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?

8/10

Any list of Best Picture winners is often defined by the list of absences. You can look through a list of all the great films from the likes of Stanley Kubrick, Ernst Lubitsch, Fritz Lang and Howard Hawks: not one of them ended the night of the Oscar ceremony with the top prize.

Bizarrely, though, Alfred Hitchcock does have a picture on that list. Because of Rebecca. Or perhaps he should still be on the list, as the producer re-edited and reworked parts of the film after Hitchcock had delivered his final cut. Hitchcock was to subsequently disown the film, and so its status as his only Best Picture win feels like it needs a large David O. Selznick-shaped caveat.

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