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Succes or Snub? Casablanca (16th Academy Awards Review Pt. 2)

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 To read part 1, click here .   The Song of Bernadette Suite~The Song of Bernadette - Alfred Newman Casablanca ’s Oscar win is interesting on a few counts. For one thing, you may remember that one of the rules the Academy has (and that we use as a baseline for movies to complain about in this series) is that the year’s considerations are for whenever the movie came out in Los Angeles. Casablanca was originally released in New York City during the closing weeks of 1942 but it didn’t receive its wide release until January of 1943, qualifying it for the 16th Academy Awards instead of the 15th. Furthermore, January is usually regarded as the bad season of films, even back then. If a movie is released in January, it’s not usually getting big accolades, especially at the Oscars. The fact that this movie was still on people’s minds twelve months later speaks volumes about just how much people loved Casablanca . Anyway, the next couple chapters will be divided in half between war movies and

Oscars Retrospective: Casablanca (16th Academy Awards Review)

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  As Time Goes By~Dooley Wilson Casablanca is one of the greatest and most beloved movies of all time, often considered the best film to come out of Hollywood during the war years, one of the best films of the Golden Age of Hollywood and is still a great watch even over 75 years after the war has ended. In a time when Hollywood was churning out war pictures non-stop, Casablanca in particular seems to stick out as an especially treasured film. In the words of famed film critic, Roger Ebert, while Citizen Kane (1941) might be the greatest movie of all time, Casablanca is arguably the most loved. So let’s analyze why, shall we? Casablanca is set in Casablanca, Morocco, revolving around the numerous expats and refugees who make their homes in the city. In particular, it centers on the owner of a nightclub/gambling den named Rick Blaine (Humphrey Bogart), a cynical and depressed stick-in-the-mud who has no qualms about patronizing the local Nazis, represented in the film by Major H