(no subject)

[learnedax]

Huh. Return of the King got 11 Oscar nominations, and 11 Oscars. Has that ever happened before?

This backs up my theory that they were cautiously waiting until the third film in the trilogy before giving them the big awards.

Comments

[its-just-me.livejournal.com]

Nope - it's a first.

[new-man.livejournal.com]

That exact thing has never happened. Other films have been nominated for and won 11 Oscars. Other films have made a clean sweep of all categoreis for which they were nominated.

Return of the King matched the record 11 Oscar wins of Titanic and Ben-Hur and became only the third movie to sweep every category in which it was nominated, following Gigi and The Last Emperor, which both won nine out of nine.

[learnedax.livejournal.com]

Ah, alright. It was the largeness of the sweep that I, ambiguously, was interested in.

[jadasc.livejournal.com]

Twice before -- Ben Hur and Titanic each got 11 awards. I don't know what their percentages of nominations to Oscars were, though.

[katkt.livejournal.com]

This backs up my theory that they were cautiously waiting until the third film in the trilogy before giving them the big awards.

Of course, in this I think they were grossly mistaken. ROTK (the movie) was the worst of the three, IMO. I'm a big fan of the Tolkien, and I enjoyed all three movies, but the end of ROTK the movie was incoherent. I mean, I knew what he was going for, but I didn't feel like the movie said it or really made any sense at all after Frodo passes out after destroying the ring.

So the trilogy deserved awards. It was a stupendous endeavor of a previously unknown scope, and it was well (but not flawlessly) done. It was beautiful. But ROTK wasn't the best picture this (last) year.

*shrug*

[jducoeur]

On the one hand, I agree that RotK was the weakest of the three films, and probably not in and of itself deserving of best picture.

OTOH, the Oscars simply don't have a way to recognize a split story like this, and the fact is that this really *is* just a single movie, split into three parts mostly for commercial reasons. That's how it was shot, that's how the story is structured, and that was (quite reasonably, in my view) how it got treated by the Academy. Best Picture for RotK was treated as a referendum on the whole thing, and as such I think it was deserved.

Yes, it's a rules hack. But I think it was a fair one for an unusual situation...