The Greatest Show on Earth/Awards

==Awards==
At the 25th Academy Awards, the movie won Oscars for Best Picture and Best Story. It received nominations for Best Director, Best Film Editing, and Best Costume Design, Color. It is the last Best Picture winner to win fewer than 3 Academy Awards until Spotlight.
Many consider this film among the worst to have ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture. It also won that award over highly rated films such as High Noon, Ivanhoe, The Quiet Man, and Singin' in the Rain. The American film magazine Premiere placed the movie on its list of the 10 worst Oscar winners and the British film magazine Empire rated it #3 on their list of the 10 worst Oscar winners. It has the second lowest spot on Rotten Tomatoes' list of the 81 films to win Best Picture.
Stanley Kramer alleged that the film's Best Picture Oscar was due to the political climate in Hollywood in 1952. Senator Joseph McCarthy was pursuing Communists at the time, and DeMille was a conservative Republican involved with the National Committee for a Free Europe. Another Best Picture nominee, High Noon, was produced by Carl Foreman, who would soon be on the Hollywood blacklist, and one of the scriptwriters of Ivanhoe, Marguerite Roberts, was also blacklisted.
Another likely reason for its Best Picture win was that it was seen as a "last chance" vote for Cecil B. DeMille, to honor him for a lifetime of filmmaking going well back into the silent movie era. DeMille's best work had been done before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) was created. It may be that the members of the Academy (which included many veterans of the silent era) felt that as an elder statesman of Hollywood and founding member of the Academy, he deserved the honor even if other films that year were better than The Greatest Show on Earth. Many people agree that The Ten Commandments, DeMille's next (and last) film which he produced and directed, was more deserving of the 1956 Best Picture Oscar than Around the World in 80 Days and more deserving of an honor to DeMille's magnificent and legendary career and his contributions to the growth and evolution of cinema than The Greatest Show on Earth.
Category:Awards