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Oscars Retrospective: Cimarron (4th Academy Awards Review)

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  Main Title~Cimarron - Max Steiner On November 10 th , 1931, the 4 th Academy Awards took place to hand out some awards and name Cimarron as the Outstanding Production of the time period from July 1930 to June 1931. That’s about the beginning and end of the trivia for this ceremony so I’m going to stop mentioning them every time unless there’s something worth talking about for the ceremony itself.           Cimarron is interesting in that it’s the first Oscar win that wasn’t really revolutionary. You could argue the first 3 movies all being big groundbreakers in the art of film but that’s not really the case here. In addition, Cimarron was the first, and one of the very few, Oscar wins that was a box office failure as it failed to recoup its budget during its initial theatrical run. Cimarron is a historical drama set around the turn of the 20th Century that revolves around a couple called the Cravats, Yancey (Richard Dix) and Sabra (Irene Dunne). After the new territory of

Success or Snub? All Quiet on the Western Front (3rd Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

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  To see part 1, click here . Paris, Stay the Same~Maurice Chevalier - The Love Parade This is probably going to be one of the shorter installments in this series because, to tell you the truth, there wasn’t a whole lot of competition for All Quiet on the Western Front . Don’t get me wrong, there were good movies that came out in 1929 and 1930, but they all appear to have come out outside of the defined time bracket (Aug 1929-Jul 1930). Most of the major splashes seem to have earned their way into film history by simply being firsts rather than actually being classic films. Por ejemplo: There’s Blackmail , which was Alfred Hitchcock’s first sound film and the first British talkie film. Also Atlantic which was the first sound movie to be based on the RMS Titanic disaster as well as the first sound film released in Germany (after it was dubbed). The Big House was one of the first and most definitive prison movies and pioneered most of the clichés of the genre (the evil warden, the c