Baby Clyde's Oscar Completist Diaries -- Part 1
I’ve been and gone and done it! It took me nearly four decades, thousands of hours of screen time, a very patient brother and ultimately a trip to the other side of the world, but I’ve finally I’ve watched every available Best Picture and Acting Oscar nomination.
There were highs, lows, tears, laughter and Maximillian Schell in The Man in the Glass Booth but I’ve done it. The first thing I’ve ever had patience to follow through with in my entire life and we have one woman to thank. I know the exact moment my Oscar obsession started: Tuesday March 25th, 1986. 37 years ago, today...
The Color Purple (1985)
I was just 12 years old and staying at my Nan’s house for the night, when I sat down alongside her lodger Andi to watch the 58th annual Academy Awards on television. The ceremony had taken place the night before but back then it was never shown live in the UK. We’d get a highlights broadcast the following nights. It was the year that Out of Africa ruled, winning 7 of its 11 nominations and yet I have no memory of that film at all from the night. For me, the whole ceremony was dominated by one famously snubbed film and one legendary lady.
I’d heard of The Color Purple. It had been featured in a magazine article a few weeks before and piqued my interest, but I wasn’t really aware of Alice Walker’s book. I was taken with the names of the stars though: Whoopi Goldberg and Oprah Winfrey sounded loads of fun. It wasn’t until Oscar night that I got a real window into the films content. I can clearly remember a clip being shown of the young Celie running after her sister Nettie as she’s taken away. I was entranced. I don’t know when I finally saw it, but the film became a firm family favourite. One we would sit down together to watch. We bought the soundtrack album. My Mum would start crying when the credits went up AT THE BEGINNING. I wasn’t fully aware of its giant snubbing (11 nominations. 0 wins) on Oscar evening but it’s the first "baity" film I was invested in. Strangely the Color Purple loss that the most people are mad about to this day had never bothered me in the slightest. That’s because it involves the woman I have to thank for the last 37 years. My life changed the minute Geraldine Page’s name was called and she had to scramble around under the seat to retrieve her shoes, before ascending the stage to collect her long over overdue Best Actress statuette.
“I consider this woman the greatest actress in the English language” – F. Murray Abraham.
I’d never heard of her before (although I was later to discover she was the voice of Madame Medusa in one of my favourite childhood cartoons The Rescuers) but it was love at first sight. “Who is this wonderful woman...” I thought, “Why is she getting such a huge ovation?”. I determined right there and then to track down this Bountiful film, and my Oscar journey began.
Britain had a great track record with The Academy in the early 80’s. ‘The British are coming’ Brian Welland famously declared as Chariots of Fire triumphed for 1981. It was all over the news the next day -- my first clear Oscar-adjacent memory. Julie Walters in Educating Rita had been a huge deal in the UK. A Passage to India and obviously Gandhi sweeping the board had made big impressions. Weirdly I have a clear recollection of Tom’s, Courtney and Conti, being nominated in the same year and young me being confused why two actors would have such similar names.
I’d seen Kramer vs Kramer and On Golden Pond and understood they were classy, worthy, adult films and I’d loved them. Clearly my brother and I had weird tastes for tweens. To this day I’ve never seen Ghostbusters, Gremlins or The Goonies but we did both see A Room With A View in the cinema.
Soon after the 1986 ceremony I bought an "Encyclopedia of Movie Stars" and devoured it. I covered my bedroom walls with pictures of old Hollywood stars. We got a VCR for Christmas 1987. Best present ever. Soon after that I bought my first of many Oscar books and that was it. The path for the rest of my childhood was determined.
I made my brother learn actress winners by rote. I’d test him when we took the dog for a walk. I was fascinated by the likes of Luise Rainer and Miyoshi Umeki -- Oscar winners that I’d never heard of before and wins that had left no impression at all. More discoveries: Miss Ellie from Dallas was an Oscar nominee! Jessica Fletcher from Murder She Wrote had three nominations!!! The Oscar book was my Bible. My brother threw it at me once and broke the spine. I cried. We started travelling up to London to try and meet Movie Stars when they in the West End. Mickey Rooney didn’t stop to talk but Vanessa Redgrave signed my encyclopedia and after waiting all day outside the ITV studios because we knew Lauren Bacall (My favourite of them all) was appearing on appearing on Aspel we saw the back of her head as she drove passed us, leaving. I was thrilled. But most importantly of all I started the project that was going to occupy me until now.
I was determined to see every single acting nomination.
Long before spreadsheets existed, I’d make copious lists of all the nominees by hand. It was only acting nominees for some reason. I’ve seen all the Best Pictures contenders as well but that was a kind of side project. After each viewing, I’d assiduously tick off and rank the performance. My world revolved around it. I’d bunk off school, coming up with elaborate ploys to get out of class in time to see Olivia De Havilland in To Each His Own on TV at 2pm. I completely dominated the VCR which was constantly set to record multiple things which I would then stay up all hours of the night watching to clear space on the tapes to fit more films on. One day they had a vote on our local TV station asking the viewers to call in and decide whether to show Women In Love or The Blues Brothers as the Midnight Cult Film. I went to bed safe in the knowledge that the classy Oscar winner was obviously going to beat out the crude John Belushi comedy. I was appalled the next morning to discover that I would not be seeing Glenda Jackson’s first win because it only received 20% of the vote. Philistines. A film snob at 14.
With literally hundreds of films for me to see the task was easy back then. There were old films on TV every afternoon. I’d sit down with The Radio Times and a highlighter pen to mark off my viewing plan for the week ahead (This was good practice for the TIFF schedule decades later). Woe betides anyone else who thought they had a say on what was being recorded that week. Newer films cold be rented from The Video Van. A man who came round with a van full of VHS tapes on Sundays. He’d try to fob me off with Back To The Future, but I’d choose The Morning After, Crimes of The Heart and Children Of A Lesser God. I saw the whole 1986 Best Actress line up due to him. Soon after a giant Blockbusters opened in our town and I found all kinds of obscure titles that had never appeared on TV. They even had a copy of Glenda Jackson in Hedda which I failed to rent at the time and had disappeared when I went to do so a week later. I was furious. It took me another 30 years to track that one down when I finally saw it at The BFI just last year.
Whilst my compulsion to watch all things Oscar was relatively easy, getting to see the Oscar ceremony itself was not. By this point it was no longer shown on terrestrial TV as the rights had been bought up by the cable company Sky and there was no way to view the show unless you paid a monthly fee which my Mum couldn’t afford. Desperate times called for desperate measures and for years I basically bullied school friends who did have a Sky dish into taping it for me. I would give them video cassettes and detailed instructions of time and channel. The next day I would rush to school avoiding all morning TV and newspapers, lest they give the game away, and claim my prize, before immediately pulling a sickie and being sent home where I would be able to watch the Academy Awards in peace. Poor Lucien. He probably still has nightmares over the thought of accidently taping the wrong TV station.
By my late teens I was studying film at college which I absolutely hated. I wanted to be discussing Bette Davis not mise-en-scène. I knew more about some subjects than my tutor did; his knowledge was confined to the obvious film bro topics of the day. I regularly flummoxed him by mentioning film luminaries that he had never heard of. He once asked the class to name a famous cinematographer. I said, ‘James Wong Howe’. He said I was wrong. HUH???. I namechecked ‘Bergman, Kurosawa and Ray’ in an essay about International Cinema. He noted in the margins that Nicholas Ray was an American studio director of the 1950’s. I didn’t have the heart to tell him I meant the great Indian filmmaker Satyajit Ray.
This was the exact moment I gave up and decided I was better of doing my own ‘Film Studies’ about stuff that actually mattered. I spent the rest of the year at the back of the room quietly testing myself on acting nominees. One day I’d do Best Actresses of the 1970’s, the next Supporting Actors of the 1940’s. I got a "C" in the class.
The Crying Game (1992)
Back then the Oscar Race was vastly different than today. I didn’t go on for 6 months. There weren’t a million precursor awards and obviously no social media or amateur prognosticators to keep you up to date. Outside of the Hollywood bubble it wasn’t something you could really follow beyond the odd bit in a movie magazine or a mention on a TV show. This meant that nomination morning could be full of surprises. By far the biggest came when the 1992 noms were announced. I was driving to college and shamefully trying to read the story in the paper at the same time. When I found out that the new British It Girl, Jaye Davidson had been nominated in Supporting Actor rather than Supporting Actress I nearly crashed by car and ruined The Crying Game’s plot twist at the same time.
A few weeks later I was gobsmacked to see Jaye’s date for the Oscars was someone I knew. He’d once complimented my outfit at the legendary London nightclub Kinky Gerlinky- ‘You look fierce girl’. Within 6 months I has moved to London permanently and was actual friends with Jaye himself. I knew an Oscar nominee!!! Turns out we had lots of clubland friends in common and it’s for that very for that reason my Oscar watching stalled for nearly a decade.
Side Note: As a kid the TV Show No. 73 was filmed in my hometown. My brother and I once appeared on it tap dancing. Andrea Arnold was one of the presenters. We sometimes used to see her around town and she would always say hello. You can imagine my surprise 20 years later when she pops up collecting an Oscar in the aisle of the Kodak Theatre. Now I knew an actual Oscar winner as well, even If I hadn’t seen her since 1987.
I still followed the awards compulsively. I’d watch any old Oscar noms I could and read all of the great movie mags of the era like Premier and Movieline. Every year I’d watch as many films as I could before the ceremony, but I was too busy being a 90’s Club Kid to worry too much about Miliza Korjus and Maria Ouspenskaya. My life revolved around House music, ecstasy and my latest fabulous look for the weekend. Although my 5 AM party trick remained having people name a year and I’d tell them all the Oscar winners.
This began to change at the turn of the century when I was introduced to Gold Derby. I couldn’t believe it. I didn’t own a computer so I spent untold hours in internet cafés having indepth discussions about the 1951 Best Supporting Actress race. I’d found my people. Soon after I found out you could actually buy VHS tapes of old films on Ebay and Amazon and since no one else wanted them they were dirt cheap. Min and Bill, Disraeli, The Sin of Madelon Claudet -- films I never thought I’d see. I also started attending films at the BFI where I could see the likes of Sunrise and Wings on the big screen.
By this time, I had very few films left to see. I’d probably tracked down a good 80% of the nominated performances over the year and those left were impossibly obscure. Escape Me Never wasn’t being shown on TV at least not here in the UK. Ride The Pink Horse wasn’t getting a big screen revival anytime soon. I assumed there were some I would never see but a few chance discoveries changed everything and lead me towards completing the task.
Firstly Karina Longworth’s sensational You Must Remember This podcast reignited my passion for the Golden Age of Hollywood which was something that had never gone away but I hadn’t been actively pursuing in recent years. Secondly, I got into Film Twitter and discovered my people all over again 20 years after Gold Derby, whose forum in recent times had mostly descended into squabbles about Jennifer Lawrence. The hardcore Oscar nerd did still exist and was more than happy to discuss the finer points of historical acting line-ups. From there I started actively scouring the internet for any old film that may have uploaded to a dodgy site at some point. Turns out there were specific websites just for this kind of thing and I was soon to uncover the mother (Russia) of them all. The site that shall not be named. Веб-сайт моей мечты.
I no longer had any excuses. After over 30 years this was finally possible. The only impediment was time. I was no longer a club kid but a business owner in my 40’s. I had adult stuff to do. How would I be able to watch all these films? There were still hundreds left to go and many more I wanted to revisit. Well fate stepped in and the whole world ground to a halt. I suddenly found myself with all the time in the world.
I went to work as if I was Eddie Redmayne in a room full of Oscar voters. My beloved Letterboxd account could barely cope. I watched 451 films in 2020. 735 in 2021. Not all of those were missing Oscar noms of course, but I was getting through those left at a startling pace. I saw The Divine Lady, The Devil’s Holiday and Valiant Is The Word For Carrie. Completely forgotten to most film fans but legendary classics to hardcore Oscar fans. I finally got round to some gaping holes that had just passed me by like Summer Wishes, Winter Dreams or Georgia and suffered through lumbering 50’s epics and coma inducing Shakespeare adaptations I’d been avoiding for decades. I even subjected myself to the infamous Trader Horn, a film so jaw droppingly offensive it becomes genuinely fascinating.
The only thing left to see were lost films from the very beginning of the Academy Awards and Best Supporting Actor nominees from this century (for obvious reasons). You see, whilst my accomplishment may not sound that impressive now that you can find more or less anything online, that of has only been true in recent times. There were thirty odd years of struggle beforehand and even these days some films are simply unavailable. To get over the final hurdle you have to be really dedicated.
2022 was going to be the year, but it would take some serious commitment and a far-flung holiday that I’d been planning since before the pandemic. The time had come to get this over with once and for all...
TO BE CONTINUED...