1) Vigo for L’Atalante? Okay. You arguably start off good, though I would have researched whether the Academy rules back then permitted a film to be awarded a Best Foreign Film Special Oscar 14 years after its release. But a great movie, you’re right. Where I have a complaint here, though, is with your opinion that “considering the first recipient, Vittorio De Sica (for Shoeshine), would win again two years later (for Bicycle Thieves), the Academy should have recognized Vigo’s film.” How can you hold that against the Academy? This would presuppose they had some magical future-vision machine that would tell them that De Sica was going to win anyway in 2 years, so, hey, let’s throw a bone to Vigo? Whhhhhaaa? Oh, and, by the way, the movie is called The Bicycle Thief.
2) Of course, as you point out, James Dean did get a posthumous nomination in ’55 for East of Eden. But if you had researched your Academy rules, you’d realize that, movie god or not, Dean and every other actor has no chance of competing against themselves because there’s a rule against it. Has never happened, and never will.
3) You wanted to GIVE the award to Richard Harris for a nothing role simply to appease the Harry Potter fans and make them tune in to an awards show the otherwise couldn’t give two shits about? This is piss-poor logic.
4) Heather O’Rourke for Poltergeist III? Are you kidding me?! NEXT…
5) I get the impression that you haven’t even seen Murnau’s Tabu (hell, I haven’t even seen it, and I’ve seen 30,000 movies), because you don’t even talk about its merits as a film. You just like other Murnau movies, so you picked this one somehow out of a hat because, I suppose, it made you sound like you knew what you were talking about.
6) PETER SELLERS FOR FU MANCHU???? That thing is an embarrassment to
Sellers’ memory!!! It would have been better if you’d proposed nominating his 1979 Being There performance again in 1980, in a precident-setting move by the Academy voters! God, I know you gotta be kidding now…
7) Finally: a choice that makes sense. 1999 was an incredibly great movie year, filled with Best Director possibilities. But, yes, Kubrick deserved a nomination both as tribute and as recognition of a great directorial effort. Good job.
Adrianne Shelley’s Waitress was a charming movie, but Oscar material? Mmmm, not really. And, what, the Academy is paying tribute to her career as an actress. Not to take anything away from her fine acting, but I’d doubt most
Academy voters have ever even seen a Hal Hartley movie. They’d be giving her
the Oscar basically for dying in a horribly tragic way. Ugh. Again, bad logic.
9) This one is amazing. You come right out and say you’ve never seen Thelma
Ritter in What’s So Bad About Feeling Good?, but you’re proposing she win a
nomination anyway? And then you even shoot it down by saying she died at the wrong time to even be considered. Now you’re just wasting the reader’s time.
10) Again, you GOTTA be kidding! The only reason The Crow has even made a dent in pop culture is because Brandon Lee died in an on-set accident, and people think that’s creepy somehow. Man, come on.

Again, I don’t like to be negative. This is the first post of this sort I’ve ever written. I dig that you’re so excited about movies that you want to write about them online (I don’t even know if you’re getting paid for your stuff or not). But what you’re doing with posts like this, Christopher, is (a) misinforming people looking to you for good info and detailed, well-backed opinions, (b) misdirecting people to poor movies that you, personally, just have some sort of thing for (and a thing that not even well-explained), and (c) generally bringing down the status of online criticism—just lowering the bar a little more so that other misinformed “critics” can hop right over it.

Go read some books, study you craft, and in the meantime, write detailed, evocative stuff about something you know and know well. And, man, get some taste.

Dean Treadway
Filmicability.blogspot.com