| re: to be honest | |
| Posted by: BruceinIthaca 09:36 pm EST 01/25/18 | |
| In reply to: to be honest - Chazwaza 07:31 pm EST 01/25/18 | |
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| I agree with some of your argument, disagree with other parts. I would agree that "If Ever I Would Love You" is a far better song than any of the nominees. But the category is "Song Written Expressly for the Film" (not called that, but those are the terms, at least for the Oscars--I don't know about the Globes, but, for the sake of this discussion, let's assume so). We do know that there have been trunk songs used for films that have been nominated and perhaps won. They do not, of course, fulfill the spirit of the criterion that the song should have been composed as part of the gestalt creative process of making the film, but, unless the song has circulated in some way previously (I used to hear that Loesser and his then-wife used to do "Baby, It's Cold Outside" at parties long before "Neptune's Daughter," but then I've also heard that that is just a rumor), it can qualify "legally." BTW, have there not been instances when songs have been eliminated because they only appeared under the closing credits or something like that? And, by extension (absurd, perhaps, admittedly) one might argue that "Amadeus" should have won Best Score--who could compete with Mozart? I would also be more inclined to go along with your argument if the point were, which song has been performed and filmed best (and also serves the film's overall quality)--though, in that case, the singers of "If Ever I Would Leave You" would probably have been responsible for it LOSING the GG, as they did not serve the song/music well (though as a 10 year old, I loved the film). I agree that adaptation of plays are a thorny case and that the omission of Albee a perfect example. What exactly did the adapter do, other than perhaps tone down some of the language and make cuts for time (I've never done a viewing of the film with the playscript in hand). Similarly, with "Doubt." In a sense, many of the offerings of the American Film Theatre could by this logic have been strong contenders, as they were some of the great works of dramatic literature. So, if I were a voter, I would not be inclined to vote for an adaptation of a play that hewed very closely to the script as performed onstage, other than opening it up scenically (as in the Albee--"Virginia Woolf"). I'm always more impressed by adaptations of novels, short stories, and non-fiction, where the translation from the page to screen takes more creative imagining (though some might argue that both the novel and film are essentially narrative media--but I think the material--exclusively verbal in the novel, with the growing exception of graphic novels, and a combination of verbal, visual, temporal, and kinesthetic, perhaps, in film--argues for the special nature of adaptation to film). I don't think any one approach will satisfy all, and I can imagine instances where the adaptation of a play to film is truly worthy of the category award--"Amadeus" may be a good example, as the film dispensed with the choric figures and therefore had to find other ways of telling the story (and Shaffer did win the Oscar, though I might have given to "A Passage to India," except for the egregious "cleansing" of the final moments of the novel, which end in conflict not resolution, or to "The Killing Fields," which finds the drama and epic in journalistic narrative and memoir). |
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