best picture

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

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a 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?

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)

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a 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?

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)

Alan Kuhl GrahamLeave a 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?

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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Romance is shaped like a fish

MattLeave a comment

I was prepared not to be a big fan of The Shape of Water. It looked twee and self-indulgent, and several people whose tastes I trust were lukewarm on it at best. The Hellboy movies didn’t do much for me, nor did Pacific Rim – but worse, I’d never really warmed to Guillermo del Toro’s biggest critical darling, Pan’s Labyrinth. I liked Cronos and The Devil’s Backbone, and I have a clandestine soft spot for Blade 2‘s comic book operatics, but more often than not I’ve liked del Toro’s endearing enthusiasm and the aesthetics of his films more than the films themselves.

Imagine my surprise when I really enjoyed The Shape of Water.

The Shape of Water

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