Review-O-Sphere

Main Title~Grand Hotel - uncredited Grand Hotel is a bit of an outlier when it comes to Best Picture winners (or Outstanding Production as it was still called at this time). If you go down the catalogue of winners and look at their plots, they’re usually about an outcast who has something to prove (e.g. On the Waterfront (1954), Rocky (1976), Braveheart (1995)), a war movie (e.g. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Patton (1970), Braveheart (1995)), sweeping film epics (e.g. The Godfather (1972), Gladiator (2000), Braveheart (1995)) or a true story about someone who did something amazing (e.g. Gandhi (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Braveheart (1995)). Grand Hotel is about some people who stay at a hotel at the same time and, yeah, that’s about it. The film was still revolutionary though. Not in the sense that it had some new camera techniques or had a story that’s never been seen before, no, instead it proved the raw potential of star power in Hollywood. Before this...

   To see part 1, click  here . The Nightclub~Charlie Chaplin - City Lights Once more, the time frame for this ceremony is a half-year and half year, spanning from July of 1930 to June of 1931. First things first, let’s identify a few historical milestones.     First is Skippy , a film about a young boy named Skippy, played by Jackie Cooper who is on record as the youngest actor to be nominated for the Oscar for Best Actor, a record held to this day. Film is rare and hard to find so no comments are made here. There was also Trader Horn which started the safari film genre that became a big deal in the 30s. This was back before National Geographic and Animal Planet so the only way that audiences could see exotic animals was going to see movies set in Africa. The most popular example of these would be the Tarzan film series starring Johnny Weissmuller that began with Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). These movies were usually nothing more than an excuse to see ...

  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 D...