But I couldn't come up with ten (so much for being pro-Oscars), and my back-up - the times when my favorite of the nominees got the award - produced too many possibilities (though still less than a quarter of the total number of winners). So I finally had to make do with-
The Ten Times That the Oscars Gave Best Picture to the Actual Best Picture of the Year (or Rather, the Best English-Language Film Produced by an American Studio), If You Sort of Fudge It in Those Early Years When the Eligibility Period Was Divided Between Two Calendar Years
This was the one I fudged: I think Rouben Mamoulian's Applause (premiered October, 1929) is better than AQotWF (premiered April, 1930), so I'm squinting a bit and calling it the award for 1930, and praising Milestone's tremendously inventive early sound film, still one of the most effectively hellish war movies ever made and a one-stop argument against the twits who think that old movies are cheesy and boring.
Given a little bit too much popular credit for "inventing" screwball comedy, but that doesn't keep it from being one of the smartest and funniest movies of the 1930s, arguably the smartest and funniest decade in cinema history. Hovering on the transition from Pre-Code to Code Era filmmaking, it has a subtle naughtiness that gives it a modernist bite; and neither Claudette Colbert nor Clark Gable was ever better
This is my desert island movie: the perfect example of the Hollywood machine working at its very best. Either you've seen it and you don't need an explanation, or you haven't seen it and Jesus Christ, what is wrong with you?
A staggering indictment of wartime masculinity, centered on Alec Guinness's brilliant performance (one of the best ever captured on film) as a stiff British officer who won't let a little thing like sanity stand between him and his beloved honor. There's plenty more to chew on, like William Holden's snotty American Cassandra and some glorious epic photography, and for a film that so profoundly explores the nightmares of war, it's a damn fine entertainment.
I like David Lean, all right? The best landscape cinematography ever (if you haven't seen it on 70mm, you haven't really seen it) gives a frame and context for the best debut performance ever (Peter O'Toole's haunted, hollow T.E. Lawrence, a man without a self trying to find it in the desert) and a story that makes outstanding use of the great tableaux provided by the vogue for epics in the '50s and '60s: the scale of the movie makes for an ironic counterpoint to the psychological probing.
Do you remember how awesome it was that one time, when a surprise write-in campaign drove the aggressively pop-Marxist French film to take the top award over the expected winner, the listless musical Oliver!? And everybody agreed it was a triumph of Hollywood's commitment to artistry over bland, audience-friendly mediocrity, which then they proved with an amazing chain of follow-up winners: Z, My Night at Maud's, Death in Venice. What a great time to be an Oscar-watcher, in my imagination!
I'm on record as preferring the sequel, but the original is still one of the great stories of American ambition and greed put to film, a virtually Shakespearean tragedy. Again, I don't think you need me to explain why it's great film, right? ...please?
The most intelligent comedy ever made about relationships: from the dialogue to the occasional well-played gimmick to the very structure of the film, rendering its story as the fragmentary, discontinuous memory of a lapsed romantic licking his wounds. As hilarious as it is painful as it is honest.
You know what's completely awesome? Though it was filmed in America with a script written by an American, with a cast made up almost exclusively of Americans, Paris, Texas doesn't have a drop of American money in it. Which freed me up to give a slot on this list to Forman's film of Peter Shaffer's play, a melodramatic and grossly ahistorical study of the trumped-up rivalry between Mozart and Salieri that reigns as American cinema's finest tribute to classical music, genius, and envy.
Sometimes I drift over to thinking I might call one of Eastwood's other movies his best as a director, but I keep coming back to the potency of his bloody-minded nihilistic fable, an indictment of violence and his own legacy as a screen presence. It's so obvious that it's almost comical, if not for Eastwood's harsh performance, probably the best of his career, keeping everything in check. The rare blend of film noir and Western at its stormiest.
Great list, but I'll never like Amadeus, try as I might. I've seen it four times and can't get myself to like it as much as I know I should. And us Godfather Part II kids need to stick together.
ReplyDeleteI also can't spare much love for Amadeus, but I have little use for Peter Shaffer.
ReplyDeleteWas "Silence of the Lambs" inferior to "Beauty and the Beast"? I'm surprised not to see it on the list.
I'll take a stand for Oliver!, which I found endlessly delightful (though the Best Picture that year should have been Zeffirelli's Romeo & Juliet). I have my own Top Ten Best Pictures (though I haven't seen ALL of them, Cavalcade not being available in the States). Here they are so far in descending order:
ReplyDeleteThe Silence of the Lambs, West Side Story, All About Eve, Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia, All Quiet on the Western Front, Rocky, The Godfather Part II, Schindler's List, and Casablanca.
Silence of the Lambs is obviously inferior to Beauty and the Beast. Silence of the Lambs has some of the lamest cinematography in history. IN HISTORY.
ReplyDeleteTough choice between Silence of the Lambs and Beauty and the Beast but I still vote for the former as Best Picture. Then again, I haven't seen every Best Picture.
ReplyDeleteBy the way Tim, why not have the Top Ten WORST Best Pictures? That would give you a chance to bash the Academy & relate it to the Oscars.
I agree with Rick. Please put Crash on that list so that I can feel vindicated.
ReplyDeleteFor the record, not only do I like Beauty and the Beast more than Silence of the Lambs (though not by very much), neither one of them gets my "Best of 1991" pick - that would be the non-nominated Barton Fink.
ReplyDeleteI haven't decided what I'm doing next Monday, but I know it's going to be a ten worst of something Oscar-related.
I thought No Country for Old Men was a masterpiece.
ReplyDeleteNo Country for Old Men was my favorite film of 2007, so I'm totally happy with the Oscars that year (and Daniel Day-Lewis was my favorite male performance of that year!), but my favorite Coen film is definitely Barton Fink.
ReplyDeleteI could be wrong but wasn't '07 the "annus mirabilis" of the decade in film?
ReplyDeleteSole gripe is Bridge on the River Kwai, which I find to be easily inferior to 12 Angry Men, Paths of Glory and Sweet Smell of Success. Dig the Week-End wish fulfillment.
ReplyDeleteAfter seeing All quiet on the western front for the first time, I thought "Why do people bother making more (anti-)war movies? I can't get better than this".
ReplyDeleteI guess you gotta do something, and they have to keep churning out movies, it's a business after all.
"the 1930s, arguably the smartest and funniest decade in cinema history."
I don't have access to the quote right now, but my favorite film critic once wrote that although many don't realize it, the 30's were Hollywood's swan song, before surrendering to the East coast company pressures, or something like that.
I guess this is utterly stupid and missing the point, but I was always somewhat disappointed in how the thriller aspect of Casablanca resolves. The way the meeting at the airport is arranged, and then how the Nazi officer arrives just by himself (or kind of), very conveniently so so he can be killed by Bogart without problem.
The movie looks stupendous, but content-wise the best thing is the humour and irony, i.e., Claude Rains' character. I think it's what keeps it fresh and prevents it from fossilising.
I better not write about the Godfather movies.
Please, feel free to write about the Godfather movies: I know I just put it on the list and all, but I've always kind of been irritated by the weird way that so many people seem to regard it as objectively the best movie ever and let's not have any kind of conversation about it at all, that I still enjoy reading takedowns when I can find them (which is very rare).
ReplyDeleteAbout Casablanca, well, let us agree to disagree, as they say.
Casablanca is practically perfect in every way. I agree w/Tim: The Godfather, Part II is better than the original.
ReplyDeleteRick, of course you're with Tim on GFII; all right thinking people are. It IS that good. I personally think that the handling of time lapses in GFI is tremendously clumsy and the score is powerfully overbearing at times. I wanted to offer my opinion of the best film of 1972, but I looked at some lists and realized that I don't think there was an American film in 1972 that I even LIKED (unless it be Shaft's Big Score and Blacula, hardly Oscar material). So, I may need to let it stand. I still would have included Godfather II, though.
ReplyDelete