The Academy Award 'Best Picture' List

The Academy Awards were created by the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts, and Sciences to recognize outstanding achievements in motion pictures by actors, directors, writers and other craftsmen of the movies.  The first Academy Awards were given out May 16^th, 1929 at the Hotel Roosevelt in Hollywood, CA.  ‘The Oscars’, as they have come to be known, have been given out every year since (although there is a bump in 1934 when the academy award year was aligned with the calendar year).  This year, the 83^rd Academy Awards will be presented on February 27, 2011 at Kodak Theatre in Hollywood before a global television audience.

The top award has always been the ‘Best Picture’ award, which recognizes the best movie of all the eligible movies made that year.  It is chosen by all voting members of the Academy, it’s always presented last in the program, and is given to the producers of the movie.  The first Academy awards had two awards: Outstanding Picture, Production won by Wings and Unique and Artistic Production won by Sunrise.  The following year, only one Outstanding Production award was given and retroactively, Wings is considered the Best Picture of the first awards.  The award was called Outstanding Production from 1930-1940, Outstanding Motion Picture from 1941-1943, Best Motion Picture from 1944-1961, and Best Picture from 1962 until now.   

The list of 82 Best Pictures is a mixed bag to say the least.  Fortunately, it does contain a lot of true classics including It Happened One Night, Gone with the Wind, Casablanca, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, Forrest Gump, Titanic, and Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.   But much of the list is made up of movies that may have looked like the best at the time but looked rather mediocre and/or dated today.   Cavalcade, The Great Ziegfeld, How Green was my Valley, Gentleman’s Agreement, The Greatest Show on Earth, Marty, Tom Jones, The Deer Hunter, most of the 80’s winners, The English Patient, and A Beautiful Mind come to mind.  Why is this? 

One reason is that the Best Picture is selected from a short list of a certain kind of movie – so called prestige movie.  Genre movies and blockbusters have to be really good to make this list. The number of movies in the list of nominated films has varied over the years.  The first year had three nominees for two awards.  For the following three years, five films were nominated for the award. During the thirties, the number was changed to eight, then ten, then twelve, and back to ten. In 1945, the number of nominees was reduced to five where it remained until 2010, when it was raised to ten. This last change was prompted by many years of Best Picture nominees that did not include any blockbuster movies.  The awards show was losing viewers as the public lost interest in what the Academy considered ‘Best’.  This frustration came to a head in 2009 when The Dark Knight was not nominated as many movie pundits expected it to be.  The change to ten nominees presumably gives the blockbusters more of a chance.  In 2010, ironically, the blockbuster Avatar would have made it into the Big 5 anyways.  The same is true this year for Inception which sits in the third or fourth position on the pundits’ lists.  In reality, the expansion of the nominee list has simply allowed more small, independent movies to make the list.  In 2010, slots 6-10 were filled by prestige movies A Serious Man and An Education but also a sci-fi thriller District 9 and an animated film Up.  Although nominations for 2010 aren’t out yet, we will probably see a similar ‘back-5’ this year with little indies The Kids are Alright and possibly Winter’s Bone, and the Coen Brothers’ genre picture True Grit.

Another reason is simply because the voting for Best Picture is only months after the movie’s release.  With most of the nominated films coming out just weeks before the end of the year, there is little time for the swelling go down.  For example, a year ago Avatar was considered a front runner for Best Picture.  Today, while the pop-cultural influence of Star Wars goes on and on,  Avatar is already legacy-free.  Another reason clearly is historical context and the topicality of the story.  The Best Years of Our Lives, a story about returning WWII GI’s, must have been powerful stuff in 1946.  In the Heat of the Night cooks with the racial tension of the 60’s.  Who knows how we will feel about The Hurt Locker in 30 years?   I don’t even want to think about how The Social Network is going to look on the list by then (assuming it wins).

Finally, some years simple don’t have any great movies and some have too many.  Platoon (1987) really was the Best Picture of a pretty weak year.  Fortunately for us, (but unfortunately for the relevance of the Best Picture list), there are plenty of years when there was more than one great movie.   Every now and then in these cases, the Academy picks the best movie but leaves worthy competitors permanently off the list.  The Wizard of Oz, To Kill a Mockingbird, Bonnie and Clyde, Chinatown and The Shawshank Redemption were beat out by Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, In the Heat of the Night, The Godfather Part II, and Forrest Gump respectively.  But then there are the years that just feel wrong in retrospect.  Grapes of Wrath, Citizen Kane, It’s a Wonderful Life,  A Street Car Named Desire, Raging Bull, Raiders of the Lost Ark,  Field of Dreams, and Fargo were beaten by Rebecca, How Green was My Valley, The Best Years of Our Lives, An American in Paris,  Ordinary People, Chariots of Fire, Driving Miss Daisy, and The English Patient.

It’s fun to compare the Best Picture list with lists of the GREATEST FILMS OF ALL TIME such as AFI’s ‘100 years - 100 movies’ list (2007 version).  Of the top 10 on the list, only five are on the Best Picture list (The Godfather, Casablanca, Gone with the Wind, Lawrence of Arabia, and Schindler’s List).  The other five include one that was beaten by another in the top 10 (The Wizard of Oz), two nominated movies that were beaten by movies that didn’t make the AFI  list (Citizen Kane and Raging Bull), and two movies that weren’t even nominated for Best Picture (Vertigo and Singin’ in the Rain).  Of the 100 movies that the AFI considers the best American films, only 27 were Best Picture winners.  More importantly, 53 Best Pictures didn’t make the AFI list at all.  That’s a 337 batting average – not bad in baseball but pretty lame as far as picking classic movies.

All of which makes me wonder what makes a movie exceptional and when do we know?  Robert De Niro, during his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes the other night, said “It’s up to the audiences to decide if it’s entertainment, the critics to decide if it’s good, and ultimately, posterity to decide if it’s art.” Unfortunately, none of these are involved in the selection of the Best Picture.

Question of the Day: In March of 1981, the Academy Awards were postponed one day.  Why?