joan fontaine

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.

Continue reading →

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!

University reading lists as the one described in Matt’s latest post (and dare I mention I was one of his students to be on the receiving end of that particular list) can be a double-edged sword: There is a certain mechanical quality about ticking off titles one wouldn’t necessarily have chosen for personal reading, for sure. Yet gently forced exposure to such literature – if pre-selected well – can produce unexpected pleasures and open up new worlds and avenues for further reading. Starting out my English studies in the early 2000s as a slightly disoriented reader in the wide world of literature, the English department list (when diligently dealt with) certainly kept me busy, and struggling, for a while.

Continue reading →