Author: Alan Kuhl Graham

One Best Picture After Another #5: Grand Hotel (1932)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

In 1930 a play called Grand Hotel opened on Broadway and was an instant success. Such a triumph led to a film adaptation, packed full of some of the biggest stars of the day, that struck box office gold, critical acclaim and eventually won the Academy Award. None of this was an accident: all of it was masterminded by MGM’s super producer Irving Thalberg.

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One Best Picture After Another #4: Cimarron (1931)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

The past is a foreign country, they make films differently there. Both critically acclaimed and a box office hit back in 1931, Cimarron‘s appeal seems genuinely mystifying to me today. A Western saga set in Oklahoma that manages to be both clunky, messy and boring, despite having gun fights, family drama and a court case about sex work.

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One Best Picture After Another #3: All Quiet On The Western Front (1930)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

When I was watching All Quiet On The Western Front, I couldn’t shake off the incredible fact that this was made in 1930. It feels so ahead of its time, a brilliant piece of work that casts a shadow on so many films made, not just that year, but for years to come. Mentally I’ve become so accustomed to accepting a certain level of production values when it comes to films made in the first decade of sound, that the fact this film comes along and blows all of that out the water is striking.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #285: Right Casting, Wrong Time

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Matt’s column last week about favourite actors reminded me of a curious, if rare, phenomenon. Where a great actor gets cast in a role they are clearly incredibly well suited for. And yet, somewhere in the back of my mind, I can’t help but feel that they would have been absolutely perfect for the role if they had been cast earlier in their career.

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One Best Picture After Another #2: The Broadway Melody (1929)

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

It seems fitting that the first Academy Award for a Sound Picture should go to a musical. The arrival of the Talking Picture had caused all sorts of chaos in Hollywood as it struggled to get to grips with the new technology. However filling the Big Screen with songs was an immediate winner when it came to using the Modern Day Marvel That Is Sound™

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #282: The BBC Radio Lord Of The Rings Part Three: Stephen Oliver, The Composer For The King

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

I think many people remember the first time that they discovered music that really fired the imagination. Music that wasn’t just the signature to a tale, but an integral part of the experience. If you wanted to imagine the other worlds of a tale – just a few bars of a theme and your mind begins to inhabit a whole new universe.

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One Best Picture After Another #1: Wings (1927)

Alan Kuhl Graham1 Comment

Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – where I attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. And attempt to answer two simple questions – is the film still actually any good? And why did it win?

Many years ago a movie journalist gave me a very good insight into the type of films that win the Best Picture Oscar. The winner, they argued, will tend to be the film that best reflects the type of film Hollywood – at that time – wants to be making. Not necessarily the films that they know they need to make in order to bring in the money, nor the most technically adventurous or innovative. Nor even the most critically acclaimed. It’ll be the film that the Academy voters working in the industry look at and think: “Yes! That’s the type of film I wanted to make when I chose this career.”

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One Best Picture After Another: Overture

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Welcome to One Best Picture After Another – our new fortnightly blog where Barista Alan will attempt to watch all the winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture, starting at the very beginning. Before it all begins in earnest tomorrow, here’s his explanation as to why he embarked on this madness.

When it comes to the Academy Award for Best Picture, there’s an adage that goes: “The right pictures get nominated, the wrong picture wins.” And while you could easily do a very long-running blog on all the amazing films that didn’t get close to even a nomination, I think there’s some truth in that. Especially when it comes to the great injustices of the Award’s history, it is almost always framed in terms of a nominated film that is now revered as a classic losing out to a film that is now almost unheard of.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #277: The Gates Of Europe… and other Origin Stories

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

What are the origins of modern nations? Where does national identity come from, and how has it been shaped to fit modern political structures? Going by a lot of the recent books I have read, this definitely seems to be a subject I’m interested in right now.

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Six Damn Fine Degrees #268: Agatha All Along

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Welcome to Six Damn Fine Degrees. These instalments will be inspired by the idea of six degrees of separation in the loosest sense. The only rule: it connects – in some way – to the previous instalment. So come join us on our weekly foray into interconnectedness!

Okay – I’ll start with the headline. I absolutely love Agatha All Along. It’s one of the Marvel Cinematic Universe TV shows that stands up to a rewatch. It’s funny, creepy and, over the course of its nine episodes, slowly unravels a satisfying and unpredictable story. So many streaming shows these days feel like a single large plot arbitrarily cut to fit awkwardly into the episodic TV format. But Agatha All Along understands how to tell a story episodically, each week delivering revelation and plot, including some cracking cliffhangers.

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