The Best Best Picture Nominees

Every year, the craftsmen and artists and monied executives of Hollywood get together in a nice theater to pat one another on the back. It's all "great job playing servants and athletes, black actors" and "Way to work all those product tie-ins in." Well I do not believe that's how film history works. We honor these films yearly against competition from the same year, but that's not how we think about film.

We beat The Help! We beat The Help!

I don't walk out of Moneyball comparing it and its merits to those of Hugo. I compare it to other movies based on plotless and character-free works of journalism, like The Social Network. By the same token, I didn't walk out of True Grit comparing to The Social Network, I was comparing it to other Westerns from throughout history.

It is in that spirit that I present to you my ten nominees for best picture drawn from a competition pool of past winners

Note: This list is in no particular order, because when you have ten of the greatest movies ever, trying to decide which one is the best is a retarded thing to undertake. So I put them chronologically.

Note 2: If you don't want any of the movies spoiled for you, stop reading. I'm not going to leave out details from movies that are all more than 5 years old. The statute of limitations on complaining about spoilers has passed. Vader is Luke's father.

Casablanca (1942)

Had he known his film controlled the war's out come, director Michael
Curtiz would have ended Casablanca with bombers dropping
candy on everyone. 

There are a couple things about Casablanca that make it one of the best movies in the history of movies. First there is the fact that, as the aforementioned history of movies progressed, Casablanca never lost its standing as one of the greatest achievements the medium has ever seen. Almost every scene is classic to the point of being paid homage in what seems like 80% of all movies produced since, and there are so many endlessly quotable lines that even without seeing it, most people could tell you what happens. So great is this film's legacy that watching it today will likely be underwhelming, because every element of this movie long ago entered the "cliche movie device" zone.

But as you will see throughout this list, simply being a great movie isn't enough. Good thing the film is significant in more impressive way: It was a movie about World War II filmed, edited and released WELL before WWII ended. You may have noticed the year it won the Oscar as 1942. It was released in 1942. When they started filming, the USA had just entered the war.

Reminder: this is a movie about an American who has no personal interest in the war and has remained neutral thus far, only in it for the financial gains he makes at his Moroccan night club. Then his ex-wife gets involved, and suddenly she's at risk. By the end of the movie, Rick (Humphrey Bogart) is helping refugees from Nazism. What's more, in a famous scene, he gives his consent to French refugees to sing L'Marseillaise in front of a bunch of Nazi's until the Nazi's leave like some bitches.  

The symbolism isn't to hard to grasp, but I'll lay it out again. A neutral Rick (the USA) is happy to profit from the war (US selling arms to both sides before getting involved military-wise) until something pretty that he loves is put in jeopardy (the Pearl Harbour attack on our prettiest state, Hawaii). After that, he joins in, helping Europeans sing (fight) until the Nazi's fucked off forever.

Impressive? Yes. Even more impressive considering the movie pre-dated every key event in the USA's involvement in WWII besides Pearl Harbor. Also consider that the film ends with Bogart and Claude Rains, having formed what is called "the beginning of beautiful friendship," implying Bogart's continued involvement in French resistance efforts.

Written and directed by Nostradamus.

The Apartment (1960)

Also one of the first movies to address the prison-like atmosphere of the modern office.

The Academy had, and still has, a reputation for awarding big budget schlock (look it up) over smaller, more deserving pictures. To prove this, I draw your attention to 1994 (when Forrest Gump defeated Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption for best picture) and 1997 (when Titanic triumphed over the obviously superior Fargo). This was true before 1960, as well, with the two winners previous to The Apartment being Gigi and Ben-Hur. 

To me, The Apartment represents the first detour from this formula. It's not an epic, it's not a war movie, it's not even, in my opinion, a love story. Sure, Jack Lemmon wants to get with Shirley McClaine (duh), but that's not the crux. This movie is important enough to get on this list because I believe it to be the first true character study to win best picture. Lemmon's Baxter is a cog in the machine at an insurance company and his career isn't progressing fast enough. As a means to curry favor with his bosses and get out of this life he no longer enjoys, he begins loaning out his apartment to the company's executives to use in illicit (sexy, Mad Men-esque) affairs with presumably buxom young women.

It was a lot more serious than I just made it sound. Point is, it's a movie carried by Lemmon's (and to a lesser extent, McClaine's) acting chops, because it was dependent on us believing in and rooting for this pathetic sad man. It was a lot like American Beauty in that regard. 

In the Heat of the Night (1967)

"Call me Mister, not nigger, darkie, boy or Jack" - All of black

America via their Poitier-shaped surrogate.

This film deserves mention for a number of reasons. First, 1967 is widely called arguably the greatest year in film history (definitely in the top 5 years ever). Look at the Best Picture nominees that In the Heat beat out: The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming To Dinner and Bonnie & Clyde. It also boasts one of the most classic introductions in history, with the line "They call me Mr. Tibbs."

But for the real reason this movie is so important, I will ask you to consider what was going on in 1967, sociopolitically speaking. I'll wait a second. Got it?  With that in mind, here is the simplest, shortest version of the plot from In the Heat of the Night: An African American detective is asked to investigate a murder in a racist southern town. 

This was about as timely as Casablanca, and it managed to investigate race relations in a way that was remarkably not cloying. It was simply a police movie, and southern racism happened to be an antagonistic force for our main character. Who happened to be black. It helped launch the career of Sidney Poitier, more or less black Hollywood's Jackie Robinson figure. 

None of this would have mattered if it hadn't been a taut, well-paced and masterfully acted detective movie. And it was. So black actors everywhere should be thanking Canadian-born Norman Jewison for giving the world this gem, entertaining them to the point that I reckon a lot of audiences didn't even consider the deeper issues being discussed. This is a great example of film as subversive art.

The Godfather (1972) 

So good that it made this ugly motherfucker into a household name. 

It's The Godfather, ok? I don't need to justify it being on this list. It's widely considered the best film of all time, and is at the very worst, in nearly every critic's all-time top 10. I don't need to spend forever explaining it to you, so I'll just list the significant elements.

- Invented/reinvented the entire genre of the mob movie
- Made the careers of Al Pacino, Francis Ford Coppola, Diane Keaton, James Caan and that guy who played Fredo and died. Also made Sofia Coppola's acting career
- Revived Marlon Brando's career
- Spawned a sequel that then cemented Deniro as a megastar
- Too many classic lines and scenes to even bother listing
-  Again, provided the template for an entire genre. It's like if War of the Worlds the radio broadcast had won an Oscar.

If you need me to convince your of this movie's spot on this list, well...I don't need you reading my blog.

One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)
For the same reason I think that Moneyball and The Social Network are two of the most impressive achievements in adaptation, I think Cuckoo is as well. If you've ever read Ken Kesey's book of the same name, you'll understand what I'm saying. This was a book with an insane first person narrator (literally insane, it's narrated by Chief Crazy-Ass Bull) who is not only entirely racist, but sees things that aren't there. How do you make a movie out of it?

Well you cut out the narration and make Jack Nicholson's McMurphy the focus. Cuckoo is, with Silence of the Lambs and It Happened One Night, one of three films ever to sweep the big five at the Oscars (Picture, Actor, Actress, Director and Screenplay). It remains Louise Flether's signature role, and arguably Jack Nicholson's as well (though The Shining would probably disagree). It manages to be a great and very serious movie while including Danny Devito, Christopher "Doc Brown" Lloyd and freaking SCATMAN CROTHERS as other mental patients.

More importantly for me is the ending. It's not very Hollywood. It ends with the main character (the Chief) smothering his now lobotomized friend (McMurphy) to death. It's played out as a mercy killing, as McMurphy's life is deemed no longer worth living after Nurse Rachet's combination of brain slicing and electrocution have robbed him of his indomitable joie d'vivre (sp? I don't care, fuck French). But that doesn't change the fact that it was a movie that ended with the main character murdering his best friend.

Stick that scene on the end of Titanic and see if it wins any awards. Oh...wait...

"Don't let go, Jack. Because if you do, I can't let go of your hand and 

kill you like the script calls for me to do."

Platoon (1986)
There's a part of me that believes this is the greatest war movie ever made. That part of me is the part that is a journalist, because you cannot ignore the power and the accuracy of Oliver Stone's Platoon. Why? Because Stone, before directing the film, served a few tours of duty in Vietnam, the war that is the subject of Platoon. Sure, the opening of Saving Private Ryan might have induced PTSD in some WWII vets, but Platoon was a movie Oliver Stone made to GET OVER his PTSD. And Ryan wasn't that great beyond the amazing staged battle scenes.

That should be enough to get someone to buy into this as being a fantastic movie worth being on this list, but if that isn't enough, consider this achievement:

This is a movie that rested on the abilities of Charlie Sheen and Tom Berenger to carry the main protagonist/antagonist story line, while relegating future Oscar winners Forrest Whitaker and Willem Defoe to more secondary roles. Sure, Defoe gets to die like Troy does in the second paintball episode of Community, but that doesn't change the fact that Stone used the pitcher-catcher duo from Major League as his film's leads and still produced the greatest war movie ever.

Fun fact: Defoe wouldn't look this much like Jesus again  until he 

was cast to play Jesus in Scorsese's The Last Temptation 

of Christ.

Silence of the Lambs (1991)
You may have noticed a pattern with Platoon, The Godfather, In the Heat of the Night and now Silence of the Lambs. All of them fall neatly into mainstream movie genres. To me, when a movie that is very specific to a genre (war, mob, crime procedural, horror/suspense respectively) and still receives the acclaim needed to win an Oscar, I take special notice. It's hard to win an Oscar with a genre film, unless that genre is "high family drama," or in some cases, if the word "epic" can be tacked onto the end or begining of your genre. Lord of the Rings wasn't just a fantasy, it was an epic fantasy. Private Ryan isn't just a war movie, it's a war epic. The Godfather may be the exception to this point, as it is most definitely a mob epic.

Silence of the Lambs is not an epic, it is simply a horror movie, a thriller, an edge-of-your-seat suspenseful thrill ride through the horrible minds of serial killers, if you will. All in all, it's not a film concept that should have made producers see gold statuettes. A very marketable idea? Yes. High art? Not on paper.

But through a combination of otherworldly skills, Silence not only won best picture, it swept the aforementioned Big Five. Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Jonathan Demme, Ted Tally (writer) and Ron Bozman (producter) all went home with naked statues. I will never understand why it won so many awards, because even though I clearly think it is an all-time classic, it still doesn't seem like Oscar fare.

It's dark, it's dreary, even though Jodie Foster kills Buffalo Bill, the good guys don't really win (if you consider the 3 girls Buffalo Bill killed before being caught). The line between good and bad is seriously ambiguous given that Hannibal's role is to HELP our female protagonist. It subverts normal serial-killer-movie form by having the most depraved killer of all on the side of our protagonist. There is violence more graphic than most non-war movies and that violence is more disturbing than anything I've seen in an Oscar winner.

If you're still not convinced that this film deserves a spot on this list, consider that Hannibal Lecter is now one of pop culture's most iconic characters, along with the likes of Darth Vader, Captain Kirk, Rick Blaine from Casablanca, Mr. Tibbs,  Don Corleone and Kermit the Frog. See the pattern?

They're all cannibals. Exactly. That's the pattern.

Unforgiven (1992)
This is easily my favorite western of all time, and I'd have to think long and hard about this movie if you wanted me to tell you my favorite movie ever. Unforgiven is another genre-specific movie that triumphed because of how it redefined and subverted the genre in which it was made. Some critics have said that Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles "broke" the Western by satirizing it to the point that one could not look at serious western seriously. Satire is a great way for an artist to make a particular form or genre his/her bitch. Brooks did it repeatedly to a variety of genres, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report do it today to cable news networks, Itchy and Scratchy does it to classic children's cartoons. All these works say "I'm going to mock you, but while I'm doing that, I'm also going to show you that I can do you better than you can."

I contend that Unforgiven "broke" the Western to a much worse degree than Blazing Saddles did by, instead of satirizing the genre, PERFECTING IT. That's a hard argument to really have since its 100% opinion based, but I'll just say one thing. After Unforgiven came out in 1992, there was not a single, big budget, Hollywood-funded Western until 2007, which saw the releases of No Country for Old Men, 3:10 To Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. There are a few in between you could make a case for, like Brokeback Mountain (I wouldn't) or even Serenity (I don't know how big the budget was, and it took place in space), but really, that was 15 years after Unforgiven came out before Hollywood finally was like "Ok, by now most people haven't seen Unforgiven in a while. We can make Westerns again."

Movie posters remain broken, because
nothing will ever be as cool as this. Ever.

In a nutshell, it's a movie about a bounty hunt. A whore is assaulted by a client, and when the sheriff (Gene Hackman) refuses to take action, her coworkers take up a collection which they then put up as a bounty on the assailant. Clint Eastwood, Morgan Freeman and some young kid who I haven't seen since team up to hunt that bounty down. But there's so much more to it.

It's almost a metamovie about the Western genre as a whole, which limped through the 80's barely still a part of the national consciousness. Seriously, read through the wikipedia page on the Western and try to find something about the genre in the 1980's. It more or less skips from Blazing Saddles to Unforgiven. This is part of why people say Blazing Saddles broke the Western. Eastwood plays an old, retired bandit/gunfighter type. Picture The Man With No Name in his 60's. He's a farmer and a widower with two children. Unforgiven is the story of his return to glory, his redemption with this most righteous killing. It's as if Eastwood wanted to make the most beautiful swan song he could for the genre that made him an icon.

And he did.

American Beauty (1999)
There's a very specific type of story that Hollywood likes to make different versions of all the time. I call it "Behind the Picket Fence." Others call it "Inside the American Dream." Either way, you get the point. It's a story about the suburbs, about a family or neighborhood that looks like the American Dream personified. But there's something rotten in Denmark (a suburb of Europe, get it?) and that something is often of a sexual nature. Films/shows like Happiness, The Apartment, Desperate Housewives, 9 to 5, Edward Scissorhands, The Stepford Wives. You get the point.

"This is American Beauty, the movie I've wanted to be in since I was a kid.
And now I'm in it and winning all the awards. I rule." - Lester Burnham

And nothing has ever done it with more success (critically and artistically) than American Beauty. No, it never made me wretch like when I watched the jizz-scene in Happineess or any scene in Desperate Housewives, but it did have the kind of understated elegance that we have come to expect from director Sam Mandes and the probably the best performance Kevin Spacey has ever given. To me this was a movie about the actors, and they were all perfect. The pacing was perfect, the movie as a whole was just perfect. It was't flashy, it wasn't action packed, it only contained four total boobies. It was just a perfect little movie about a fucked up family.

It was so critically acclaimed that I had to give its list of praise its own paragraph.

Spacey took home an Oscar, Anette Benning was nominated for one. Mendes won best director, Alan Ball (True Blood) won best writing, Conrad Hall won for cinematography and the movie took home best picture. The editing and the score were also nominated. It won an American Comedy Award despite not being a comedy, its production design was nominated by the Art Directors' Guild, it won or was nominated for best foreign film in Denmark, Australia, Japan, the Czech Republic, Russia, France, England, Italy and Sweden. It won best cast from the Casting Society of America, Mendes, Ball and the film won with the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the film received multiple nominations and wins from critics' associations in New York, Kansas City, London, San Diego, Toronto, Las Vegas, LA, the Internet and Chicago, you know what...I'm done. You get it. Everyone in the world loved the shit out of this movie.

And my opinion aside, that has to mean something.

No Country for Old Men
This is another Western, but I love it so much because it doesn't fall neatly into any genre, and it CERTAINLY doesn't stick to what the Hollywood machine likes to see in its Oscar winners. It's a western that takes place in the 1970's, a fact only really discernible based on the characters' insistence on using shitty old cars. People wear cowboy hats, but they have 70's haircuts under those hats and also our hero murders a dog. And who is our hero anyway?

And also we get to see the face Javier Bardem makes when he cums.

No Country is an Oscar winner I love because it won the Oscar despite not having an easily identified protagonist. The guy we thought we were rooting for, Llewelyn Moss, is dead with little fanfare, so it can't be him. It's not Anton Chigurh, a personification of death who only leaves three people he encounters on screen alive (two kids at the end, and the guy who wins the coin toss), because obviously it can't be him. My case would be made for Tommy Lee Jones' Sheriff Ed Tom Bell, and if that is true, he loses. His motives are to save Moss and his wife while hopefully catching Chigurh and some drug dealers. None of that happens.

If there is a less Hollywood ending in an Oscar winning best picture, I have yet to see it. While it is not a better Western than Unforgiven, it is still one of the best that genre has to offer. What seperates this from the Coens' other foray into Westerns, True Grit is that True Grit was a Western made by the Coen brothers, No Country For Old Men is a Western that could only have been made by the Coen brothers.