and quite beautiful.

Watch Nanook of the North on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1923Best Documentary

Nanook of the North

Special effects had been a part of the movies going back to the 19th century, when Georges Méliès brought stage magic to filmmaking, but that has nothing on what Willis O’Brien brought to life with clay, armatures and stop-motion effects in the original Jurassic adventure. The ostensible stars of the picture (Wallace Beery, Bessie Love and Lewis Stone), explorers in search of a fabled land where prehistoric creatures have survived and thrived, are all upstaged by Willis O’Brien’s dinosaurs. Though hardly realistic to modern eyes, these pioneering special effects are still a sight to behold, especially the lumbering brontosaurus that receives the most care from O’Brien, both foraging in his jungle and rampaging through the streets of London. The effects were so startling that these imagined Oscars® created a new category to celebrate the achievements in the granddaddy of all giant monster thrillers.

Watch The Lost World on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1926Best Visual Effects

The Lost World

Released in January of 1927 in Germany and two months later in the U.S., this landmark was just too early for consideration in the inaugural awards (handed out in May, 1929). So I’m giving this early 1927 release a clear playing field with its own Oscar® year: Academy Awards® Year Zero. Sure, science fiction isn’t a big player with the Academy, but otherwise it has all the hallmarks of an Oscar® favorite: epic canvas, astounding sets, visionary visual design and the timely theme of man struggling to find his place in the rapid spread of technology and machinery, all under the firm control of filmmaker Fritz Lang. Hollywood had never seen anything like it before. The film was soon edited down and the original cut was lost for decades. The 2010 restoration restores scenes, characters and story lines unseen since opening night and confirms just how grand Lang’s vision was.

Watch Metropolis on Fandor

Metropolis

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Alternative Winner 1928Best Picture, Cinematography, Production Design

B Y S H A R I K I Z I R I A N

Mid-Century SnubsRighting Oscar® wrongs from the ’30s to the ’70s.

In Hollywood’s rush to sound, the Academy also wasted no time bestowing a special prize at its first ceremony on The Jazz Singer for “revolutionizing the industry.” By the second year, Outstanding Production went to Broadway Melody. Meanwhile the world was still making silent films—good ones, too. Yasujirô Ozu’s I Was Born But…, (1932); The Goddess (1934), starring China’s biggest star, Ruan Lingyu; and Carl Dreyer’s Vampyr, which is basically a silent with added sound. In the Soviet Union, Mikhail Kalatozov, later celebrated for The Cranes Are Flying, Letter Unsent and I Am Cuba—all made with the same breathtakingly fluid camera moves he first picked up in the silent-era—directed this ethnographic film shot on location in a remote, salt-deprived Caucasus mountain range in his home province of Georgia. The American government didn’t formally recognized the U.S.S.R until 1933 and the Academy didn’t have a documentary category until the propaganda films in World War II, but it’s not without precedent for Salt to have picked up a win: the Academy gave its third cinematography award to With Byrd at the South Pole. Those were the days.

Watch Salt for Svanetia on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1931Best Cinematography (Silent)

Salt for Svanetia

The Fleischers deserved an Oscar® long before the 1941 win for Superman. This cinematic marvel, with its astonishing depth of field, rivals anything the Oscar®-monopolizing Disney put out. For the film, the Fleischers deployed their patent-pending device, the Setback, a turntable platform that allowed for the simultaneous photographing of layers of miniature sets and hand-drawn cels to create a three-dimensional universe that moves. Shot in Cinecolor, because Disney had an exclusive four-year contract with Technicolor to animate in its full-color process, Poor Cinderella displays all the best of the endlessly inventive Fleischers: the gags (one hopeful’s big toe wagging its verdict on whether the glass slipper fits); sound effects (clomping coach horses provide the backbeat for the title song); a red-headed Boop (with some remaining va-va-voom before the Production Code inhibited her) against azure-mountains majesty. A shot lasting only seconds, high-wigged royals arriving in dark silhouette against the baroquely colorful ballroom, proves Poor Cinderella is not only a groundbreaking cartoon, it’s cinema.

Watch Poor Cinderella on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1935Short Subject (Cartoon)

Poor Cinderella

There’s a campaign afoot to add an Oscar® category in casting: Casting Directors—so the argument goes in 2012’s Casting By, which gives hilarious short shrift to the opposing side represented by Taylor Hackford. (Is it possible the doc maker didn’t know he’s married to Helen Mirren?) Actors are the largest contingent of Academy membership and always have been except for a brief period in the early 1930s because of a dispute with the guilds. Paying tribute to those who get them their jobs makes sense. A Casting Director branch was added in 2013, so it might not be too long now. I tend to agree with poor misrepresented Hackford that the film’s director retains control over casting choices, at least for the principals. So I propose a compromise: an award for Outstanding Achievement in Making the Background Believable. This film by the accomplished Swedish film director Per Lindberg perfectly illustrates the crucial role of an ensemble of extras. Ingrid Bergman in the lead was a no-brainer, but those townsfolk in the courtroom scenes? They (and whoever cast them) deserve an Oscar®. Casting directors can accept the statuette as long as they name all the extras in their acceptance speech.

Watch June Night on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1940Best Ensemble of Extras

June Night

Brought over from Berlin because of his blockbuster spectacles, Fritz Lang’s relatively low-key American career must have been an enormous disappointment to Hollywood. He remains one of the all-time greats, despite his Academy shut-out, which is unforgivable, especially in light of this burnished masterpiece that turns noir-conventions inside out before the genre had a French name. Its virtues are legion: nighttime city streets slick with rain, a richly thickened plot, unremittingly venal characters and a Hays’s office-sanctioned ending that defied the proscriptions of its own Production Code. Oscars® are due not only to Lang but to screenwriter Dudley Nichols and photographer Milton R. Krasner, as well as to the unfairly overlooked Dan Duryea, at the top of his slippery, wise-acre game. While we’re at it, give Best Picture to producer Walter Wanger for staying in business with the director and to Wanger’s wife and business partner, Joan Bennett, who blossomed as a brunette under Lang. Watch her string along, while she gets strung along, over a rum Collins with horny henpecked Edward G. Robinson. Extra kudos to Lang for his dual digs at art world elitism and the uncultured masses.

Watch Scarlet Street on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1946A Sweep

Scarlet Street

Marriage is murder in this adaptation of Émile Zola’s tragic novel of an adulteress, which Marcel Carné deftly turned into a humanistic noir. The lovely Simone Signoret is yoked to a cold-fish mama’s boy, so when love storms through the storefront of the family business, we’re happy for her. But soon, someone is dead, and someone must pay. We’re kept guessing as to how destiny will collect its debts, but an unsettling dread builds with every scene as we’re convinced that no one deserves their fate. When a crowd of onlookers gathers outside the store window to watch the tragedy unfolding within (in a stunning deep-focus shot), the whole world knows how it must end. The Academy didn’t establish a foreign-language category until after the war, even as some titles occasionally showed up in other categories (Á nous la liberté and Grand Illusion) and for some reason did not name any foreign language film in 1953. Signoret eventually garnered a statuette for her English-language work as a “woman of a certain age” in 1959’s Room at the Top.

Watch Thérèse Raquin on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1953Best Foreign Language Film

Thérèse Raquin

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Alternative Winner 1955Best Art Direction, Honorary Achievement Award to Director Allan Dwan

Silver LodeShot in tight spaces with deep focus and a muted Technicolor palette by noir cinematographer John Alton, this western about a shady authority figure trying to arrest someone on a dubious charge might be the best of Allan Dwan’s late films. Released the same year that Elia Kazan’s On the Waterfront swept the Oscars®, its relative obscurity is even more poignant. Though Dwan consistently denied the correlation, the story is an unmistakable allegory for HUAC’s Hollywood witch-hunt. It was also released the same year as Rear Window, Hitchcock’s nominated morality play about the costs (and benefits) of peering into other people’s lives. Dwan weaves in a subtler motif, with the hunted and the hunters keeping tabs on each through the town’s windowpanes and drawn curtains. Townsfolk meanwhile resemble a fickle Greek chorus, their opinions changing faster than a gunfighter can draw. Art director Van Nest Polglase, who used Fourth of July bunting to critique American indifference, deserves the win. Dwan praised Polglase, better known for drinking than for his six previous Oscar® nods, as “a great guy to take one set and transform it into another one with very little money.” Surely a virtue in Hollywood. The Academy could also have used the opportunity to acknowledge Dwan’s unsung fifty-plus-year career.

Watch Silver Lode on Fandor

Lighter cameras, faster film (for shooting in low light), and the portable Nagra gave filmmakers the mobility to capture images and sound as it unfolds, making the audience feel part of the action. Michel Brault and Gilles Groulx had made an impression among documentary filmmakers with 1958’s Les raquetteurs. After seeing the fifteen-minute film, which gets right up in among the snowshoers at a convention in Quebec, Jean Rouch pressed Brault into service on his groundbreaking cinema verité project, Chronicle of a Summer. Back home, Brault shot (with Claude Jutra) this charming little gem about American tourists who flood Montreal’s summer in search of a closer, cheaper Paris. Joining an African American couple in their Cadillac, the filmmakers weave and whoosh with them around town, capturing poetic imagery of the city they clearly love. Documentary filmmaking had changed forever, but the Academy seemed not to have noticed, blind to pioneering filmmakers like the Maysles brothers (Salesman, Primary) until their first Christo film a decade later, and, most egregiously, ignoring William Greaves and his exuberant genre-defiant Symbiopsychotaxiplasm.

Watch Visit to a Foreign Country on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1963Best Short-form Documentary

Visit to a Foreign Country

As Americans developed a warier view of war, some filmmakers picked up the zeitgeist. The Academy gave Peter Watkins the win in 1966 for his effective docudrama The War Game, an it-can-happen-here nuclear holocaust. Still, two years after the Tet Offensive, Patton kicked M*A*S*H’s ass. In the year that it honored the deserving Closely Watched Trains, the Czechoslovakian film that used WWII has an allegory for Soviet oppression, the Academy could just as easily have chosen this critics circle favorite, which uses the Russian Civil War as an allegory for the non-heroic nature of all war. Miklós Jancsó’s camera seems in constant movement as it follows a series of hapless protagonists, Communists and Cossacks both, whom we are never allowed to get to know. Capricious and chaotic, warfare turns villains into victims in an instant. The camera speeds quickly away or stays remote from all deaths, rendering each one meaningless. It’s no surprise that the Soviets tinkered with the film’s ending then finally banned it, or that Middle America couldn’t yet handle its antiwar message. But a wiser Academy could have at least extended black-and-white award categories a few more years to acknowledge its galloping cinematography.

Watch The Red and the White on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1969Achievement in Black-and-White Cinematography or, at least, a Foreign Language Nod

The Red and the White

Dominique Benicheti’s soundtrack for this gorgeous, textural CinemaScope documentary consists of only ambient sound (recorded in stereo!), allowing you to peacefully relish the wide-angle view provided by La nuit américaine cinematographer Pierre William Glenn. Set in bucolic Burgundy among its naturally impressionistic hues, the film respectfully records the steady rhythms of the daily routine of a blacksmith and his wife: gathering wood to make the fire to heat the steel and getting water from the well, the first step in the long worthwhile process of sharing a cup of freshly ground midday coffee. “I made a sketch of each scene,” said the director, then in his early thirties, about Cousin Jules, which tests the limits of the documentary—discarding reporting, fact recitation and interviews all together—as well as strains the confines of the story film. There is no inciting incident, no denouement. Benicheti’s legacy is evident in subsequent observational documentaries, especially the camera virtuosity and canny framing of Leviathan, People’s Park, Manakamana, produced by the ten-year-old Sensory Ethnography Lab housed at Harvard, where, thirty years ago at the invitation of Robert Gardner, Benicheti rigged up widescreen and 3-D equipment and planned future films.

Watch Cousin Jules on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1973Best Documentary Feature

Cousin Jules

Exhaustive raconteur of the vividly unusual, Peter Greenaway made this mesmerizing BFI-financed film two years before his plus-sized The Falls launched his feature career. Ninety-two canvases painted by the director serve as maps for a 1,418-mile journey through a placed called H, which is forever delineated but never defined. The camera pans around the intricacies of each dark opaque oil as a first-person narrator describes receiving cryptic directions and dubious advice, getting lost, tracking back, occasionally sharing fascinating anecdotes of birds. In the end, we’re back in the gallery where the film’s initial tracking shot ensnared us in this mesmerizing world in the first place. Greenaway made it, he said, as a way to know his deceased father, who hoarded decades of bird facts in five suitcases that inspired the director’s alter ego, Tulse Luper. The Academy tends to ignore the experimental except as it seeps into movies it understands (some Luis Buñuel films, American Beauty, etc.). Watching this whimsical, melancholy film, you can almost hear the idiosyncratic voiceovers and feel Greenaway’s touch in the painstaking, hand-made sets and slowly moving, wide-angle camera of Wes Anderson.

Watch A Walk Through H on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1979Best Short Film (Live-action)

A Walk Through H

B Y S A R A M A R I A V I Z C A R R O N D O

And Now, the NomineesThey made it to the party, but really: should they have won? Nominated

non-winners get their due, from the ’80s to the present day.

Marlene Dietrich says early in the Oscar®-nominated documentary about her that there are fifty-five books written about Marlene Dietrich and she hasn’t read any because she doesn’t give a damn about herself. The doc’s director, Maximilian Schell, was in the winter of his acting career when he made Marlene. Like Dietrich, Schell was a native German speaker and had a legacy of playing slippery characters—though he played the baddie more than she ever did. Schell’s Marlene was one of a few of docs he made about admirable women (My Sister Maria, about his actress sister, was the second biggest entry) and the doc was at once a breath of traditional Euro-charm and a strange feat of almost-revisionism. In glossy/gritty archival footage, Marlene delivers evidence of the aged icon’s life in performance, while her voice-over describes with epic aloofness her private life as the patron saint of DGAF. A star among stars, Dietrich is a hero to herself alone and that autonomy is memorable but begs you not to follow—the film helps you look up at her but she’s not a hero so much as a rebel.

Watch Marlene on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1985Best Documentary

Marlene

It can’t be a coincidence that six years later, Oscar® noms were interested in revalidating legends: Young Guns II and Dances with Wolves pulled the western genre out of the dustbin and spit-shined it for public approval while Havana looked at a trenchant historical moment for answers about the day. Mark Kitchell’s doc nominee Berkeley in the Sixties was an expose about the messy, hard-to-record history in the capital of our American cultural revolution. Kitchell sifts through the rubble of this nation’s last zeitgeist only to find our triumph of public dissent provided less triumph than hard lessons about the utility of public assembly. Democracy is a leadership by the people and for the people; its existence is meant to fortify the hope-bringing autonomy of the individual and prove the little guy’s power to make change. What are we supposed to think when the model doesn’t work? Then again, are we really sure it didn’t?

Watch Berkeley in the Sixties on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1991Best Documentary

Berkeley in the Sixties

Whit Stillman’s sophisticatedly naïve Metropolitan answers that previous conundrum with a punch line: in the upper echelons, no one can hear you peaceably assemble. Up for best screenplay against Green Card, Avalon and popular favorite (and winner) Ghost, we might look on Stillman’s reverse Cinderella story as its own A Rose for Emily. The nominees read like four Goliaths and one Whit—maybe the fact Stillman’s name is present at all proves the little guy can triumph.

Watch Metropolitan on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1991Best Original Screenplay

Metropolitan

Maybe history is written by the victors but the 1994 Oscar® race was packed with stories that explained how the majority is silenced. Schindler’s List watched a vile profiteer be manipulated to save the lives of thousands and Philadelphia addressed the AIDS crisis and the marginalization of the afflicted through the story of an attorney suing for wrongful termination. Perhaps the most piquant and literal story of silence is Foreign Language film nominee The Scent of Green Papaya. The film watches a placid but poor child indoctrinated into a life of servitude. She cooks, she cleans, she’s denigrated by the children of the house and after her life of quiet diligence, she is denied both money and sadness. Leave misery to those who can afford it.

Watch The Scent of Green Papaya on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1994Best Foreign Language Film

The Scent of Green Papaya

The same year Schindler’s List rocked the nomination, short subject Black Rider dangerously critiqued Germany’s “denazification.” From WWII on, cinema used The Nazi as its own go-to baddy and the German nation made great efforts to fix (see: Reconstruction), repay (see: Reparations) and/or forget (see: Heimatfilm) their part in the history of human atrocity (see: Third Reich). As part of German Reparations and a broader goal to demonstrate goodwill and escape financial devastation, Germany opened its borders to immigrants. Black Rider’s sly title doesn’t declare the nationhood of the rider/protagonist—that would be limiting, and anyway the bus riding old biddy spewing racial epithets isn’t giving him the benefit of a cultural heritage. Her heritage, by the way, is resplendently Master Race, and Reparations are just a bump in their otherwise eternal legacy of triumph. Is that terrifying? Black Rider thinks it’s hilarious.

Watch Black Rider on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 1994Best Narrative Short Subject

Black Rider

Sam Green refuses to let the history of American resistance lie quietly, and in his 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, he tracks the houseboat-loving radicals who aimed to overthrow the U.S. government. In retrospect, 2004 nominees highlight a lot of magic in the water: Mystic River traced trauma through ripples upstream while Pirates of the Caribbean (how did that get on the list?!) portrayed pirates as wobbly, rogue strategists parallel to Jobs and Wozniak. I mean, really, how did we get where we are? While Errol Morris’ The Fog of War tracked the victor’s narrative about Vietnam, Green revealed American radicals were ambitious, ruthless risk takers—and forgetting that history is akin to pretending our nation is invulnerable.

Watch The Weather Underground on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 2004Best Documentary

The Weather Underground

As Greece was teetering towards bankruptcy, the “Greek Weird Wave” (so-called by The Guardian’s Steve Rose) was hitting the states and Dogtooth, the most vital, perverse, multivalent metaphor for perspective led the charge. 2011 was the year Black Swan pit feminine aberrance against a King with a stutter (King’s Speech). Meanwhile, in the competition for Best Foreign Film, each entry was concerned with seeing ways outside their limited scopes. Javier Bardem hunted for a way out of poverty in Biutiful and Trine Dryholm cried for peace among warring families in In a Better World. Turmoil is evergreen and while the characters in Dogtooth have organized their world in avoidance of outside conflict, living in a bubble can’t provide safety. The magic of Dogtooth (which lost to In a Better World) is that its primary contrivance (a family raised inside a compound) is based on an ideal that can’t produce healthy fruit; you have to break the bubble to see outside it.

Watch Dogtooth on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 2011Best Foreign Film

Dogtooth

Few film-based activist campaigns are as successful as the one begun by The Invisible War filmmaker Kirby Dick. About the crisis of unprosecuted rape cases in the military, The Invisible War promised to crack open a legacy of cruelty swept under the rug by the military’s justice system. The year this film was up for best documentary, Lincoln, Argo and Hitchcock were having their ways with history; The Invisible War called for a full-scale review of the military record and a redress of the grievances made by a growing number of women who’d been silenced by their authorities in the armed forces. Under threat of reprisals, endangerment and terrors from within, the women who came forward changed the dominant narrative, defied their authorities and, by changing the landscape for future women in the forces, transformed themselves from rebels into heroes.

Watch The Invisible War on Fandor

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Alternative Winner 2013Best Documentary

The Invisible War

Oscars® 2015: Video EvidenceWho deserves to win?

Kevin Lee’s video essay series looks closely at the major categories of the Academy Awards® to determine which films and performances truly deserve to win, through the application of sense, cinemetrics and subjectivity. The series was inspired by a desire to break free from the typical Oscar® coverage and gossip that seems solely interested in predicting the winners. Caught up in all the industry speculation and hype, too often we lose track of the movies themselves. The beauty of the video essay is that it allows us to look directly at those films and re-engage that question: what exactly is on screen that deserves our praise? And how exactly does it work its wonders?

In these video essays, Lee employs a basic technique called cinemetrics, in which he tries to find objective measurements for understanding the elements of movies, particularly with performances.

There’s no question that assessing the quality of a film is highly subjective. All the same, it is worth trying to understand this alchemical process for what it may reveal about how each of us metabolize movies, and what particular qualities each of us values more than others.

Watch Kevin Lee’s 2015 Oscar® Video Essays on Keyframe

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B Y K E V I N B . L E E

To read more on these films and to find similar articles, visit Fandor’s digital magazine, Keyframe.