The Best Picture Lists - Discussion and Defenses

[domino harvey]

THE BEST PICTURE LISTS
THE BEST PICTURE NOMINEES 1927-1968 LIST
THE BEST PICTURE NOMINEES 1969-2018 LIST
THE BEST PICTURE WINNERS (ALL YEARS) LIST
April 01 - May 31

You've seen the long running secondary Alt Best Picture List Project threads of members slowly working their way through the entire history of the Academy Awards' Best Picture nominees and winners, now delight as a confined time span comes into play. We will be casting votes for THREE different lists:

THE BEST PICTURE NOMINEES 1927-1968 LIST
All films nominated for Best Picture (or both categories in the first year) that did not win, from 1927 through 1968

THE BEST PICTURE NOMINEES 1969-2018 LIST
All films nominated for Best Picture (or both categories in the first year) that did not win, from 1969 through 2018

THE BEST PICTURE WINNERS (ALL YEARS) LIST
All films that have won the Academy Award for Best Picture

Discussion for all three lists goes in this thread ...for the span of this project, at least, do not use the previous Oscars threads for new discussion. After May 31, you may use this thread or the older threads to continue discussion of these films

ELIGIBLE FILMS
Films that won Best Picture are not eligible to be voted on for either Best Picture Nominees list. And conversely, films that were nominated but did not win cannot be voted on for the Best Picture Winners list. Duh

Years listed in eligibility are for the films release date as considered by the Oscars, not the ceremony date. Keep in mind Googling 1968 Oscars will return the ceremony held in 1968 for the 1967 films, &c

Though voting for films you've never seen is par for the course in the real Oscar voting, for the purposes of this list, the Patriot is considered lost and there are no circulating copies, so you cannot vote for it. The White Parade exists in a single print at UCLA, so you may have seen it, I guess. All other films are circulating somewhere

For the sake of our list, Sunrise (winner of Best Artistic Production) IS eligible for the Best Picture Winners list, and cannot be voted for in the nominees list

La La Land is only eligible for the Best Picture Winners list if you are Faye Dunaway or Warren Beatty. Proof of ID required with ballot. Otherwise, it belongs on the Best Picture Nominees 1969-2018 list

Eligible films for the 1927-1968 list (all titles not in red)
Eligible films for the 1969-2018 Nominees list (all titles not in red)
--Consult the titles in red in the above links for eligible Best Picture Winners

RULES
You may submit all three lists, or two of the lists, or one list. Each list should contain a minimum ten films in ranked order on list, and a maximum of twenty films. You may submit a list with any number between 10-20.

Though I know the temptation is strong to make a top 20 consisting solely of Green Book, you can only vote for Green Book once, in the Best Picture WInners list.

If you are reading this, you’re eligible to submit a list. You do NOT have to have seen every eligible film in order to vote.

Lists should be PMed to me, domino harvey, by the end of the night on May 31. No lists will be accepted before April 1

[domino harvey]

Discussion now open! The previous Best Pic list threads in this subforum have been temporarily locked only for the duration of this list, to avoid confusion in posting, FYI

[knives]

I'm pretty excited for this one though I'm almost done with the titles easily available to me. Just 53 to go with two of them being winners (and I honestly don't mind if Cavalcade stays out of reach). So thanks for setting this up in short. Should be fun.

[movielocke]

It seems like it would be a useful thread resource to not have to scroll through 555 nominees on two separate threads to get all 90 winners, particularly when a phone displays only about three years at a time.

So in the spirit of helpfulness, here is a correct year order list of the best picture winners all in one place. (And Letterboxd list here)

1927/28 Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans
1927/28 Wings
1928/29 The Broadway Melody
1929/30 All Quiet on the Western Front
1930/31 Cimarron
1931/32 Grand Hotel
1932/33 Cavalcade

1934 It Happened One Night
1935 Mutiny on the Bounty
1936 The Great Ziegfeld
1937 The Life of Emile Zola
1938 You Can't Take it With You
1939 Gone with the Wind

1940 Rebecca
1941 How Green Was My Valley
1942 Mrs. Miniver
1943 Casablanca
1944 Going My Way
1945 The Lost Weekend
1946 The Best Years of Our Lives
1947 Gentleman's Agreement
1948 Hamlet
1949 All The King's Men

1950 All About Eve
1951 An American in Paris
1952 The Greatest Show on Earth
1953 From Here to Eternity
1954 On the Waterfront
1955 Marty
1956 Around the World in 80 Days
1957 The Bridge on the River Kwai
1958 Gigi
1959 Ben-Hur

1960 The Apartment
1961 West Side Story
1962 Lawrence of Arabia
1963 Tom Jones
1964 My Fair Lady
1965 The Sound of Music
1966 A Man For All Seasons
1967 In the Heat of the Night
1968 Oliver!
1969 Midnight Cowboy

1970 Patton
1971 The French Connection
1972 The Godfather
1973 The Sting
1974 The Godfather, Part II
1975 One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
1976 Rocky
1977 Annie Hall
1978 The Deer Hunter
1979 Kramer vs. Kramer

1980 Ordinary People
1981 Chariots of Fire
1982 Gandhi
1983 Terms of Endearment
1984 Amadeus
1985 Out of Africa
1986 Platoon
1987 The Last Emperor
1988 Rain Man
1989 Driving Miss Daisy

1990 Dances with Wolves
1991 The Silence of the Lambs
1992 Unforgiven
1993 Schindler's List
1994 Forrest Gump
1995 Braveheart
1996 The English Patient
1997 Titanic
1998 Shakespeare in Love
1999 American Beauty

2000 Gladiator
2001 A Beautiful Mind
2002 Chicago
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
2004 Million Dollar Baby
2005 Crash
2006 The Departed
2007 No Country for Old Men
2008 Slumdog Millionaire
2009 The Hurt Locker

2010 The King's Speech
2011 The Artist
2012 Argo
2013 12 Years a Slave
2014 Birdman
2015 Spotlight
2016 Moonlight
2017 The Shape of Water
2018 Green Book

[movielocke]

I finished off the oscar nominees a few year ago, and without deliberate intent, I wind up re-watching a few every year. I still have not seen Vice of last year's nominees, which should be rectified within the week, with it releasing to video tomorrow.

To draw attention to one film that has grown on me enormously in the last four years, It Happened One Night is absolutely tremendous. When I watched it with my wife, her first time, it quickly became one of her favorite classic films. Having watched it together several times since I'm continually amazed at how good the script is, how well drawn the characters are and how clever the filmmaking is. And for a film that became one of the touchstones of the romantic comedy genre, it's amazing that there is no real conflict/misunderstanding between the romantic couple until the final fifteen minutes of the film, instead giving that time over to the couple learning to trust each other and begin to fall in love. There's no getting around the very off-putting misogyny of Gable's late in the film lectures on the salutory effects of beating women and putting them in their place, some of the most sour notes in an otherwise charming film. But my wife seems to think they come from oafish bluster more than sincerity, so I try and overlook it.

[domino harvey]

Thanks for the list movielocke. Keep in mind the Letterboxd list linked does not contain Sunrise

I strongly encourage members to peruse the nominees lists before assuming they can’t or don’t want to participate— I cannot imagine anyone here not being able to construct at minimum a Top 10 from each division, even if they claim to hate the Oscars

[movielocke]

It has been since middle school since I last saw Amadeus (in "music" class), so It's probably the winner I most need to rewatch as I've never seen it as an adult. Is there anything I should know about it's home video status? as I recall, there was a bunch of kerfluffle every time it came out DVD or blu, which is why I never bought it and rewatched it, but I really don't remember the details, and have no idea which edition to try and get.

[knives]

There's a few different cuts out there, but the theatrical is still the best.

[domino harvey]

Just did a quick tally of the winners and it wasn't too hard to get to 20... but my initial listing of movies I felt strongly enough to list only went to 22, so not exactly a heartbreaking process. There's prob another handful of movies on top of that which are "okay," but the nominees lists will be much harder to winnow down than the winners!

As far as revisiting, for whatever reasons On the Waterfront and the Lost Weekend have been mentally bookmarked in recent years as winners that I wasn't enthused about but still want to reassess, so I'll hopefully get to those.

knives, we are absolutely not doing a Worst Winners/Nominees list, because that kind of thing is antithetical to the purpose of these lists, buuuuuuut if we were, Cavalcade would be a competitive contender for the worst winner of all time

[movielocke]

I have to agree on cavalcade.

Around the world in 80 Days is another I need to revisit, it was the very first film I ever watched streaming as I think it was a launch title on Netflix, I watched it on a computer and remember thinking it was weird they were making this big spectacle in academy. Looking it up later I found out it was famously the film that launched Todd AO and i was pissed I might have to rewatch it in the future because Netflix was just streaming basic cable masters in the wrong AR. I wound up not streaming anything for over a year after that and kept watching those sorts of films on TCM instead.

Midnight cowboy is another film I watched as a budding cinephile at 16-17 (and was using the AFI list as a guide), and I completely was not mature enough to get that film, criterion’s release reminded me last year that I need to watch it as an adult, but I still haven’t gotten to it.

[knives]

knives, we are absolutely not doing a Worst Winners/Nominees list, because that kind of thing is antithetical to the purpose of these lists, buuuuuuut if we were, Cavalcade would be a competitive contender for the worst winner of all time

With Lloyd's other films I can believe that.

[ianthemovie]

(Re: Amadeus)

There's a few different cuts out there, but the theatrical is still the best.

Agreed--though sadly the director's cut seems to now be seen as definitive, since it's the only version available on Blu-ray.

[domino harvey]

movielocke, I 100% absolve thee from having to watch Around the World in 80 Days again. A better film does not await you in the missing frame

[knives]

I think it's okay. Nothing special, but probably like 60 percentile.

[dustybooks]

This is a rare bit of synergy for me because I've been working on watching all the nominees I've missed for about a year now. I did watch all of the winners (in order, for some nutty reason) back in 2012-13 which was quite a process. I concluded that Crash was the worst and wasn't swayed from my long-held view that The Apartment is the best. My favorite discovery from that project, which I hadn't seen at all until then, was Mrs. Miniver. I waited a while to start on the nominees, as instead I set out to see the winners in all of the other big categories (acting, writing, directing) and finished that a couple of years ago, lost films aside. This left me with what looked like a relatively small number of BP nominees left to see but, for some reason, it seems to be taking me forever. I don't expect I'll be able to knock many out in this timeframe, too much going on, but I will definitely submit lists and do some writing up.

[movielocke]

movielocke, I 100% absolve thee from having to watch Around the World in 80 Days again. A better film does not await you in the missing frame

I have it as 83rd right now, just below Greatest Show on Earth, and I'm less concerned with the missing frame, than with having watched it on the equivalent screen area of a phone, because, as I recall, excited by the brand new technology of streaming movies, I surreptitiously watched it at work, and never even full-screened the feed!

At the very least, renting it on apple and watching it on my ordinary 55" TV would do it a lot more justice. I just tried setting up a trial netflix dvd add-on to avoid rental fees for a dozen rewatches and both Amadeus and Around the World in 80 Days are unavailable as discs from them.

[movielocke]

I track everything in spreadsheets, but since I finished the BP nominees back in 2010 or thereabouts, I hadn't updated my spreadsheet with any info other than titles, I just filled in a few blanks for the last nine years, and the 68 nominees of the last nine years have been so long that we went from a total Best picture nominees TRT of 60,501 minutes to a new total of 69,241 minutes, which raised the average length of the 554 nominees from 121 minutes to 125 minutes.

Only 6 best picture nominees have won everything they've been nominated for:

Wings - 2
Grand Hotel - 1
It Happened One Night - 5
Gigi - 9
The Last Emperor - 9
Return of the KIng - 11

and 158 best picture nominees (or 28.5%) have not won anything

and the average winning percentage for all nominees is 23%.

Bohemian Rhapsody surprisingly carries an unusual stat, it has the highest winning percentage (80%) of the last ten years, putting it in the top twenty all time, in winning percentage. Just imagine, if it had won, if would be the seventh film to join the 100% group.

[knives]

More on that tomorrow, but I honestly would have been fine with that.

[knives]

Bohemian Rhapsody
I don't get where the Internet is coming from with this film at all. Perhaps it's just because the poisonous nature of May and Singer can't be overcome by a mediocre film, but in any explanation this is a decent enough film. It does adhere to the Dewey Cox model (it must have taken a lot of restraint for that Bowie cameo), but it's successful within that. Certainly something like Ray is much more horrendous in how it saves the cat without consideration for its characters or any sense of theme.

The positive I was most surprised about was the sensitivity and care the film gives to Mercury's bisexuality, the one type of sexual preference that's gotten no coverage in recent years. The way the script and even direction pauses with his various moments tough and light to bring about insight to his character is nice and genuinely stirring. Had the film focused more on this than the rock stuff it probably would have been a great film, but the boring people deserve scenes too I suppose.

To prove myself completely contrarian on this though, probably the weakest part of the film (more so than the wrongly maligned editing) is Malek's performance of Mercury. I have no clue if actually sounded like that in real life, but whoof I can't imagine a more annoying way of speaking. That's what borders on a hate crime. This is definite case where the film shouldn't have cared about reality at all and just give him a tolerable accent.

Auntie Mame
This is quite the examplar of the sort of shrill, overlong, hysterical instead funny mess that Hollywood was flailing with in its death gasps. I could derive no pleasure from most of this even in the areas such as production design which could be seen as well done. I honestly have no clue why everyone seems to like Russell's performance as from the word go it strikes me as the worst of the film with a screeching quality I hate. Fred Clark honestly gives the only performance here I enjoyed and he's in this far too little. That highlights another problem with the film which is it's A Thousand Clowns attempts to be cool. I don't see any reason to not root for her failure across the first half of the film since she seems a genuinely dangerous malady. Of course when the film falls to its expected conclusion midway through it looses its mind in terms of what to do and so spends an hour and half flopping around like a dying fish in love with its liver before in the last moments finding something close to the idea it should have been pursuing all along.

While the middle section of the film is the weakest and should have been cut in total the final section with the potential in-laws has the film sort of finding it's feet. The WASPy arrogance is a good target for the sort of spit in the eye the film has been aiming for all along. The jokes also begin to pick up speed with everything from before piling on in a juicy way (the crack about Jews is both hilarious and flinch worthy given the Holocaust was going on at the time). What really elevate the section to good though is the performance of the fiance who pronounces each phoneme in the funniest way one can imagine. The section also has the most Clark.

[domino harvey]

1958 is the true nightmare year for Best Picture nominees. It is the only year in which none of the nominated pictures are any good. Auntie Mame had and has my vote as the “best” of that lot, but that’s not saying much. Looking at the different Best Director noms, either I Want to Live! or the Inn of the Sixth Happiness would have been infinitely better choices to nominate that year

[dustybooks]

I actually like Separate Tables, mostly because I find some of the performances moving, though I think it's really hurt (as is the play) by the substitution of sexual harassment for a gay liaison, and it's pretty tragic that the former was considered more acceptable/forgivable than the latter! Have not seen Auntie Mame or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof yet and hate both Gigi and The Defiant Ones.

[domino harvey]

If you don’t like substitution of gay content, you definitely won’t like Brooks’ Cat. On the one hand, his hands were tied, Hollywood was never going to let that motivation fly. But on the other hand, when you replace that motivation with nothing, the entire play is nonsensical. Skip it unless you’re an Oscar completist and just watch the version from the 80s with Rip Torn as Big Daddy, which does retain Brick’s homosexuality

[knives]

I actually like the Brooks film okay (haven't seen the Mann). It's not a great film and barely a good one, but it's still better than most of the Williams adaptations that were flying around at the time. As for '58 being the only year without a good film, what about '29 or did you block that from memory?

Edit: Oops, thought Broadway Melody was '30 for some reason.

[domino harvey]

I think you forget I’m one of the few people who doesn’t mind the Broadway Melody, and In Old Arizona is okay for what it is too, so that’s 2/4 (the Patriot being lost and all)

Other than the Roman Spring of Mrs Stone and the Rose Tattoo, there was no worse Williams adaptation in this era (though I still need to watch Summer and Smoke). Brooks later redeemed himself with Sweet Bird of Youth though

[dustybooks]

I'm still laughing at how spiteful the end of In Old Arizona is. The Heiress is one of the only other Hollywood movies I can remember that approaches that level of bleak callousness at its conclusion.