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Saturday Evening Movie Thread 12/30/2023 [TheJamesMadison]

The Third Quarter Century of Oscar Best Picture Winners

Getting close now, it seems. I should be done right before the next Oscar ceremony, which isn't too far away, but I was looking ahead to what came after my stopping point of 2004 and realized that the whole game seemed to have changed character from that point on. Considering the vast changes in how the Academy seemed to be operating when it came to Best Picture winners that had occurred from the early 70s to the early 00s, it felt like simply too much for one post. So, here I am breaking it up into two, separated by a couple of months.

From my observation, the 70s is the last time the Oscars were somewhat "pure" in their efforts to award Best Picture. You may recall that I was pointing out that they were oscillating between movies that reflected their past (something like Oliver!) to reflecting what they thought the future was (Midnight Cowboy), eventually settling on something in between, the classically made film with more frank depictions of sex and violence like The Godfather. Well, that period passed, and some odd things happened to the Academy.

I think it boils down to three major developments. The first is that the actors (just under 1/3 of the voting body in the late 70s) either knowingly or unknowingly banded together to make the awards more about them than ever. The second is that this is where the franchising of movies started, and the Academy didn't want anything to do with it. The third is that the Oscar campaign began in the late 70s.

Actors

I have little respect for actors in general, and I find their pretensions about their importance to the art of cinema to be overblown at best. On top of that, I think if you want to point at one group for the Oscars losing their luster over time, it's the actors themselves to blame. You see this manifest early in this section, in the late 70s and early 80s, when movies like Kramer vs. Kramer and Ordinary People won the awards.

Now, I'm not here to slag on either of them (I actually love Kramer vs. Kramer), but when you put up those movies against what they beat (respectively Apocalypse Now and Raging Bull as their most prominent and most frequently referenced opposition), it seems obvious to me what the main difference is. The ones that won are unquestionably actors' films. They are films that are first and foremost about the actors, almost exclusively movie stars, and their navigating of emotion on screen. What are the films that they beat? They are directors' films: films with a cinematic vision and about more than just the performances (which are very good). I think you can extend that out a few years as well, pointing out films like Terms of Endearment, Amadeus (one of my favorite films), and Out of Africa where the films seem to be mostly about the performances at the core.

And then you have the actor/directors. Actor/directors have been a thing since the beginning of film with people like Chaplin, Keaton, and Welles, but they had largely been sideshows in the ensuing decades. Even Welles couldn't get funding in the Hollywood system while people like Charles Laughton used independent money (only once, though). I suppose one of the more prominent actor/directors through the fifties would be Laurence Olivier, but even by that point he was making romcoms with Marylin Monroe, or Woody Allen who was always more attached to the New York film scene than the LA film scene. There really wasn't a golden boy doing it until Robert Redford gave it a go with Ordinary People. Ever since, the rewarding of acting stars who directed seems to have shot up. Clint Eastwood, Mel Gibson, and even Ben Affleck have directed films that won Best Picture, and never mind the quality of any of them, I see it as part of the pattern of actors making the award as much about them as possible, changing it from Best Picture to some combination of Best Ensemble and Best Film Directed by an Actor.

Anti-Franchise


Out of all the films nominated for Best Picture in 1982, Terms of Endearment, the winner, made the most money at the box office. It was number 22 at the box office in 1983, making $34 million. The number one movie of the year was Star Wars Episode VI: Return of the Jedi. The next year, after it won the Best Picture Oscar in April, it made another $74 million, good enough for number 9 at the box office. The number 1 movie at the box office in 1984? Ghostbusters. Out of those three films, which had the greater cultural impact and staying power, is more well-regarding by the public at large, and made the most money? Not to imply that Terms of Endearment is poorly regarded these days (it's IMDb score is 7.4/10, which is perfectly respectable), but the other two were either part of an existing franchise or a big, genre-bending spectacle that had the potential for becoming a franchise.

I don't bring this up because I feel like franchise films were underserved by the Academy (I don't care enough, but they probably have) but because the franchise stuff was largely dominating the box office through the 80s and being largely ignored by the Academy at the same time. 1985? Back to the Future #1. 1986? Aliens #5. It wasn't until the late 80s where there seemed to be a reconnection between the Academy and the public when Platoon and Rain Man ended up very high up the box office list. For a long stretch of the 80s, the Academy seemed to be actively shunning popular taste because the films that were dominating the box office were beneath them. And notice, it wasn't the Academy changing but the public giving their money to movies that the Academy could deign to be interested in that changed.

Politicking


There's a brief period in the late 80s and early 90s where it felt like the Academy had returned to its roots of awarding best picture to films that made a lot of money that many considered deserving of such an award (Dances with Wolves...not a fan, personally). Movies like Schindler's List or Unforgiven or Forrest Gump made decent money while few were near the top of the box office save Forrest Gump, but the real change is in the surrounding nominees that tended to see more big box office performers like The Fugitive in 1993 compared to Working Girl in 1988. There seemed to be an effort to find a middle ground.

And then The English Patient won in 1996, and we got the era of Harvey Weinstein. The English Patient is not the lowest rated Best Picture winner on the IMDb of the past few decades, but it's definitely on the lower half. However, there seems to be a consensus that The English Patient largely won because of Weinstein's politicking. I don't only say this because I hate the film (I do) but because it seems like one of those inexplicable wins since it beat Fargo, and it's also Weinstein's first win for Best Picture, distributed through his company Miramax, the award actually won by Saul Zaentz. Weinstein would then go and win in 1998 and 1999 with Shakespeare in Love (beating Saving Private Ryan) and American Beauty (beating The Insider and The Sixth Sense). It's not that the three films are self-evidently inferior to the films they beat but that Weinstein's politicking was legendary in Hollywood. He wasn't just happening to get the Oscars, he was spending tens of millions of dollars to do it.

This was based on the assumption that Best Picture wins gave films cultural cache that led to increased box office returns, and it was true for a while. This whole politicking thing really started with The Deer Hunter, given a late year release with arranged screenings of industry professionals to gain word of mouth that led to support within the Academy followed by the win and then box office returns. However, the more it went on and the more the Oscars sidestepped popular taste, the less effective it became to the point where the investment to get the award was more than the return. The week after Shakespear in Love won Best Picture, it's box office take increased by 66%, from $3 million to $4 million. Reportedly, Weinstein spent $5 million on the campaign, so the immediate return was $2 million. The reports are that this was some kind of big win, but the return seems, minimal, even if you extend the win out over the following weeks, assuming 66% increases over what had been, you're looking at roughly an equal return. The point really wasn't the box office, but the prestige.

Touching the Zeitgeist


That makes it when the Academy does line up with the public zeitgeist all the more interesting. The two biggest examples are Titanic, the biggest film in the world until Avatar a decade later, and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Against Titanic, it's L.A. Confidential that honestly feels like the more typical choice for the Academy's history. It's well-written, well-directed, and chock full of movie stars while dealing in LA history. It's Academy fodder, but they simply could not resist the pull of Titanic.

The Lord of the Rings feels more like the Academy being pulled, kicking and screaming, after a three-year effort by Peter Jackson to bring respectability to fantasy filmmaking. They awarded A Beautiful Mind (awful film that everyone seems to love) instead of The Fellowship of the Ring. They awarded Chicago (entertaining Bob Fosse tribute, but Fosse would have done it better) over The Two Towers. Finally, with the third entry becoming the biggest movie of the year, the Academy relented.

In both instances, it feels like, to me, that the Academy was running to catch up with popular taste.

End of a Third


And that takes me to Million Dollar Baby, a great film that I love but also feels like an apology for skipping over Mystic River the year before. This has been probably the most tumultuous period in the Best Picture awards as the Academy had a series of crises related to popular taste, its own identity, politicking, and relevance. The crises are an extension of what was happening in the late 60s and early 70s as it whiplashed between awarding films that reflected how old Hollywood did things (Oliver! and how they saw Hollywood developing (Midnight Cowboy), except that that period was actually more even since they were moving along with popular taste at the same time (Midnight Cowboy was #3 at the box office that year).

As time has gone on, especially in the 80s, the Academy has wanted to lead where the people weren't following, setting the stage for an increasingly irrelevant institution leading no one in particular, but that's for another time. As it is, this third set is uneven but awarded some great stuff along the way. It's just that the Academy was flagging in importance. I sure hope they don't suddenly decide to reject the people as a whole. That would be unfortunate for their place as a cultural institution.

What I Would Have Voted For


As with the previous two entries, here is the list of winners for the given period and which I would have voted for. I'm going to repeat what I said the last time:

I'll explain a bit more since I got some pushback that I should have predicted for whenever you say that "this movie" should have won over "that movie," one inevitably gets the response that one is stupid because one doesn't love "that movie", even though I never expressed an opinion on "that movie".

So, what I mean is that out of the five nominees each year, I would have voted for the movie in parentheses. That's it. It's not me saying that, if there's a disagreement between my own little, unimportant taste and the Academy's choice from 50 years ago, that I hate the choice the Academy made. In more than one instance, I genuinely love the film I wouldn't vote for, I just love the other film a bit more. Same goes if I agree with the Academy and some other very worthy film wouldn't have gotten my vote. And then there are a couple of years where I think the Academy was smoking some bad stuff.

I should also note that I did my best to watch as many of the nominees I'd never seen before to make this list as robust as possible. In more than one instance, my mad dash to watch as much as I could did lead me to actually changing my mind about what I would have voted for. I also limited myself to what was nominated.

1975 - One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Jaws)
1976 - Rocky (Taxi Driver)
1977 - Annie Hall (Star Wars)
1978 - The Deer Hunter (An Unmarried Woman)
1979 - Kramer vs. Kramer (Apocalypse Now)
1980 - Ordinary People (Raging Bull)
1981 - Chariots of Fire (Raiders of the Lost Ark)
1982 - Gandhi (E.T. The Extra Terrestrial)
1983 - Terms of Endearment (The Right Stuff)
1984 - Amadeus (Amadeus)
1985 - Out of Africa (Witness)
1986 - Platoon (The Mission)
1987 - The Last Emperor (Moonstruck)
1988 - Rain Man (Working Girl)
1989 - Driving Miss Daisy (Field of Dreams)
1990 - Dances with Wolves (Goodfellas)
1991 - The Silence of the Lambs (The Silence of the Lambs)
1992 - Unforgiven (Unforgiven)
1993 - Schindler's List (Schindler's List)
1994 - Forrest Gump (Pulp Fiction)
1995 - Braveheart (Apollo 13)
1996 - The English Patient (Fargo)
1997 - Titanic (L.A. Confidential)
1998 - Shakespeare in Love (The Thin Red Line)
1999 - American Beauty (The Insider)
2000 - Gladiator (Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon)
2001 - A Beautiful Mind (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring)
2002 - Chicago (The Pianist)
2003 - The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King)
2004 - Million Dollar Baby (The Aviator)

Movies of Today

Opening in Theaters:

Anyone But You

Movies I Saw This Fortnight:

The Silence of the Lambs (Rating 4/4) Full Review "It's a great entertainment, completely embracing its depths of the worst imaginings of the human condition while telling a compelling mystery and delivering the thrills." [Personal Collection]

The English Patient (Rating 1/4) Full Review "This movie is, really, pure trash. It's dressed up really nicely, though." [Paramount+]

Oppenheimer (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "He's got this expansive view of how much he can tell in the cinematic form, propulsively moving the story forward at all times, making 3 hours feel like 2, all while embracing complexity in multiple forms. I don't think this is his best film or the top tier of them all, but it's probably the most ambitious and ambiguous. That's something to admire." [Personal Collection]

Shakespeare in Love (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a good bit of fun. I really enjoy revisiting it once every few years to rediscover its pleasures. Everyone is game. Everyone is having fun playing around an amusing script in a well-realized recreation of sixteenth century London. Sure, Saving Private Ryan deserved it more, but Shakespeare in Love is a fun addition to the list." [Personal Collection]

Gladiator (Rating 2.5/4) Full Review "It's a weird story, man. I don't think it really works, but it's well-made, fun in spots, and looks great. Thats far from nothing." [Personal Collection]

Chicago (Rating 3/4) Full Review "It's a fun little film. It made decent money. It won Best Picture over The Pianist. That's its legacy, I guess." [Library]

The Night of the Hunter (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It's a beautifully shot, well-acted, and thrilling ride through the American midwestern countryside. That it was poorly received at the time is not the biggest of surprises. It's all about children in danger and is overwhelmingly meanspirited for much of its runtime, but it's also such a good thrill ride as it goes." [Personal Collection]

The Matinee Idol (Rating 3.5/4) Full Review "It really is kind of amazing to see Capra forming so distinctly and executing so well so early. He feels like he's in complete command of the physical production from the subtle and effective direction of actors to the clear use of visual language (even a couple of jokes through intertitles), and his scripts are creeping up in quality at the same time." [YouTube]

Contact

Email any suggestions or questions to thejamesmadison.aos at symbol gmail dot com.
I've also archived all the old posts here, by request. I'll add new posts a week after they originally post at the HQ.

My next post will be on 1/20, and it will talk about the LEGO movies.