Wow, this is sad. There aren't even very many good movies on the list, much less great ones. Guess this is an example of what one Spinal Tap member called "too f-----g much perspective." So, what was the last really great movie that won Best Picture? "Unforgiven," perhaps? "Sunrise"? (Damn, that one got an award for "Unique and Artistic Picture" in 1927-28, but Outstanding Picture went to... "Wings.")
Wow. Those really are slim pickings. That is, there's no movie I'm happy choosing.
This would be a lot of easier if Brokeback had just won last year.
another interesting take on this survey would be to list both the nominations and the winners for best picture and ask if, in hindsight, "they" picked the right one. Or which one should have been picked, etc.
The only ones I really like and have seen more than once are "Million Dollar Baby" and "The Departed," although Kevin Spacey's performance may make "American Beauty" worth seeing again (although I could say the same for a lot of movies he's been in). The '90s were much, much better for Oscar and movies in general.
I feel less elite reading your blog now that I've seen this poll.
Seriously? The Lord of the Rings?
I cannot bring myself to vote for any of the films on that list. Some are terrible (like Crash), sure; but most are just so mediocre, and lazy, and insipid.
In fact, let's hope the sheer monotony of this year's films is but the culmination of a dull decade of missteps by the Academy voters, and that things will get better. Who'd have thought ten years ago that the second golden age of television was just round the corner? Maybe this year will be the real beginning of a second "1970's" in American cinema.
A boy can dream, can't he?
Of the movies there... Return of the King is probably the most memorable, I agree. Not the greatest film ever made. But as far as artistic poetry and telling a story with such visual power it belongs near the top of the list here.
Something like American Beauty was powerful in the moment of the film, but has grown cheap over the years. And Titanic/Crash/all the rest... I can hardly say were even the greatest films of the year in the moment... who votes for these films? Entertaining, sure. Powerful, at times. Great... nah.
Most of the films I fall in love with each year aren't even nominated for best foreign film... I think I'm just going to give up, and move to another country.
Ali,
With a director like Greg Brewster starting the year off, here's hoping it's pretty good. And 300. But again. Doesn't matter how great these films have the potential to be, the Academy will never want films like the 70's to win. Nominated, sure, but win, probably not. Even in the 70's Kramer vs. Kramer beat out Apocalypse Now, Rocky beat out Taxi Driver Network and All the President's Men... the Godfather II beat out The Towering Inferno ... okay. You got me. Things suck a lot worse now than before. The problem is, the great movies each year, just aren't being recognized like they used to, and they certainly aren't winning as often. You got "Cuckoo's Nest", "Annie Hall", "The Sting" which beat out "Cries and Whispers", "Exorcist" and "Grafitti", "The Godfather", "French Connection" beating out "Clockwork", "Patton". In this list should be all the winners of best picture from the 70's, and ones that didn't win. Overwhelming the difference in styles and qualities of movies that the Academy prefers now.
Many have said that the LotR award represented the trilogy, not simply The Return of the King, and on that basis I think it deserves its place. My vote went to American Beauty, though, which worked for me as a meditation on what it means to be "alive" today.
Jim, what are you talking about? Sure the last few years haven’t seen the greatest Best Picture winners (“Million Dollar Baby” over “The Aviator”? Really?), but to say that maybe “Unforgiven” or “Sunrise” were the last Best Picture winners that were deserving is absurd. Yeah it’s pretty obvious that the Academy gets it wrong more often than right, but with Best Picture winners like “Forrest Gump” “Schindler’s List” “Silence of the Lambs” “Rain Man” “Platoon” “Amadeus” “Annie Hall” (although “Close Encounters” should have won but wasn’t nominated) “Rocky” (although “Taxi Driver” should have won) “Godfather, part 2” (although “Chinatown” should have won, but you could keep going on about movies that didn’t win) “The Godfather” “The French Connection” “On the Waterfront” and more, it’s not like the Academy has never picked a great movie as the Best Picture winner. And I don’t care what anyone says, “Dances with Wolves” was a great movie, though it should definitely not won BP over “Goodfellas”.
I would classify "Million Dollar Baby" and "American Beauty" as the cream of that particular crop. Sadly, I have to agree with previous posts; I can think of many movies I would put before those over the last decade.
Is this an indictment of the Academy? I thought you loved the Academy, Jim??? :-)
Wow, how uninspiring. I did think Million Dollar Baby was a great film, but earlier than that it starts getting a little embarrassing.
Looking further back in time, the last "Best Picture" winner that I think was worthy was Unforgiven.
Looking at the winners in general, I realize that I hold very few of them in high esteem, even the older ones. The academy has a long history of bypassing great, innovative work for simple, emotional drama that doesn't really hold up after a few years.
My biggest disappointment was Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction. But, Pulp Fiction was and is very influential on movies and pop culture, it's impact is still felt, while Forrest Gump has been essentially forgotten.
The problem is, as much as I don't want to care about the Academy Awards, I like to see great movies get recognition.
Yeah, not much selection here, but I'm quite positive the inclusion of Brokeback wouldn't make my voting time any easier. In fact, I've found most of the nominees from the past decade pretty shoddy, with some exceptions (Sideways, Mystic River, Goodnight & Good Luck), but even those (Sideways excepted) were by no means the best pictures of their respected years. At least not as far as I'm concerned.
Two and three years later, I still think Million Dollar Baby and The Return of the King were solid picks, and I still think they are very good movies. And I think Shakespeare in Love is a far better movie than the punchline it's been reduced to whenever someone wants to make an observation about how misguided Oscar can be. (Just those brief moments from it we saw on Oscar night reminded me of that.) As for the rest of this list, it just makes me tired. I liked The Departed even more the second time around, and it though it's a better movie than just about everything else on this list (Gladiator? Chicago? American Beauty? Titanic? A Beautiful Mind? Crash?!) it still doesn't feel like one for the ages to me. To find a recent winner for which I have absolutely no reservations, I have to go back to Unforgiven.
The problem with the Best Picture Oscar category begins with the fact that one cannot even guess which might be the best film often until years later, and ends with the fact there is no such thing as a "best picture" in terms of artistic merit. Best Picture is a pure bunk category and only exists for the entertainment of its mere existence. So anyway, I picked Shakespeare in Love because, well, it’s a comedy and it’s my preference and what the heck. But it’s not the best, none of them are, they cannot be. ha!
I think Return of the King, Million Dollar Baby and The Departed are the best, in that order. Other than that, what everyone else said: Jesus. Titanic and Shakespeare in Love are entertaining, sure, but nothing special(beating, respectively, L.A. Confidential and The Thin Red Line); same with Gladiator. American Beauty was good at the time but hasn't aged well at all. Chicago and A Beautiful Mind are pretty mediocre. And well, we all know about Crash one of the worst movies of the year and probably the worst Best Picture winner of all time. (Who the hell voted for it? Pranksters? Ebert?)
But for the guy(s) who said the 90s were especially better for BP winners, there's only like two, maybe three, great winners. Unforgiven and Schindler's List are amazing, sure - especially Unforgiven, seriously - and Silence of the Lambs is a great thriller, but other than that? Not much.
I'll go with The Departed. It's one of the few films in the past 10 years that I actually thought was the best of the Best Picture nominees.
Looking back, these are the winners that I disagreed with.
-Crash; wanted Capote to win
-Million Dollar Baby; Sideways
-Lord of the Rings: Return of the King; Lost In Translation
-Chicago; Gangs of New York
-A Beautiful Mind; Moulin Rouge (slim pickings this year, and I still haven't seen In The Bedroom)
-Gladiator; Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
-American Beauty; This one I actually agree with, though none of the winners thrilled me
-Shakespeare In Love; Saving Private Ryan
-Titanic; LA Confidential
Dudes,
I'm really surprised that Titanic doesn't rate higher than that with you guys. When I look at that list, Titanic is the only movie that seems, I don't know - "cinematic".
Titanic is a true film experience. Sound, Image and experience. It's a movie that the kids will be watching for a least a couple of generations. Movies like Crash are forgotten as soon one is leaving the cinema.
Jazzy, keep in mind what Jim is asking of us- "Our FAVORITE Best Picture winner". In choosing from ten movies, one is bound to get the boot.
In a filmmaker's message board that I participate in, almost everyone considers Titanic overrated. Cinematic? Certainly is. But what about story? Star-crossed lovers? Hardly unique and compelling. Screenwriters in particular don't seem to care for this film (not surprisingly, the film wasn't even nominated for a screenwriting Oscar).
I rarely revisit this film. Yes the film is visually amazing, but I don't find the characters very compelling. And for me, characters trump any and all techinical achievements a film can contain.
Besides, even in terms of what you consider being "cinematic" (a word whose definition differs from person to person), Lord of the Rings arguably beats Titanic.
I was going to vote for "Silence of the Lambs," then I realized it was more like 15 years ago. I voted The Departed—it was the only film that was my favorite of the nominees. Least favorite would likely go to Crash or Gladiator. I'd include Chicago with those two, but it seems better ever since I had to sit through Dreamgirls
I second many of cineboy's comments and, interestingly, also picked Shakespeare in Love. I don't understand all the talk about movies holding up. Discussions like this would be a lot less interesting if the Academy were psychic and Citizen Kane and Casablanca, etc. were lauded in their time. The Oscars become history and tell us something about that year that can be quite enlightening even if the winner (Going My Way?!?) isn't. Anyway, I would also argue that some of the "stuffy" cinemascope-type pics of the 50s and 60s, made by ancient directors (Ben-Hur, Lawrence of Arabia) hold up a lot better than some of the "edgy" stuff that was an answer to them (Blow-up, Midnight Cowboy, The Graduate) The 70s was good because it was a transitional period just as the post-war film noir was. Another such golden age will come--for the Academy to recognize it at the time would take another 60s style cultural revolution. (I don't mean like China's)
"American Beauty" is actually one of my favourite films, and one of the most misunderstood, in my opinion. I think it was a deserving Best Picture winner, and really the only truly great one on that list (my 2nd favourite might actually be "Chicago", which I think is just a fairly good musical, and I also don't mind "Million Dollar Baby" or "The Departed". The rest, though...ugh.)
My contribution to Jim's "Contrarian Blog" was actually going to be a piece defending "American Beauty" as the masterpiece I believe it is. Why would a film that won a Best Picture Oscar and currently is in the Top 50 on the IMDB poll of the top films of all-time need defending? Because among a certain cadre of critics that I very much admire (of which Jim is at the top of the list), "American Beauty" is frequently derided as a laughably smug and dated satire that captured the zeitgeist at the time in 1999 but now has been revealed as a cheap, manipulative, shallow film. I couldn't disagree more, and in my contrarian piece, I contrasted it with "Fight Club", which came out the same year and has seen its cult following grow. I feel about "Fight Club" the way Jim feels about "American Beauty"...I find it smug, reprehensible and aesthetically uninteresting.
Unfortunately, I didn't finish the piece comparing the two films before the Contrarian deadline...but I'll keep working on it, and maybe some future blog-a-thon will present an opportunity to extoll the virtues of "American Beauty" in more detail.
Oddly I haven't seen Shakespeare in Love, though I do want to. Of the others, I think that Lord of the Rings (my pick), Million Dollar Baby and The Departed are the best--okay, so they're not Unforgiven, but I think they're solid, good films. Chicago and Titanic are next as decent-to-good popcorn entertainment, though mostly glitz.
Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind have their moments but are too artificial (denying any part of personal or political history to simplify the story into some easily-packaged Hollywood message). And Crash and American Beauty--both of which are well acted and with some moments and characterizations of value--are the worst of the lot, mostly because both are so full of pretentions of being Important!Films! while undermining their own moral messages repeatedly. I don't think that either are the worst films ever as has been said, and to be honest I did enjoy both of them on a first viewing (I know, I'm a bit ashamed), but they both leave a very sour taste afterwards.
Also, Casablanca, unlike Citizen Kane, was lauded as Best Picture. And, you know, so were Lawrence of Arabia and Annie Hall and The Godfather films and It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest and On the Waterfront and The Apartment and The Bridge on the River Kwai, and so on. For most of those years, maybe I can pick a film I might have rather seen win, but I personally think those (and others) hold up pretty well. And, crucially, are still remembered.
For all of you who think The Departed is the best film on the list, you should watch Infernal Affairs (if you even can--I'm in China so I watched it years ago). Not to call down the thunder of the Scorsese lovers, but Infernal Affairs was the better picture in my humble opinion, and also better acted. Leung Chao Wei and Andy Lau acted circles around Leonardo Di Caprio and Matt Damon. Mark Wahlberg overracted; desperately trying to steal every scene he was in, probably because he was underwritten and his character underused in the Scorsese version, and also probably because he was supposed to have the 'coolest/most badass' character. Jack Nicholson is always great, but I much preferred Zeng Zhi Wei's turn, not only because it was much better developed--showing how through brilliance and scheming he rose through the ranks despite his small stature--a regular Napoleon; and also showing how he was vulnerable--not to the police necessarily, as he never felt he was, even to the end, but rather to rival gangsters. That was a long and convoluted sentence.
Anyways, Infernal Affairs. It's much longer, meant to be viewed over three settings actually, so you could even call it a miniseries, and it was originally released as three seperate movies. But it's better stylistically, a much more developed and complete story, the setting is far better and more appropriate to the story--Hong Kong easily trumps Boston there, and it's better acted. And aside from choosing what to keep and what to omit, it's not clear to me what Scorsese actually did with that film, because the scenes that were kept almost exactly mirror the original film. At times even the dialogue is little more than direct translation with Boston slang substituted for Hong Kong slang. Awarding Scorsese the Oscar for that movie is like awarding a translator a nobel prize for literature.
Getting to the point of the poll, best recent oscar winner is Lord of the Rings, because the award obviously represents the entire trilogy, which, taken in entirety, is one of the greatest cinematic experiences of film ever made. Arguing about plot/characters/storyline etc is a little off topic in talking about the greatest film. Film as a medium has certain advantages over other media and the Lord of the Rings trilogy (though of course it's not really supposed to be a trilogy) is the best representation of the medium of film (as opposed to say novels or television or whatever).
Also I really liked the observation of the poster above (cineboy) who said that the Best Picture of a year cannot be accurately chosen in the same year. Perhaps Oscar should take a clue from pro sports and vote on who goes into the 'movie hall of fame' three to five years after the fact. Of course that would greatly reduce the promotional impact of the awards, which the studios would NOT like. Then again, that would also greatly depoliticise the whole process, an unqualified plus from the serious film fan's point of view. Something to think about, though completely unrealistic. What a shame.
Much to my surprise, I also chose "Lord of the Rings" after scanning the list of films. Not that I didn't enjoy "Return of the King" immensely, but it never occurred to me that it was "the best film of the last decade." Of course, it isn't; it's just my favorite Best Picture of the last decade, but I never expected that. Quite frankly, it's not all that close. Next up would probably be Million Dollar Baby, a wonderfully acted film that has its obvious flaws, and then probably, an even bigger surprise to me, Titanic, which was a very well-acted soap opera. The ire that film draws from some detractors is either related to its obscene box office (and the commensurte "Greatest Movie Ever Made" ad campaign it received) or to the continuing disrespect that melodrama gets.
Much more striking is that the list contains three films I consider truly atrocious: American Beauty, Crash, and Chicago. I thought all three were in the running for worst film of the year (or at least worst film that I saw that year)and I'm not sure I could find a way to give any of them so much as a single star in a review. True turkeys all three.
Shakespeare in Love might not be a great movie, but I certainly agree with it winning over Private Ryan, one of the least inspired war films of the past decade. Of course, none of the five nominees that year were terribly inspiring - I used to love "Thin Red Line" but I now find it the least successful Malick film.
Setting aside the wretchedness of Crash, the Best Pictures of the 2000s so far are a whole lot better than the Best Pics of the 1990s, perhaps the most embarrassing decade in Academy history (Forrest Gump, English Patient, Braveheart and, yeah, I'll add in the ridiculous Silence of the Lambs as well).
Over at Cinematical, Jeffrey M. Anderson has an interesting article arguing that the Best Screenplay nominations and winners are often a better indicator of a film's quality than the choices for Best Picture. I think he makes a good point.
http://www.cinematical.com/2007/03/01/jeffrey-m-andersons-400-screens-400-blows-scribe-and-prejud/
Thanks, William B, for setting me straight on Casablanca. Maybe I was remembering Bogart losing out to Paul Lukas for Best Actor or Maltese Falcon getting mostly shut out (Bogart and Huston not even nominated.) In any case the point I was trying to make with my erroneous facts was that I think too much is made of the awards as some sort of historical imprimatur on a film. I don't think that's the idea and if they did try to decide what film will be remembered in 10, 20, 30 years the results would be even more skewed against smaller and topical films. For example I thought United 93 was an excellent movie but I really doubt people would be watching it years from now even if it had won a bunch of Oscars. It's a film for 2006. The list-making of best all-time is a separate exercise and will probably always be subject to the age of the list-maker.
Mason,
You're right. I'm convinced.
I chose Titanic. I have to agree with Mason. As much as the last ten years have produced some pretty interesting, somewhat unusual films, none of them even come close to capturing Titanic's brilliance. It was a sure thing then and it would be a sure thing today. Either errogance or jealousy has blinded people since Titanic opened. It's really sad that people can't see past their own vanity. Forget the fact that Leo is in it. Forget the fact that the story is "cliche". It's a great romance novel on film if you ask me. Novels are probably criticized for the same things. "It's too much Shakespeare and not enough originality"... yada yada. Ebert said, "you don't spend 200 million dollars to reinvent the wheel". No matter how cliche it may or may not be, it's still one of best tellings of this kind of love story I've seen on film. Titanic is the best film of the past ten years and still one of the top ten ever made. Not a single film has captured the attention and imagination of so many in the last decade. The only other film to do so was Gone With The Wind. That's saying something. Saving Private Ryan should have beaten Shakespeare In Love, Ridley Scott should have gotten best director over Soderbergh, and Brokeback should never have been nominated. That's just my opinion. Feel free to trash me and my words. I will stand my ground.