Operation: Oscar

A (not very) brief summation of why I’m here…

The very first Oscars I watched was when I was eight. Because it was a school night (Tuesday, maybe) I had to tape the last half of the awards and watch them at a later date, with most of the big awards (Best Picture, Best Actor/Actress) spoiled for me by the time I saw the envelopes opened. This was 1988 so The Last Emperor won everything in sight, seemingly, and I really didn’t know what a lot of the awards (sound editing? art direction?) meant. This sad habit of only being able to watch a portion of the awards live continued until a teacher’s strike in 1993 meant there was no school the next day and I was able to see Unforgiven take best picture in real-time with the rest of the world (The 1993 awards were for 1992 movies, remember). My dad even took me to see it a few days later, despite its hard R rating.
I think part of the reason I like the awards is because they set some sort of verifiable achievement to an art form, almost like sports. Baseball has the World Series. Football has a Super Bowl. Why not a night for movies to sum up the entire year and say what was particularly good in that year?

In a more pragmatic sense, when I was a little kid, the Oscars offered a glimpse of movies I could hardly dream of seeing. All the acting awards, plus the Best Picture nominees, got to present clips from the films, and for a little kid who digested every movie ad he saw on TV, but couldn’t actually view too many movies with a rating higher than PG, it was an overload of information. I still remember a clip from the 1987 awards for Best Actor which had this fully clothed man walking into water. Crazyness. I don’t even remember what movie it was (and it clearly wasn’t the winner because Michael Douglas won that year), but what an impression of a cinematic world outside of cartoons. It was pure catnip for a burgeoning movie buff (Checking Wikipedia the movie was most likely Marcello Mastroianni in Dark Eyes).  The clips have been cut way back at the Oscars recently and even Best Picture nominees show more of a trailer for the film than any specific clip, which I think is too bad, even though at 32 and living in a reasonably sized city, I have access to pretty much everything nominated, shorts and documentaries notwithstanding. I still love the clips.(Ironically, The Last Emperor is the newest Best Picture I have never seen).

The Oscars are weirdly polarizing, because most people seem to care about who wins, but often times they HATE who wins and dismiss the awards as being out of touch. Without a doubt, the Oscars are tied to a certain type of film, although what that type is has changed through the decades. We’re at a very strange period now where Oscar winners are typically arty “prestige” pictures put out by a subsidiary of a major studio, that generally don’t make that much money and may only show in art houses, unless there is a re-release when the nominations are announced. And yet, at various times, hugely successful blockbusters have also won Best Picture. Sometimes Best Pictures are widely remembered (Gone with the Wind, The Godfather), some beloved or critically adored movies lost out to movies that the consensus holds to be of far lesser quality (It’s a Wonderful Life, Citizen Kane) and some winners would probably be relegated to the cinematic dustbins of history if not for the win (Tom Jones, Cimarron).

So here is my mission: To watch every Best Picture winner, in order, from the debut ceremony to modern-day. It’s a fete that will take a while. Even if I owned all 84 films, I couldn’t watch them in 84 consecutive nights. I’m at the mercy of my schedule and my one-dvd-at-a-time subscription to Netflix to get a lot of this done.(I don’t know enough to download bootleg copies on the internet, and even if I did, for such an exercise as I propose, it feels dirty and like cheating.) I have already seen approximately 50 percent of the Best Pictures, some once many years ago, some several times, but I plan to start fresh and watch them all. My goal is to review 3-4 movies per month, adding in interesting trivia from the awards and the movie itself when merited. I will also occasionally offer bonus reviews of non-winners that still mark a personal milestone for me, however eccentric those milestones may be (but we’ll get to that in good time). I’ll also have to “jump ahead” in the project when Oscar time comes around to catch up with that year’s nominees (Since 1996, I have seen all but two Best Picture nominees *before* the awards and caught the two that I missed within months of the ceremony). I hope that by doing this, I can share my love of movies and also find an enjoyable, unique way to write about them and the awards show I do truly love.

And with that in mind, let’s open the envelopes!