Oscar Files: Best Picture

One last category to survey before I bound onward into more screenings. Recall again that I have a thing for round numbers: 100 Best Actress nominees left to see, 100 Best Supporting Actress nominees to see, and in Oscar’s top category, where 450 movies have been nominated as Best Picture, I’ve seen 300, a ratio of exactly two-thirds. Exquisite, like a lunar eclipse!

The wide range of quality for which Oscar is so notorious has been pretty well indicated by my last two forays—on the good side, George Cukor’s cheeky and genial Born Yesterday, in which Judy Holliday brings a minor explosion of inspired creativity to almost all of her scenes, and on the far side of sub-mediocrity, Bing Crosby and Ingrid Bergman wilting before the stultified camera and dead air of Leo McCarey’s The Bells of St. Mary’s.

Like most of us, I have the recent years in Oscar annals better-covered than the early history. I’ve seen every nominee from the past 21 years, a streak that halts at Norman Jewison’s A Soldier’s Story (1984), whereas more than half of the films I’ve missed date from 1943 or earlier—a.k.a., from the first 16 years of Academy voting, when the Best Picture list often encompassed as many as 10 or 12 films per year.

As I mentioned in the Best Actress post, Goatdog is way out ahead of me in covering the Best Pictures, and I gather from all of you who have posted comments recently that he’s probably not alone in having me beat at this game. But, to quote the title of one Best Picture nominee, the more the merrier! At this point, I’m having even more fun reading all of your lists than I am making my own, so I’ll show you mine if you show me yours, etc.

And, given that we're dealing with almost twice is large an archive with Best Picture than we were with Supporting Actress, allow me to expand the range of my lists:

Nominees I Have Left to See: 9 — The Broadway Melody (1929), Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), The Great Ziegfeld (1936), The Life of Émile Zola (1937), Mrs. Miniver (1942), The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and Gandhi (1982)

My Ten Favorite Winners So Far:
1. Casablanca (1943)
2. All About Eve (1950)
3. It Happened One Night (1934)
4. Annie Hall (1977)
5. The Godfather (1972)
6. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930)
7. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
8. Rebecca (1940)
9. Gone With the Wind (1939)
10. Titanic (1997)
Note: I saw Hamlet (1948) and The Godfather Part II (1974) so long ago that I almost don't feel that I've seen them. I doubt Olivier's film will shake up these lists all that much, but upon revisiting, Coppola's well might. Oh, and I'm not offering any apologies about Titanic.)

My Ten Favorite Losing Nominees:
1) The Piano (1993)
2) Citizen Kane (1941)
3) Nashville (1975)
4) Chinatown (1974)
5) Grand Illusion (1938)
6) The Thin Red Line (1998)
7) Taxi Driver (1976)
8) Hannah and Her Sisters (1986)
9) Apocalypse Now (1979)
10) The Conversation (1974)

My Least Favorite Winners:
1) Out of Africa (1985)
2) Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
3) Rain Man (1988)
4) Going My Way (1944)
5) Forrest Gump (1994)
6) Braveheart (1995)
7) Gladiator (2000)
8) Cavalcade (1933)
9) Gentleman's Agreement (1947)
10) You Can't Take It With You (1938)

Years in Which I've Seen Every Nominee: 27 — 1945, 1948, 1964, 1968, 1975, 1981, and every year from 1985 through the present

From Among These Years, the Best Overall Fields...
Privileging consistent high quality over peak contenders
1) 1975 — Barry Lyndon, Dog Day Afternoon, Jaws, Nashville (my pick), and *One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (for my money, the only non-masterpiece)
2) 1993 — The Fugitive, In the Name of the Father, The Piano (my pick, obviously), The Remains of the Day, and *Schindler's List (not a bum in the bunch)
3) 1996 — *The English Patient (a great literary epic), Fargo (a brilliantly mordant comedy, and my pick), Jerry Maguire (a great mainstream romance), Secrets & Lies (a great drama), and Shine (four out of five ain't bad)

Hon. Mention: Sorry for the cliché, but 1939: Dark Victory, Gone With the Wind, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Stagecoach, and The Wizard of Oz are all stunners, Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Wuthering Heights have their moments, and I have high hopes for Love Affair, Ninotchka, and Of Mice and Men

...and the Worst
1) 1945 — Anchors Aweigh (subpar Gene Kelly hoofer), The Bells of St. Mary's (lame proselytizing), *The Lost Weekend (awkward, overdone Expressionism), Mildred Pierce (enjoyably slick trash, and thus my pick), and Spellbound (subpar Hitchcock)
2) 1989 — Born on the Fourth of July (turgid), Dead Poets Society (mawkish), *Driving Miss Daisy (feeble), Field of Dreams (whaaa?), and My Left Foot (literally, the redeeming feature)
3) I don't think any of the others I've checked off deserve to be on this list, though there's a lot of pressure on M*A*S*H and A Soldier's Story to make up a lot of lost ground in 1970 and 1984.

Ten Remaining Nominees I'm Most Psyched To See...
1) I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang (1933)
2) The Turning Point (1977)
3) The More the Merrier (1943)
4) Dodsworth (1936)
5) Tess (1980)
6) Sons and Lovers (1960)
7) The Racket (1928)
8) M*A*S*H (1970)
9) Heaven Can Wait (1943)
10) Four Daughters (1938)

...and Ten I'm Putting Off
1) Doctor Dolittle (1967)
2) Around the World in 80 Days (1956)
3) Fanny (1961)
4) The Longest Day (1962)
5) Wilson (1944)
6) Here Comes the Navy (1934)
7) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
8) Cleopatra (1963)
9) Test Pilot (1938)
10) 100 Men and a Girl (1937)

P.S. I'll follow up some time with Oscar Files for Director (sooner than later), Actor, Supporting Actor, and Cinematography (truly, later). I've already got my work cut out for me in these categories, plus there are exceedingly few male actors who incite my loyalty, and there were sooo many nods for so many decades in Cinematography, my other favorite category, that it's an enormously daunting task.