Biggest Oscar snub

Many people would say that the biggest snub in Oscar history is that Audrey Hepburn did not get nominated for Best Actress for My Fair Lady. The film won 8 Oscars that year (including Best Picture, Best Director (George Cukor), and Best Actor (Rex Harrison) ) out of 12 nominations. It was nominated for Best Supporting Actor (Stanley Holloway), Best Supporting Actress (Gladys Cooper), and Best Adapted Screenplay (Alan Jay Lerner). And yet, the performance that is really the heart and soul of the entire film, Audrey Hepburn's portrayal of Eliza Doolittle, the street urchin transformed into an elegant lady, was not honored with even a nomination due to a technicality - the studio decided to dub in her singing with another woman's voice, and the dubbed in singing comprised a just high enough percentage of the role to disqualify her according to the Academy's rules. What makes the situation even worse is that it was a bad decision on the studio's part. Hepburn had not proven her talent as a singer, so the studio was not willing to take a chance on her voice. She proved in Breakfast at Tiffany's, however, that she was in fact a capable singer.

The story is simple enough. Around the turn on the Twentieth Century, linguistics professor Henry Higgins undertakes an experiment to teach flower girl Eliza how to speak properly, proposing that improving her speech will allow her to rise to a higher social class. Though they initially have an antagonistic relationship, the two gradually fall in love. Certainly not a complex enough story to really require the film's almost three hour running time, and yet it never really drags or bores. To be honest, while I am a fan of Audrey Hepburn, I was sort of dreading this film, fearing that a three hour musical would be one that I had to suffer through every minute of. Instead, I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it. Well, maybe not every minute... It kind of drags in a couple of spots in the third hour. The song "Get Me To The Church On Time," in which Eliza Doolittle's father goes out for a night of drinking and whoring the night before his wedding, is somewhat amusing at first, but is far too long and repetitive - it has 4 or 5 verses, begins to lose its charm by the 4th verse, and then goes on to repeat the entire song about 4 times through. And Professor Higgins' musical lamentation "Why Can't A Woman Be Like A Man" is simply not as funny as it thinks it is.

I can't say that I think My Fair Lady deserved to beat out Dr. Strangelove for Best Picture that year - Strangelove is on my short list of all time favorite films, and much as I may have enjoyed My Fair Lady, it is not as revolutionary and unforgettable as Strangelove. Rex Harrison, however, absolutely deserved his Oscar. He took a character who should have been irredeemably arrogant and condescending, and found a way to make him somehow endearing, and very entertaining. (On a side note, it is apparent after about a minute of listening to him that Harrison's Higgins is clearly the inspiration for Family Guy's Stewie Griffin's entire personality and voice.) Likewise, Hepburn, had she not been unfairly disqualified, would have been absolutely deserving of the Oscar that she certainly would have been a shoo-in to win. She made a character that could easily have crossed the line into being too grating, too irritating to want to spend three hours with into somebody the viewer truly cares about. And, though some may dislike the film for this very reason, I really enjoyed the fact that My Fair Lady took its time to get where it wanted to go, rather than just rushing through the plot as quickly as it could. Yes, there are some unnecessary scenes (more critical reviews at the time called the film cavernous, a vacuum, over-long because of its empty spaces), but I appreciated it's willingness to take the scenic route, to allow the viewer to just relax and enjoy the show, and not feel rushed to the end.

Movie trivia question: One of the most successful directors in Oscar history, Frank Capra won 3 Oscars in 5 years back in the 1930s. The second of these films was later remade as an Adam Sandler vehicle. What was that film?