… and I missed something right in my wheelhouse, a comparison of baseball to classic movies. From Buster Olney, by way of Fire Joe Morgan:
If you want to quibble with the fact that he won the award in 1978, or with his placement in some particular year, OK, I get that. But to ignore the MVP voting entirely, as if it isn’t at least some kind of barometer of his play over the course of his career, is embarrassing. This is like saying, “Hey, forget the Oscar voting of the 1950s. Marlon Brando was clearly overrated.”
I think that’s a fabulous idea. Let’s compare the mindblowing stupidity of MVP voting to the mindblowing stupidity of Oscar voting. For example, guess how many combined non-honorary Oscars Alfred Hitchcock, Orson Welles, and Federico Fellini won?
One.
That’s right – just one, won by Welles, for writing the screenplay to Citizen Kane. Three of the greatest directors in the history of motion pictures died with a total of zero Best Director statues.
Citizen Kane itself was nominated for best picture (one of ten in 1942), but lost to How Green Was My Valley. When the American Film Institute published its list of the 100 best movies of the 20th century, Citizen Kane was #1. How Green Was My Valley wasn’t on the list.
Paul Newman didn’t win a Best Actor Oscar until 1986, for The Color of Money, a Lifetime Achievement Award in all but name. Cary Grant never won an Oscar. Humphrey Bogart won one, for The African Queen, but not for Casablanca, a movie that didn’t yield a single win in any of the four acting categories. Peter O’Toole never won an Oscar; he was nominated for Lawrence of Arabia but lost to Gregory Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird. Audrey Hepburn won once, for Roman Holiday, but wasn’t even nominated for My Fair Lady in one of the most blatantly political votes in the history of the Oscars. (The award went to Julie Andrews for Mary Poppins; Andrews starred in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady but was replaced by Hepburn for the film.)
Stanley Kubrick won one Oscar, for Best Effects/Special Visual Effects for 2001, but was 0-for-3 as a director. An American in Paris beat out A Streetcar Named Desire (which was nominated) and The African Queen (which wasn’t) for Best Picture in 1952, while Singin’ in the Rain – an infinitely better picture than An American in Paris, and possibly the best musical ever – received just a pair of minor nominations two years later. Stanley Donen was never even nominated for an Oscar.
Consider some of the best contemporary figures too. Johnny Depp has just two nominations and no wins. Nicole Kidman has one, for The Hours. Martin Scorsese has just one Best Director win, this past year for The Departed. And everyone knows how long it took Steven Spielberg to win his first Best Director award – long enough that he won the Irving Thalberg Award first.
So yes, please, let’s compare MVP voting to Best Picture/Director/Actor voting. We could argue all day about which is worse.
Well, it’s pretty obvious that the Oscar voting is worse if only because there are more of them awarded each year. 4 vs 2, so there’s more room for anger and frustration.
Besides, there are many more preposterous Oscar choices than MVPs. As bad as some MVP decisions have been, none have been as bad as the choice of Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas for Best Picture.
There are many many ridiculous Oscar winners, but none worse than Titanic beating the infinitely superior L.A. Confidential, which won awards for screenplay and Kim Basinger. Russell Crowe and Guy Pierce weren’t even nominated.
Raging Bull beat out by Ordinary People…ouch.
RBI’s are to the BBWAA as long, “epics” or the double, epic romances, are to the Academy. The list is seemingly endless. (English Patient (beat Fargo), Out of Africa)) There are too many poor choices to count. It isn’t always that the Academy votes for bad movies, it is that they pass over far superior ones.
I could go on and on about the stupidity of the two groups.
Keith:
Regarding EQA and similar statistics-are corrections made for home park only or are they made for each road park individually as well?
Keith, speaking of Buster’s two blog entries, did you check out Rich Lederer’s rebuttal? I would like you to post a rebuttal of sorts, if the four letter allows it (yeah right). I am guessing that next year there will be BBWAA members who vote for Rice just to spite the sabermetrics community.
speaking of oscar snubs..what’s with Horror genre movies getting the snub constantly? Was ‘Se7en’ not one of the best movies in the last 15 years?
Oscar voting is slightly better, since they’re at least willing to vote a movie/actor that didn’t make much money at the Box Office, which is probably the movie equivalent to a team’s W-L record.
Welcome back Keith, here are two Oscar oversights that have bothered me:
Robert Altman was nominated as Best Director for M*A*S*H*, Nashville and three other times with no wins.
Charlie Kaufman not winning Best Screenplay for Adaptation in 2002 and lost to the writer of The Pianist.
In the spirit of piling on – In 1989, Driving Miss Daisy won best picture, and Do the Right Thing *wasn’t even nominated.* Ack.
Bad baseball awards are worse than the Oscars. With movies, there isn’t some quantitative baseline that, at some point, the voters need to consider (as noted above, box office doesn’t control the way RBI may in baseball). Because of that, highway robbery with respect to Oscars is essentially a matter of taste (i.e. you couldn’t effectively refute someone who says that they really, really preferred How Green was my Valley).
In baseball, objective date must be ignored before a bad choice can be made, and that’s much much worse.
Keith- Any chance of you getting an occasional seat at the table on Baseball Tonight this season? That show needs some help.
Nobody will ever convince me that “Shakespeare in Love” beating out “Saving Private Ryan” wasn’t the worst choice the Academy ever made. EVER.
One quibble with your list in re: Oscars. Audrey Hepburn’s singing was dubbed in My Fair Lady by Marni Nixon. That probably had at least as much to do with her not winning.
I was going to attempt something witty regarding David Eckstein and 2000’s Best Picture winner Gladiator. Then I took a look at what else was released that year. E-gads, what a HORRIBLE year for cinema.
2007 is shaping up to be an interesting year for film though. There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men, Ratatouille, 3:10 to Yuma, Rescue Dawn, Sweeney Todd. Lots of good stuff though I bet Atonement wins.
I’ve always liked and respected Buster Olney. And I still do, of course.
But his comments there blow my mind, make me confused, and are so patently ridiculous that they actually make me sad.
Let’s add Golden Glove voting to the mix. That’ll be some good fun discussions.
I think if we added the Gold Glove into the mix, we’d have to do something like have “ER” beat “American Beauty” in 1999, like Raffy winning the 1B award after not really even playing 1B that year.
Keith don’t you EVER go on vacation again! You go and the Jays and Cards swap 3rd basemen and you’re not around to tell us what to think. AND -it hurts to think without your guidance! SO – who won the trade?
What’s so bad about Rushmore? Masturbatorily self-indulgent, to be sure, but still watchable.
Oh, and if you didn’t like it, for God’s sake stay away from ‘Juno.’
Funny, but I was just talking with my son about this and our view was that Oscar voting is by far more idiotic because no matter how foolish a particular MVP award may seem compared to better candidates, there is never a really bad player selected. We may think Bell over Trammel in 1987 was a poor choice, but Bell did have a good year. It is not as if they chose Tony Muser.
The Oscars, on the other hand, have often gone to some truly dreadful movies. Giving a best picture to Titanic because it has some exciting special effects with an idiotic script and truly leaden acting or to American Beauty because it panders to the most inane stereotypes and caricatures would be akin to giving an MVP in 2007 to Nick Punto.
Look, the Oscars are at worst insulting to the industry insiders and at best a reason to party for stars and network execs. You can’t put any weight on these categories except to assume at least one of the five movies nominated might be a good choice at midnight on Starz.
I heard your argument but I have two comments. The first is that losing to Gregory Peck is not really a bad thing. You can’t call it a mistake, unlike the 2005 Cy Young voting.
The second is that Singing in the Rain has much better musical numbers than An American in Paris, a better story, and some good laughs, but clearly An American in Paris had a better ending. The last 20 minutes of An American in Paris are a masterpiece. It’s like Singing in the Rain put up the better season numbers, but An American in Paris hit 12 home runs in September with a .450 OBP. An American in Paris was more “clutch” in the “stretch.”
Keith, just finished reading the chat. While I agree with many of your general thoughts (especially your disdain for baseball cliches) and rarely disagree strongly (with the exception of Dustin Pedroia and The Office), I feel compelled to resort to bribery.
How much money will it take to give Arrested Development another chance? I was a late arrival to the show and found myself laughing out loud at almost every episode. While I agree that the show is very “self-referential”, I think that’s part of the charm. There’s an incredible amount of self-satire and antipathy toward the brass at FOX, especially due to their shameless over-promotion of The OC.
The monotone narration of Ron Howard was brilliant – he had great timing. The acting was suberb, from top to bottom – almost every character on the show was involved in season-long subplots and could hold their own as the focus of any episode. And truthfully, the self-references were some of my favorite parts.
I think the show honestly stands up over time and each time I watch I notice little nuances and word play from the strangest of places. I’d put GOB Bluth (Will Arnett) as one of my 3-5 favorite TV characters of all-time, and I think he was nominated for an Emmy. The show also won Best Comedy Series after the second season (and was cancelled halfway through the third).
I could go on and on about specifics, quotes, recurring plots and details, but I’ve done enough. Just hope you’d reconsider what I feel is the best comedy I’ve ever seen in my entire life.
I’m also very partial to It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, but only because it’s raunchiest, dirtiest, and politically incorrect show I’ve ever seen. I feel like a worse person after watching it but can’t stop laughing hysterically in the process. Each episode focuses on a real issue (race, abortion, mental retardation, welfare, steroids) and absolutely exploits it and makes everything worse in the process without any good resolution coming out of it.
Sorry for this rant everyone!
I think an important distinction to make is that the Oscars involve an amount of personal preference. Sure, you can make some objective observations about a film – use of unusual camera angles, realism of special effects, etc. But these alone aren’t useful in themselves for judging “bestness”. Judging the merits of these characteristics is as nebulous a process as the title category of “Best Picture” would imply. If I was to say that Primer was a better film than Million Dollar Baby, not only is it difficult to make a convincing objective argument, it is impossible to make any entirely objective argument. There is no defined goal in cinema as there is in athletic competition (“You play to win the game!”). In baseball, though there is no definitive way to pick the best baseball player in a given year, we can make arguments based on objective data (we don’t always, but thats a whole ‘nother deal) and how it contributed to the specific goal of winning. How does one “win” in cinema? Epicness? Realism? Awesomeness? It would be like the MVP award was instead the award for Best Intangibles Player or Most Intangible Player (Jamie Moyer is intangible enough on days he starts that you can sometimes pass your hand through him).
That said, Shakespeare in Love was objectively rubbish.
And welcome back, Keith.
Keith,
This is off topic but hadn’t heard anything from you about it. Since you are an avid reader, what are your thoughts on the Kindle being released by Amazon? Surely I’m not alone in thinking that a book is (I’m not sure “treasure” is the right word, but) something more than just words on a page? Isn’t there a comfort to the tangible feel of having the actual book in hand while your reading? I’d love to hear your thoughts on this concept. Thanks!
MVP voting is worse.
Because we have the numbers. So we really need to get it right at a far higher percentage than we do. Sure, if Pic X beats Pic Y and most reasonable people suggest that seems a less than good result, what we’re debating is the merits of art.
If Dan Shaughnessy were to say “I think Rocky was better than Taxi Driver” then we can just write him off as being insufficiently cultured, but when he writes that Jim Rice was a better hitter than Wade Boggs, he should be covered with a net.
Mylegacy – I think the Cards won that deal. Toronto wins on defense, if Rolen’s healthy, but they get the older, more injured player who’s under contract for longer. … Brian, not this year, at least. … Josh, I’m in the queue for a review model, but haven’t received it yet.
Great topic, but there are just so many travesties that I can’t bear to even start thinking about it.
Craig, for my money It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia is the best show on TV by miles.
Your larger point is correct, but just as an aside, How Green Was My Valley is a truly great film, and I do personally prefer it to Citizen Kane, which is somewhat overrated (even in terms of technical innovation). I would highly recommend it.