Wikipedia:Reference desk/Archives/Entertainment/2014 March 31

= March 31 =

Academy Award acting performances
What director has directed the most Academy Award winning acting performances? What director has directed the most Academy Award nominated acting performances? Thanks. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 00:53, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I believe it is either Billy Wilder or William Wyler, I get these 2 mixed up a lot. Wgolf (talk) 04:23, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * If you can't find anything, the lists of winners are here: Academy Award for Best Actor and Academy Award for Best Actress. You could go to each film and tally up the directors.  With 86 winners in each category, it shouldn't take more than an hour or so to tally up. (As an aside, it's interesting to see that the actors' page has images but the actresses' page has none.)  Dismas |(talk) 10:31, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There are also Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor and Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress. --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  10:47, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Unfortunately the IMDB's publicly available raw data files include director data but not awards data. I downloaded the directors file and then went to the official Oscar database to obtain lists of all movies that won or were nominated for acting Oscars. Unfortunately I then had to do a lot of hand-work to make the titles from the two sources consistent&mdash;e.g. Wait Until Dark vs. Wait until Dark; Casablanca (1942) (first release) or (1943) (first Los Angeles release); Life is Beautiful vs. La vita è bella. After that it was a small matter of programming to tabulate the results.

Anyway, the result was that Wgolf was right: William Wyler is the right answer in both categories. The directors of the greatest number of Oscar-winning acting performances are:
 * 10 William Wyler
 * 7 George Cukor
 * 6 Elia Kazan
 * 6 Woody Allen
 * 5 John Ford
 * 5 Martin Scorsese
 * 5 Sam Wood
 * 5 Fred Zinnemann
 * 4 Victor Fleming
 * 4 John Huston

And when you add non-winning acting nominations:
 * 20 William Wyler
 * 14 George Cukor
 * 12 John Huston
 * 12 Martin Scorsese
 * 11 Woody Allen
 * 11 Fred Zinnemann
 * 10 Clarence Brown
 * 10 John Ford
 * 10 Sidney Lumet
 * 10 Billy Wilder

Here are the 20 movies for Wyler. Boldface names indicate winners; italics indicate the supporting categories. Boldface dates indicate that Wyler himself was nominated as Best Director, and boldface titles indicate that he won. (The markup and name lists were mostly done by hand, so it's possible I goofed somewhere.)
 * Come and Get It (1936)&mdash; Walter Brennan
 * Dodsworth (1936)&mdash; Walter Huston, Maria Ouspenskaya
 * These Three (1936)&mdash; Bonita Granville
 * Dead End (1937)&mdash; Claire Trevor
 * Jezebel (1938)&mdash; Bette Davis, Fay Bainter
 * Wuthering Heights (1939)&mdash; Laurence Olivier, Geraldine Fitzgerald
 * The Letter (1940)&mdash; James Stephenson, Bette Davis
 * The Westerner (1940)&mdash; Walter Brennan
 * The Little Foxes (1941)&mdash; Bette Davis, Patricia Collinge, Teresa Wright
 * Mrs. Miniver (1942)&mdash; Walter Pidgeon, Henry Travers, Greer Garson, Dame May Whitty, Teresa Wright (yes, 5 acting nominations for one movie)
 * The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)&mdash; Fredric March, Harold Russell
 * The Heiress (1949)&mdash; Ralph Richardson, Olivia de Havilland
 * Detective Story (1951)&mdash; Eleanor Parker, Lee Grant
 * Roman Holiday (1953)&mdash; Eddie Albert, Audrey Hepburn
 * Friendly Persuasion (1956)&mdash; Anthony Perkins
 * The Big Country (1958)&mdash; Burl Ives
 * Ben-Hur (1959)&mdash; Charlton Heston, Hugh Griffith
 * The Children's Hour (1961)&mdash; Fay Bainter
 * The Collector (1965)&mdash; Samantha Eggar
 * Funny Girl (1968)&mdash; Barbra Streisand, Kay Medford

Note incidentally that one of the movies on the list is a remake of another one on the list!

Thanks for an interesting question.

--50.100.193.30 (talk) 12:22, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Thanks for doing all that leg work! By the way, which of the movies on the list is a remake of another one on the list?  Thanks.   Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 22:08, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * I know Ben-Hur is a remake-but that was another director. And the original was before the first Oscars. (You know had the Oscars started 10 years earlier there be a lot more missing Oscar nominated films) Wgolf (talk) 22:19, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The Children's Hour is a remake! Just found that out. Wgolf (talk) 22:23, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The Children's Hour is a remake of These Three.  Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 04:07, 1 April 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, all. Joseph A. Spadaro (talk) 15:28, 3 April 2014 (UTC)

Portrayal of goblins as an evil race
I never read J.R.R. Tolkien's novel, Lord of the Rings, but I did stumble across the Lord of the Rings wiki and found out that goblins were an evil race in some sort of fantasy-land. Now, this bears some resemblance to a book that I did read, The Princess and the Goblin, and its sequel, The Princess and Curdie, both created by George MacDonald. Did Tolkien borrow the concept of the goblin from MacDonald's goblin (nasty evil humanoid race that lives in an underground cave, always afraid to get out, ruled by a goblin king and queen and prince), or did he derive his own concept of goblin based on folklore? MacDonald's evil goblins had sensitive large feet, which, if I remember correctly, aided Curdie and the princess to defeat them. 140.254.226.214 (talk) 16:01, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * Wikipedia has an article about Goblins which explains their origins in European folklore. -- Jayron  32  16:31, 31 March 2014 (UTC)
 * In Tolkien's published works, "goblin" is used (mainly in the children's book The Hobbit) as another word for the beings elsewhere referred to as orcs. Orc states that Tolkien claimed that he was indeed influenced by The Princess and the Goblin (the letter referred to there is #144 in The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, where he says specifically "... except for the soft feet which I never believed in"), but there's also a good deal of T.'s own invention in them. Deor (talk) 17:26, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * MacDonald's goblin sounds something like a Morlock or a Falmer. Maybe they borrowed. InedibleHulk (talk) 22:58, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

A list of animated films nominated for any Academy Award
I could of swore there was a list of this somewhere on Wikipedia, but I have not found it. You know including every category there is-starting with Snow White as the earliest (which had a sound nomination) So is there a list like this on Wikipedia? Think someone should start this article? Thanks Wgolf (talk) 17:04, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * There is this article Academy Award for Best Animated Feature. Of course it wont have films that were nominated before 2001. Then there is this List of animated feature films and its links to "Lists of animated films by decade." Then there is the Category:Best Animated Feature Academy Award winners but we don't have cats for nominations. You are perfectly free to start the article that you suggest. You could create a sandbox to experiment with the formatting of the article until you get it into the form that you are happy with. Since you are trying to get films who were nominated for "any" award I suspect that it will be a somewhat large article so it might take sometime to get every nomination listed. MarnetteD | Talk 18:27, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Yeah I know about those, I think I could start it, probably should start in the sandbox first. Of course the obvious ones I know about, and I should mention it to be for feature length only.

Wgolf (talk) 18:30, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Started it! User:Wgolf/sandbox/List of Feature Length Animated films nominated for an Oscar Granted I just have Snow White and Pinocchio so far on there. (I know that Fantasia did get a special award, but for now I'm leaving that off, there are going to be some odd cases like Roger Rabbit as that was part animated.) Wgolf (talk) 18:40, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

I got up to 2000, now comes the part with tons of noms-yep 2001. I currently have it by year, I considered doing it by cat, but since that be mostly song/score (and of course animated feature) that be pointless in a way. Wgolf (talk) 20:19, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * Looks pretty good. You might want to consider a sortable table format. I know they are tricky but you could always ask at one of the help desks to get info on them. It is just a suggestion though and if you don't want to work with them that is okay too. MarnetteD | Talk 22:29, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Thanks, if someone else wants to do a table that be great, of course I'll need a better layout for the winners. (I had to draw the line somewhere for animated/live action crossovers, Pete's Dragon was iffy, Roger Rabbit I decided was okay, but decided against the ones that are CGI/live action cross overs as that just raises more problems) Wgolf (talk) 22:33, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Okay finished putting every film. I'm going to put some info on the bottom like years with most nominations (before 2001 and after) and other stuff. Though the layout is not that great right now. And I know it will need to be divided into sections eventually. Wgolf (talk) 23:56, 31 March 2014 (UTC)

Earworm help needed
I have an earworm that's been driving me crazy for a week. It's just a phrase, a fragment of a larger work, and this phrase is played quite gently, andante. In my mind I hear it played by strings and maybe other instruments. My head says it's by Bach, but my searches have failed to identify it.

The melody is as I specified here. I do not guarantee the pitch.

Any ideas, dear colleagues? --  Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  22:41, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * The gavotte from Bach's Suite No. 3 in D major, BWV 1068? (Added later: I don't know it that gently or andante though, I missed that part sorry. But the world famous movement immediately preceding it (and possibly still ringing in your ears) is certainly gentle). ---Sluzzelin talk  23:23, 31 March 2014 (UTC)


 * It's a first cousin to the Gavotte. Very similar, which may be why my brain recognises it as Bach.  But the tempo is noticeably slower, very gentle and flowing, like a lazy river on a languid Saturday afternoon in mid-summer.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  03:15, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * It's not exactly right, but your tune for some reason reminds me of this. -- Jayron  32  09:38, 1 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Interesting. How our brains make connections, that is.  Thanks, but no, that does not earn you a cigar.  But here, have a gorilla.  --   Jack of Oz   [pleasantries]  21:33, 2 April 2014 (UTC)


 * Well, I spent some time searching for any mentioned similarities or recycling or theft or quoting going on with regards to the first gavotte's opening theme, but found absolutely nothing. The way Musipedia played back your tune to my ears was speedier than andante and it immediately reminded me of the gavotte. No, it didn't just remind me; I was hearing the gavotte.
 * I found older recordings that aren't quite as fast. Moreover, one of the reprises is soft(er) and not played by the tutti, unlike the first notes.
 * I also thought about all the discussions going on for decades about which tempi Bach had intended where. I heard an orchestra in the early 1990s where the whole point of the concert was to play everything at a much slower tempo, including a lecture on why the conductor and orchestra came to that conclusion. I didn't really buy the theory, but hearing some of the more familiar Bach played at such a slow tempo was certainly memorable. Who knows, you might have listened to something similar?
 * Another wild idea was the Suzuki method, which actually includes that gavotte in its violin school, where students deliberately practice at slower tempi ... a neighbour's child practicing the violin ... ?
 * Then there are television and advertisement composers who often use classical music, sometimes twisted beyond recognition. Occasionally I've tried to find out whether such homage/quoting/plagiarism had been credited or pointed out anywhere online, but found nothing in some cases.
 * (Anyway, that's all I got. Add unresolved template here :-) ---Sluzzelin talk  16:29, 3 April 2014 (UTC)