MovieChat Forums > An American in Paris (1951) Discussion > How did this win Best Picture???

How did this win Best Picture???

posted 16 years ago by miriamwebster
68 replies | jump to latest

Fair-to-middling early Fifties MGM musical. (Following year's Singin' In The Rain puts it to shame.) But Best Picture??? And against A Streetcar Named Desire and A Place In The Sun? Incredible--it's impossible to watch today. Recall!!!

Addendum: Okay, yes, lengthy musical finale may have been revolutionary for its time--but rest of picture is/was so-so at best, even for anyone whose first exposure was suffering through it during TV broadcasts of Sixties, hardly 10 years after its release. Uninvolving story, cardboard characters, unmemorable performances (none of cast was nominated for Oscars). . .according to many reports, its Best Picture win was even a shock to Hollywood in 1951, many of whom chalked up victory to big bloc of MGM employees who voted for it in desperation bid to keep studio going and/or as tribute to longtime MGM musical producer Arthur Freed.

In any event, this picture has not aged well at all. Lots less fun than most of the studio's many less pretentious B musicals.

Yes, definitely has its devotees--but as some movieland insider once observed "Every movie is somebody's favorite."

[–] thesnowleopard 8 years ago

Personally, I prefer "Singin' in the Rain" by a country mile, but I'd hardly call AAIP the worst best picture for Oscar. Its main problems for me are that 1. I'm not a huge fan of Gershwin and never warmed to the score, and 2. the dance tells the story really well, but the more conventional storytelling elements don't work. If they could have found a way to do the entire thing as a ballet without making it a complete turnoff to the average filmgoer, I think it would have worked better. While the crowd scenes in the ballet were rather dull, when Kelly and Caron were dancing together, their love story made sense to me. When the story brought in all that romantic complications nonsense with Henri and Milo, it didn't.

That's why "Singin' in the Rain" works better for me as a film--because the non-dance stuff is every bit as fun (and funny) as the dance. It integrates those elements better than AAIP. But I think it would be pushing it to say that AAIP didn't work at all by discounting the greatness of those ballet sequences.

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[–] prplayer 8 years ago

i think back then, people were suckers for musicals

so many movies, so little time