1958-1967: Oscar’s Fourth Decade -A Look Back

	Musical	Historical Epic	Lavish Setting	British	Social Injustice
1958: Gigi	X		X
1959: Ben-Hur		X	X
1960: The Apartment
1961: West Side Story	X
1962: Lawrence of Arabia		X	X	X
1963: Tom Jones			X	X
1964: My Fair Lady	X		X	X
1965: The Sound of Music	X		X	X-ish
1966: A Man For All Seasons		X	X	X
1967: In the Heat of the Night					X

 

This poster for Lawrence of Arabia really tells you all you need to know: Handsome man in white, lots of desert.

The Oscars fourth decade (1958-1967) is the start of the “traditional” Best Picture with the sorts of lavish costume dramas, period pieces and BRITISH-ness from the ten winners that dominate what we think of when we think of a “Best Picture type” today. It’s very notable that in a decade revered for its social consciousness and upheaval, only 3 of the 10 best pictures take place in the contemporary time period. It’s like the Academy – and perhaps moviegoers as a whole—looked to the escapism of movies for comfort from trying times.

None of this nonesense

Unique to this time period is the Academy’s absolute adoration of big musical spectacles. Before 1958, only two musicals ever won Best Picture. In this ten year stretch, 4 out of the 10 winners were musicals. In the next 50 years, we’ll only see two more musicals win. Oddly, aside from the success of the winners, the 60s are viewed as the decline of the Hollywood Musicals and you can probably count the successful musicals released between 1970 and 2000 on your fingers. Does this mean the Academy was behind the times? Regressing into the past to avoid the harsher realities of the present – both in terms of what was going on in the world and the struggles and changes within the filmmaking business? Or were they caught up in the zeitgeist and awarded the statue to the “right” winner – West Side Story, My Fair Lady and The Sound of Music are all much-remembered and well-loved to both audiences of their time and today’s fans.

Lots of jazz hands

The other major trend, carried over from the last decade, was the prominence of historical epics and the triumph of a movie’s “big-ness” that was used to compete with television. Ben-Hur and Lawrence of Arabia are two the most visually stunning and exciting Best Pictures ever. Even the non-epics like Tom Jones and A Man for All Seasons use their big budgets and location settings of movies to employ elaborate sets and costumes unlikely to be seen or appreciated on television at that time, perhaps another reason that period pieces fare so well among Best Pictures in this period.

One cannot deny the British influence over this time period (as with a lot of things in American culture – it was the British invasion, after all). From 1962-1966, four of the five Best Pictures are set in England and The Sound of Music, despite being in Austria, has a predominantly British cast and feel.

All hail the Union Jack!

Was the Academy out of touch? It’s well worth noting that the majority of the Best Pictures in this time frame were among the top ten financial grossers for their respective years of their release. The Sound of Music was the highest grossing movie of all time for a long period following its release. So it’s not as if the critical and commercial aspects of the Academy were as misaligned as they were today, when we have some of the lowest grossing Best Pictures ever. Even today, many of the winners are very highly thought of by some if not all – West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Sound of Music, in particular. Hindsight has left many critics to question some of the Oscar choices – notably choosing In the Heat of the Night over Bonnie and Clyde and The Apartment over Psycho – but both those winners are very strong, in my opinion (There really is no defending Tom Jones, however), and it was impossible to know, for example, that Psycho would create a whole new genre of film.

Filmmaking was about to undergo a significant upheaval in the 70s and that is reflected in the Best Picture winners of that time period. For the Oscars in the late 50s and 60s, the Best Picture was about celebrating epics and style over social issues and “small” pictures.

1948-1957: Oscar’s Third Decade – A Look Back

On The Waterfront was my favorite movie from this decade – and definitely the best poster yet

The 1950s’s Oscars – and 1950s pop culture in general – gets a pretty bad rap as white-washed, conformist and undaring. A lot of Oscar history books tend to throw out phrases like “Worst Collection of Best Picture nominees ever” (for 1956 from The Academy Awards Handbook) or “Least Deserving Best Picture Winner of All Time (For The Greatest Show on Earth from multiple sources including Alternate Oscars and The Official Razzie Movie Guide). However, I enjoyed this 10-pack of films much more than the previous decade of Oscar winners (even if none could match Casablanca). I felt that the movies began to “speed up,” by which I mean directors added more cuts and edits to make the movie feel faster as opposed to the relatively static filming styles of earlier times). Movies started to have a more modern look and feel as the science behind movie making advanced in this time period.

The third decade of Oscars also had a much more eclectic “something for everyone” nature to their themes and styles than what came in the previous decade. Most Best pictures from 1938-1947 were divided into the dual themes of either World War II or social ills and most (except for the extravagant Gone With the Wind) were middle-to-low-budget affairs, due to World War II cutbacks and the nature of the stories (a movie about alcoholism, for example, doesn’t need elaborate sets of shots of epic grandeur). From 1948-1957, the themes, styles and budgets of the Best Picture winners are all over the place. We start with a sparse recreation of a classic stage play, then move back to social ills with All the King’s Men, but on a larger scope than your Lost Weekends and Gentleman’s Agreements. Then we hit some lavish, big-budget, all color extravaganzas before heading to the smaller personal stories of On the Waterfront and Marty before going bigger than ever before in shooting style and budget with Around the World in 80 Days and the Bridge on the River Kwai.

 

	Corrupt Authority /Society	Small Scale	Epic/Big Budg	World War II	Social Ills	Sex	Modern Times	Gross
1948: Hamlet	X	X				X		$3.25M (17)
1949: All the Kings Men	X				X	X	X	$3.5M (10)
1950: All About Eve						X	X	$3.6M (7)
1951: An American in Paris			X				X	$4.5M (6)
1952: The Greatest Show on Earth			X				X	$14M (1)
1953: From Here to Eternity	X		X	X	X	X	X	$12.5M (2)
1954: On the Waterfront	X	X			X		X	$4.5M (14)
1955: Marty		X					X	$2M
1956: Around the World in 80 Days			X					$23M (2)
1957: The Bridge on the River Kwai	X		X	X			X	$17.1M (1)

 

A few interesting common themes do emerge. In almost every one of these movies – even the seemingly incongruous Hamlet – there is a corrupt society or authority figure. Whereas the World War II era of movies showed a decided trust in leadership, the McCarthy Red Scare and perhaps other factors clearly altered the public’s faith in those who were supposed to guide them.

Did the public’s fear of Communism lead to so many Best Pictures about corrupt or broken authority and leadership?

Movies also began to look back on World War II with a more introspective, less rah-rah perspective then presented during the actual time of the War. Both Best Pictures dealing with World War II in this decade have bullying, corrupt and foolish leadership (Interestingly, From Here to Eternity was released at the tail end of the Korean War, a war considerably less popular and triumphant than World War II). Did the passage of time allow those who lived through the war to reconsider it, as appeared to happen in the 1920s and30s with movies dealing with World War I? Did the greater ambiguities and indecisive outcome of the Korean War change the public’s overall perception of war?

Alec Guinness deluded Colonel Nicholson is a huge departure from the dignified leaders of the 40s

Another interesting note is the overall alignment between commercial and Oscar success. Between 1948 and 1957, 7 out of the 10 winners were in the top ten for their respective year’s box office and two were the number one movie for the year. Compare that to the past decade’s winners, when no Best Picture winners made their year’s top ten .There is a not altogether unfair assumption that today’s Oscar’s are out of touch with popular appeal, but that certainly did not appear to be the case in the late 40’s and 50s.

Here’s how the collective themes of the third decade stack up to the last ten Best Picture winners.

	Corrupt Authority /Society	Small Scale	Epic/ Big Budg	World War II	Social Ills	Sex	Modern Times	Gross
2004: Million Dollar Baby		X					X	$216M
2005: Crash	X				X	X	X	$98M
2006: The Departed	X?						X	$90M
2007: No Country for Old Men							X	$171M
2008: Slumdog Millionaire	X?						X	$378M
2009: The Hurt Locker		X					X	$49M
2010: The King’s Speech								$414M
2011: The Artist		X						$133M
2012: Argo								$232M
2013: 12 Years a Slave	X							$187M

 

Period pieces are generally considered good Oscar bait and while this is true for technical categories like Art Direction (aka sets) and Costumes, this assumption clearly holds no water the 1940s-50 Best Picture winners or in today’s winners. In fact, even though the last four Best Picture winners could be considered period pieces under a rather broad definition (a movie set 30 or more years in the past where the look, dress and actions of the characters purposefully reflect the given time period), none of those movies really represent the haughty Merchant Ivory type fair that people really think of when describing a period piece (Calling Argo a period piece for example seems strange but it technically fits the definition).

Those sideburns are definitely period piece

Strangely, despite our increased distrust of big government, few Best Pictures of the last yen years represent a broken society or authority. (12 Years a Slave and Crash being the obvious exceptions. Slumdog Millionaire is a strange case in that the broken society is what ultimately provides the hero the keys to success. ) In fact, Kings Speech and Argo present government leaders and agencies working hard for the common good.

SEX! SEX! SEX! It’s on everybody’s minds in the 50s

Another interesting note: While we typically think of the 60s as the advent of the sexual revolution and increasing depictions of sexuality on the screen, a surprising number of the 1950s Best Pictures deal with sexuality in some form, usually with at least a hint of scandal to them (dating back to Hamlet, where Olivier intentionally gave emphasis to Hamlet’s obsession with his mother’s sex life). Several of the Best Picture winners had affairs between unmarried people or extramarital affairs. Meanwhile, one could argue the last decade’s collection of Best Picture winners are among the least sexy – and sexless – collection of movies ever assembled.

…well, maybe not hers

1938-1947: Oscar’s Second Decade – A Look Back

World War 2 was a major driver of Oscar Best Pictures in the 1940s and continues to be so

Following the lead I started WAAAAAY back after completing the first ten Best Pictures, I thought it would be interesting to look at the second decade of Oscar Best Pictures and see what made them “Best”. First here’s a chart to remind us about each movie and look for some commonalities.

	World War II	Social Problems	Epic	Modernity	Evil Bankers	Total Nominations
1938 -You Can’t Take it With You					X	7
1939 – Gone With the Wind			X		X	13
1940 – Rebecca			X			11
1941 – How Green Was My Valley		X		X	X	10
1942 – Mrs. Miniver	X					12
1943 – Casablanca	X		X			8
1944 – Going My Way	X	X-ish			X	7
1945 – The Lost Weekend		X				7
1946 – The Best Years of Our Lives	X	X				8
1947 – Gentleman’s Agreement		X				8

 

Two themes dominated the second decade of the Academy Awards – World War II and addressing social issues. Every movie from 1941 onward (probably not coincidentally the point where the U.S. entered World War II) can easily be categorized under one or both of these subject matters.

While it is certainly easy to dismiss the trend of World War II movies as merely an update/reboot of the popular World War I movie trend that dominated the Oscars’ first decade, it must be noted that the World War I movies popular from 1927-1938 were being made more than a decade after WWI’s end. The World War II movies were being made while the War was going on. Thus these movies aren’t the somber reflections of war’s horror seen in All Quiet on the Western Front or Wings, but more invested in creating a rousing can-do, let’s-win-this-thing sort of spirit.

My favorite of the batch – and one of my favorite movies EVER

World War II clearly holds a special place in the nation’s conscious, even 80 years later. No subsequent war movie would win a Best Picture Oscar while being about a war that’s still ongoing until the Hurt Lock in 2009! Most winning war movies – The Deer Hunter, Platoon – are about wars that have been finished for several years, if not more. In fact, the majority of “current” war movies have been box office duds. But the World War II movies of the 40s were huge hits and World War II movies examining every aspect of the war continue to be churned out – and win Best Picture Oscars – to this day! Clearly the black-and-white nature of World War II – the last true “Good vs. Evil” battle PLUS the nationalistic ideal of America as the heroes – holds a special appeal that will likely never be broken.

The socially conscious trend in the last half of the decade is harder to pin down. During the 1930s, when the country had arguably significantly worse problems of greater scale with the Great Depression, no movie explicitly about the Great Depression won an Oscar and only one – The Great Ziegfeld – even directly acknowledged the Great Depression. Movies were seen as a key to escapism from hardships during the 30s. During the post-war 40s, America prospered like never before. Whether that prosperity unleashed a liberal guilt in filmmakers or just freed them to make statements about issues they’d always been concerned about but seemed insignificant in light of the Depression’s overwhelming despair is hard to say. The Great Depression’s effects were felt indirectly in a number of films that cast bankers and taxmen as villains, although evil taxmen weren’t exactly a new phenomenon in the 1930s.

Epics, while toned down compared to the all-out spectacles of the 30s, still held a powerful sway on Academy voters. Of course, the grandest epic of them all, Gone With The Wind, won huge and several other movies with an epic feel (and/or epic lengths) like Casablanca and Rebecca also took home the gold. But as noted in the Academy Award Handbook, the emergence of the social problem movie also brought about the first real opportunity for smaller films to get in on the action. The Best Years of Our Lives combined the best of both worlds with an all start cast and an epic story focusing on domestic problems of returning soldiers.

You Can’t Take It With You winning is as perplexing as this scene from the movie

You Can’t Take It With You remains a great outlier not just of this period but of the Oscars in general. A smallish, low-stakes moral comedy with a basic message of “Just relax” doesn’t seem like Oscar bait in any time period and is hardly one of the best remembered films of its director or star.

1927-1937: Oscar’s First Decade – A Look Back

As we reach the end of the first decade of Oscars, I thought it would be interesting to take a look back at the first ten Best Pictures and see what conclusions could be drawn about what the Academy saw as the “Best” pictures of its early sound era. Even more so than today, trying to determine trends is difficult because some of the Oscars were outright rigged (Louie Mayer turned away support for his movie The Crowd in return for getting the win for The Broadway Melody the next year, for example). The voting process had numerous kinks compiled by groups of people leaving and entering the Academy throughout the tumultuous decade. Still a few trends are evident. Here’s a look at some recurring themes I noticed in the first decade of Best Pictures and then a look at how those trends fit into the past decade’s Best Picture.

1927-1937

	Block-buster	War	Modern- ity	Bio-Pic	True Story	Based on a Book	Epic	Period Piece	Awards Won
Wings	X	X					X		2
Broadway Melody	X								1
All Quiet on the Western Front	X	X				X	X		2
Cimarron			X				X		3
Grand Hotel	X								1
Calvacade		X	X				X		3
It Happened One Night	X								5
Mutiny on the Bounty	X				X	X	X	X	1
Great Ziegfeld	X			X	X		X		3
Life of Emile Zola				X	X				3

2002-2011

	Block- buster	War	Modern- ity	Bio-Pic	True Story	Based on a Book	Epic	Period Piece	Awards Won
Chicago	X							X	6
Lord of the Rings	X					X	X		11
Million Dollar Baby									4
Crash									3
Departed									4
No Country for Old Men									4
Slumdog Millionaire									8
Hurt Locker		X							6
King’s Speech				X	X	X		X	4
Artist								X	5

Two trends immediately stick out: the onslaught of modernity (i.e. how technologically advanced society has become at such a rapid pace) and World War I were obviously at the forefront of voters’ minds. Movies dealing with these two subjects won four of the Best Pictures, and Emile Zola, although not specifically about either topic, was also set between 20 and 40 years in the past.   Movies about semi-recent history remain strong contenders today (Social Network in 2009, The Queen in 2007, Argo being a presumptive Best Picture nominee for 2012), but also aren’t usually big winners. By contrast, period pieces, which I am defining as movies about history greater than 50 years before the movie was released, had very little impact on the early Oscars. Even though these types of movies are generally considered Oscar bait today, not just for Best Picture but the various technical categories like costumes and set design, only one “period piece” movie, Mutiny on the Bounty, won best Picture in the first ten years.  Three movies I would designate as “period” films have won in the past ten years.

The Oscars were also quite clearly a popularity contest in their initial outing (with the caveat that any award based on subjective voting is to a great degree a popularity contest). The majority of the early Best Pictures were huge moneymakers. It Happened One Night literally rescued its studio from bankruptcy. Many of these Best Pictures were also trailblazer in the art – Broadway Melody was the first talkie musical; Wings was the biggest war-themed production ever undertaken at that time; Grand Hotel was the first “all-star Ensemble”; It Happened One Night was the first screwball comedy. Many of the last ten movies to win Best Picture, when adjusted for inflation, are among the lowest grossing Best Pictures in history. And while its arguable that there aren’t nearly as many trails to blaze in the medium today, a few that did “change the game” notably the technological advances of Avatar (also the highest grossing movie of all time), got a best picture nomination (after the Academy expanded the Best Picture nominees to ten), it instead lost the Best Picture to The Hurt Locker, the lowest grossing Best Picture ever (from a purely artistic standpoint, I’m still on the fence as to which really deserved to win. A topic I will tackle sometime in 2016). The outlier in this scenario is Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which was a huge moneymaker with an epic scope, technological advances (Gollum) and in many ways a game changer in terms of how movies could be made. But in the 2010s, a quiet, high-browed movie like the King’s Speech is more likely to win than a big, epic loud Inception. One Best Picture that is hard to categorize in this sense is 2011’s The Artist, which was very groundbreaking in its embrace of the old ways (a silent movie in 2011 – preposterous!) But it is also exceedingly clever (it’s a silent movie about the onslaught of sound) and very intellectual in its approach (Check out the litany of references to “sound” and “talking” throughout the movie). But not everything can be easily cataloged.

True stories and biographies in particular also gained traction as the Oscar’s first decade wound to a close. The last three Best pictures were all true stories, and the last two biographies. Interestingly, despite the academies predilection for period pieces today, only one true story, The King’s Speech, took home the gold in the last ten years. In the 2011 Oscars, one true story (Moneyball) and one story with a root in truth (Hugo) were nominated.

Finally, a rather surprising statistic I came across in my research. Even though the early Oscars had less awards than today’s standard 24, the awards tended to be distributed more evenly. The first ten Best Pictures won an average of 2.4 awards total. Three movies, Broadway Melody, Grand Hotel and Mutiny on the Bounty only won one each. The most any movie won was 5. By contrast, the last ten Best Pictures won an average of 5.5 Oscars, with Crash winning the least of the ten with three. Even if you remove Lord of the Rings: Return of the King, which tied a record with eleven wins, the average is 4.9 awards per movie.  Basically, if you are winning Best Picture, you can expect some more hardware, typically in the director, writing, editing, some of the technical awards and at least one acting statue (Five of the last ten Best Pictures each won at least one acting award).  I assume this is partially an attempt by early voters to be more equitable and perhaps even some rigging of the system whereas today’s voters are more likely to latch onto one movie and hold on for dear life.