Movies first.
I saw Spotlight last night, which was a very good film. On leaving the theater I mentioned that it reminded me of Argo, another engrossing drama which, despite winning Best Picture, took away no acting accolades from the Academy. Were these isolated incidents?
Turns out: no.
Nearly half of all Best Picture winners didn't win any awards in acting categories, which I find remarkable (38/89 - 43%). Some weren't even nominated (12/89 - 13%). Here's the breakdown by decade:
2010s
2015 - Spotlight
2014 - Birdman
2012 - Argo
2000s
2009 - The Hurt Locker (no nominees)
2008 - Slumdog Millionaire (no nominees)
2006 - The Departed
2004 - Crash
2003 - The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (no nominees)
1990s
1997 - Titanic
1995 - Braveheart (no nominees)
1993 - Schindler's List
1990 - Dances With Wolves
1980s
1987 - The Last Emperor (no nominees)
1986 - Platoon
1985 - Out of Africa
1981 - Chariots of Fire
1970s
1976 - Rocky
1973 - The Sting
1960s
1969 - Midnight Cowboy
1968 - Oliver!
1965 - The Sound of Music
1963 - Tom Jones
1962 - Lawrence of Arabia
1960 - The Apartment
1950s
1958 - Gigi (no nominees)
1956 - Around the World in 80s Days (no nominees)
1952 - The Greatest Show on Earth (no nominees)
1951 - An American in Paris (no nominees)
1940s
1943 - Casablanca
1940 - Rebecca
1930s
1938 - You Can't Take It With You
*1936: Best Supporting categories introduced*
1935 - Mutiny on the Bounty
1933 - Cavalcade
1932 - Grand Hotel (no nominees) (!)
1931 - Cimarron
1930 - All Quiet on the Western Front (no nominees)
1920s
1929 - The Broadway Melody
1927/8 - Wings (no nominee)
Now, to switch to books. Have you ever wondered when authors wrote their classics? Basically the answer is: whenever. From their teens unto the brink of death, authors have written classic works at all ages. So if you are wondering when you're best work may be coming, don't worry - Goethe didn't complete Faust until his eighties, and Rimbaud became world-renowned before 20.
Here's a sample of what I mean:
18
19
Pablo Neruda – Twenty Love Songs and A
Song of Despair; Arthur Rimbaud – A
Season in Hell
20
21 Mary
Shelley – Frankenstein
22
23
Aristophanes – The Clouds; Stephen
Crane – The Red Badge of Courage
24
Alexander Pope – The Rape of the Lock;
Norman Mailer – The Naked and the Dead
25
Zadie Smith – White Teeth
26
Percy Shelley – Ozymandias; Thomas
Mann – Buddenbrooks
27
Charles Dickens – Oliver Twist; TS
Eliot – The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
28
Anton Chekhov – The Bear; Douglas
Adams – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the
Galaxy
29
Franz Kafka – The Metamorphosis;
William Wordsworth – The Two-Part Prelude
30
Flannery O’Connor – A Good Man is Hard to
Find; Jack London – White Fang
31Edward
Albee – The Sandbox; Charlotte Bronte
– Jane Eyre
32
Herman Melville – Moby Dick; William
Faulkner – The Sound and the Fury
33
Lewis Carroll – Alice’s Adventures in
Wonderland
34
Edgar Allen Poe – The Tell-Tale Heart;
Harper Lee – To Kill a Mockingbird
35 William
Shakespeare – Julius Caesar; Calderon
– Life is a Dream
36
Walt Whitman – Leaves of Grass;
Charles Baudelaire – Les Fleurs du mal
37
Edgar Rice Burroughs – Tarzan of the Apes;
Corneille – Cinna
38
Jane Austen – Pride and Prejudice;
Racine – Phedre
39
Boccaccio – The Decameron
40
James Joyce – Ulysses; Emile Zola – Nana
41
Oscar Wilde – The Importance of Being
Ernest; Leo Tolstoy – War and Peace
42
Jorge Borges – The Garden of Forking
Paths
43
Virginia Woolf – Mrs. Dalloway;
Murasaki Shikibu – The Tale of Genji
44
Moliere – The Misanthrope; Lucretius
– On the Nature of Things
45
Joseph Conrad – Heart of Darkness
46
Chaucer – The Canterbury Tales
47
Stendhal – The Red and the Black;
Kurt Vonnegut – Slaughterhouse-Five
48
49
Euripides – Medea; Mark Twain – The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
50
Virgil – Aenied; Matsuo Basho – Narrow Road to the Deep North
51
Ovid – Metamorphoses; Rabelais – Gargantua and Pantagruel
52
53
George Eliot – Middlemarch
54
55
Dante – The Divine Comedy
56
Gustave Flaubert – Three Tales;
Marcel Proust – In Search of Lost Time
57
58
59
Fyodor Dostoevsky – The Brothers
Karamazov; John Milton – Paradise
Lost
60
Victor Hugo – Les Miserables
61
62
63
64
65
Aeschylus – Oresteia
66
67
Cao Xueqin – Dream of the Red Chamber;
George Bernard Shaw – Saint Joan
68
Cervantes – Don Quixote; Jonathan
Swift – Gulliver’s Travels
69
70
71
72
73 La
Fontaine – Fables
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
Alice Munro – Dear Life
82
83
Goethe – Faust
84
85
86
87
88
Sophocles – Philoctetes
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