One Best Picture After Another

One Best Picture After Another #7: It Happened One Night (1934)

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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 Happened One Night is an Academy Award winning film that still has a high profile for a production made in the Thirties. It’s one of those movies that can be safely recommended to those who are interested in early classic cinema, and its the first film so far from all the Oscar winners that I was already a massive fan of.

But revisiting a few old friends is going to be part of this journey, and so it was joyous to dig out my own copy of this and put it in for the umpteenth time. And, unsurprisingly, it’s still brilliant. Rewatching it is also a reminder of why it’s hard to find anything new to say that hasn’t been said dozens of times before in the 92 years since it was a hit. This isn’t a complicated film: what it does is really quite simple. But it just does it so, so well.

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One Best Picture After Another #6: Cavalcade (1933)

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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?

Cavalcade has a lot in common with previous winner Cimmaron. Just like that film, the story here stretches over decades, focusing on a few characters as they change and develop over time. It also references major events over that period, as we watch them impact on the ordinary lives we are following. Both films belong on the list of Oscar winners that have truly been forgotten by the passage of time.

It also shares the quality that it is utterly mystifying to me how such an incredibly awful film won the Best Picture Award.

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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)

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?

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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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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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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