Vintage Sand Episode 35: Alternate Oscars: 1930's Edition

Vintage Sand

In Episode 35, Team Vintage Sand returns to the source of some of our most popular episodes: Danny Peary’s hard-to-find 1993 classic "Alternate Oscars". In the past, we have approached the Academy Awards from the 1950’s, 1970’s, 1980’s and the 2000’s. For this episode, we use the Way-Back Machine to explore the first full decade in which the awards were given: the 1930’s. In exploring a period that featured some truly abysmal Best Picture choices ("Cimarron", anyone? Not to mention what is possibly the worst film ever chosen, 1933’s "Cavalcade"?), we learned a couple of things. The least surprising of these is that Jean Renoir completely owned the decade; his films might have won Best Picture nearly every year. Another is that there really are two 1930’s for film: the period before the imposition of the Production Code in 1934 and the years that followed. What made this episode fun for us is that, perhaps more so that any of our other Alternate Oscar shows, this one features a ton of movies that our listeners may have not seen or even heard of. And why are we doing this? Well, like the fella once said, everyone has their reasons…