5 Days till Oscar
Tuesday, February 4, 2020 at 2:36PM 
For a bit of 'number of the day' silliness, let's talk about the #5 in relation to Oscar. Obviously the best correlation is that the traditional Oscar category is 5 nominees wide and has been for most of Oscar's history once they settled into their routines with various exceptions of categories which resisted being that large for reasons both understandable and nonsensical. Best Makeup FINALLY became a five wide category this very season (long overdue). Of this year's five-wide categories only one is made up entirely of first time nominees: Best Animated Short! Other five related nonsense after the jump...
Oscar has wisely resisted "ties" and other shenanigans that have made other awards so silly like Emmys ever expanding lineups (in addition to the hundreds of categories making an Emmy pretty easy to come by) except in Best Picture. We've gotten used to the expansion of 5 to 10 nominees but we do wish they'd just pick a number rather than using this sliding number depending on percentages of votes because it always being 8 or 9 looks sloppy. JUST PICK A NUMBER.
People enjoying their 5th nomination this year
Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes (Supporting Actor)
Russell Earl, Avengers Endgame (Visual Effects)
Robert Legato, The Lion King (Visual Effects)
Matthew Wood, Rise of Skywalker (Sound Editing)
Famous stars who finally won on their fifth nomination
Susan Hayward - I Want to Live! (1958)
Jack Nicholson - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
Susan Sarandon - Dead Man Walking (1995)
Jeff Bridges - Crazy Heart (2009)
Julianne Moore - Still Alice (2014)
OSCAR NOMINATED FILMS WITH FIVE IN THE TITLE
(We think this is all of them but let us know if we missed something)
Henry V (1944) - Back in ye olden times movies from outside the States would sometimes get nominated years after their international release. Such was the case for this Laurence Olivier production which was nominated for four Oscars for 1946…Picture, Actor, Art Direction, Score… and Sir Larry got an Honorary Award too. It was all a premonition of Oscar going crazy for his Hamlet a couple of years later.
Henry V (1989) - Even though Oscar never loved Shakespearean adaptations again with the intensity they did when Laurence Olivier was doing them, they toyed briefly with getting obsessed with them again when Kenneth Branagh announced himself as the new Olivier. This production introduced the world to Emma Thompson (for which we should always be grateful) and was nominated for three Oscars: Director, Actor, and it won for Costume Design. It was a late breaking sleeper hit and with another month in release it's easy to picture it breaking through to Best Picture as well.
Five Fingers (1952) - nominated for 2 Oscars, Director and Screenplay
Five Easy Pieces (1970) - This rough and actorly 1970s classic was nominated for 4 Oscars: Picture, Actor, Supporting Actress - which we discussed at length, and Screenplay
Nine To Five (1980) - One of the best comedies of the 1980s had to settle for just one nomination for its title track in Best Original Song. And Dolly Parton lost too!
The Hobbit: Battle of the Five Armies (2014) -the last film in Peter Jackson's perpetual Middle Earth filming was nominated for just one Oscar: Sound Editing. One assumes that a 7th film would have finally had Oscar looking the other way. Oscar hasn't adjusted that well to franchises, if you ask us, often lazily nominating them in the same categories regardless of an individual film's merits though they eventually lose interest in nearly every franchise. Franchises are the closest threat to making Oscar into the Emmys but so far at least they've mostly resisted (unless the first film in a trilogy or series has hooked them. Then they stick with it for awhile)
Reader Comments (8)
I had to look up the nominees for Best Original Song that year and 9 to 5 lost to "Fame" so I can't really be that mad...
Would you count The 5th Element (1997) among these films? It was nominated for Sound Effects Editing.
If I had a nickel for every time someone forgot The Five Pennies (1959)...
Best Cinematography, Color (Daniel L. Fapp)
Best Costume Design, Color (Edith Head)
Best Music, Original Song (Sylvia Fine for the song "The Five Pennies")
Best Music, Scoring of a Musical Picture (Leith Stevens)
There's also Five Graves to Cairo...
Best Cinematography, Black-and-White (John F. Seitz)
Best Art Direction-Interior Decoration, Black-and-White (Hans Dreier, Ernst Fegté, Bertram C. Granger)
Best Film Editing (Doane Harrison)
The Sheep Has Five Legs: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0047250/
Five Times Five: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0031316/
Five Star Final: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0021873/
The Five Cities of June: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0057061/
if you are counting shorts too.
Fame was a great choice for Best Original Song in 1980. One of very few times that category got it right. Dolly should have won for Travelin' Through from Transamerica. That year the Academy made one of it's worst Best Original Song choices.
5 Broken Cameras (2012) nominated in the Documentary Feature category.
I know “Fame” is a classic but I want Dolly to have an Oscar so badly! I suppose 2005 was their opportunity, but I cherish the ratchetness of that Three 6 Mafia acceptance speech.
Fun post! Shirley MacLaine won on her fifth nomination as well.