Saturday, April 19, 2008

Awards Watch Retro: Sunrise, Sunset

The Los Angeles Times' Tom O'Neil proves yet again how clueless he truly is in this recent rant against the certified classic Sunrise, F.W. Murnau's brilliant silent masterpiece starring George O'Brien and Janet Gaynor. He dismisses the film as a "soap opera", "paper-thin" and "hilariously schmaltzy".

I guess winning three Academy Awards (tied with another Gaynor picture, Seventh Heaven, for the most in Oscar's very first year), being named to both the prestigious National Film Registry and the American Film Institute's top 100 movies of all time and being universally regarded as one of the landmarks of not only early cinema but all of film history ... well, apparently, to Mr. O'Neil, they are all wrong.

Mind you, this is the man who still thinks that Dreamgirls was robbed (robbed!) of the Best Picture Oscar two years ago. I suppose that, in the end, it is all about taste ... or, in his case, lack thereof.

2 comments:

normadesmond said...

You are so right! "Sunrise" is a classic & the fact that someone WON an Best Supporting Actress Oscar for "Dreamgirls" is almost a joke.

Kirby Holt said...

A diva after my own heart.

Did you see "J Hud" at the Oscars this year? She couldn't even convincingly read off a teleprompter. And the little I've seen of her in "Sex and the City" isn't very promising either.

If anyone deserved an Oscar for that movie, it was Anika Noni Rose. She deserved one for consistently shinging off the two dim bulb "actresses" she had to play off of.

- kch