After seasoned choreographer and novice filmmaker Kenny Ortega fumbled Disney's 1992 Newsies, conventional musicals were officially pariahs. Only Disney's cartoon fables, especially Best Picture nominee Beauty and the Beast (1991), seemed to strike a deep chord with moviegoers and Academy folks. Until, at last, Moulin Rouge and its eight nominations wiped out some of the bad karma. And now it's Chicago's turn.
''We want to give back dignity to the movie musical,'' says executive producer Neil Meron. ''And hopefully, the popular audience that good musicals always attracted.'' Not to mention the Oscar accolades they once routinely commanded, after a long climb to respectability.
The Oscars were only two years old when a musical first won Best Picture. But you can hardly call 1929's pioneering sound movie The Broadway Melody a best anything by modern standards. A clumsy, stilted record of a stage spectacle, it's of interest today chiefly because it contains songs by Nacio Herb Brown and Arthur Freed that got recycled for Singin' in the Rain 23 years later.
When a musical Best Picture victory next occurred, the genre had improved -- yet still took some knocks. Such worthy 1936 dramas as A Tale of Two Cities and Dodsworth lost to The Great Ziegfeld, a three-hour biopic stuffed with elaborate production numbers. The most arresting of these unfolded on a giant Greek-column-cum-wedding-cake set. Hmmph, sputtered the Hollywood Citizen-News, labeling The Great Ziegfeld ''atrocious'' and declaring that ''a truer demonstration of the stupidity and rank barbarism of these times [has] never been more ably given.''
But if anything deserved a tsk-tsk that year, it was the omission of the Fred Astaire-Ginger Rogers classic Swing Time from among the Picture designees. Evidently, earlier nods for The Gay Divorcee (1934) and Top Hat (1935) were considered quite enough. To compound the brush-off, neither Astaire nor Rogers ever got nominations for their elegant footwork. The Academy eventually got around to compensating -- at least halfway -- with a special award for Astaire in 1950. It was presented by Rogers, who'd won her own Actress statuette for 1940's drama Kitty Foyle. In accepting the solo prize, Fred demurred, ''Remember, I had a partner.'' Retorted Ginger, ''That's not what it says on the citation.''
Other snubs were put right more rapidly. Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs (1937) competed in only a single category, Score, which it lost to the symphonically tinged Deanna Durbin vehicle 100 Men and a Girl. The following year, the Academy presented Walt Disney with a custom-designed set of better-late-than-never honoraries: one big statuette and seven little ones. And while none of the cast in 1939's The Wizard of Oz got an acting nomination -- the fantasy earned six nods anyway, including Best Picture, winning only Song (''Over the Rainbow'') and Original Score -- Judy Garland did get a special miniature Oscar for outstanding juvenile performance.
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