Watching the Best Picture Winners. All of them.

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Author: Kyla Sterling, October 2017


2017-10 Classic Movies.jpg


One night, my boyfriend and I got into a disagreement. I told him that I thought Hugo should have won Best Picture at the Oscars that year. He said no, The Artist deserved its win.

"Well how many of the nominees did you even see?" I asked.

"Two," he admitted. "What about you?"

"Three," I said.

We then agreed that we didn't have the proper background to really decide - especially since he hadn't seen Hugo and I hadn't seen The Artist. We ended up watching all nine nominees that year, and concluded that we were both wrong - the award should have gone to Midnight In Paris.

"We should watch all of the Best Picture winners," he said one night, shortly thereafter.

I shrugged. Sure! I'd already seen several, and I had meant to get around to several more of them.

"And I can write reviews for them - or make video reviews!"

Sounded like a good idea to me!

Five years and a baby later, my husband and I are still slogging our way through the award winners. Life has a tendency of getting in the way - especially when he takes a year off to go to grad school, we move twice, and his computer dies horribly and he needs to track down his editing software to reinstall. We've only made it to the '50s. 1953 to be exact, with the film From Here To Eternity.

You may know the film from the very famous clip of a couple kissing on the beach as the waves crash over them.

2017-10 Here To Eternity.jpg

Spoiler alert: that scene lasts all of three seconds, and is hardly memorable in the grand scheme of things.

The movie is actually about a soldier who's been transferred to an Army base in Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, in 1941. (Dun dun DUN!) He's apparently a talented boxer, but he swore off the sport after seriously injuring a friend in a match. His higher-ups resort to all sorts of awful bullying to try to get him to join their boxing squad, because there's a big match coming up. He refuses, they make his life more miserable, etc.

One of the especially notable things about this film is its cast - Deborah Kerr, for example, was primarily known for playing nuns, princesses, and genteel English ladies. Here, she's a vampy officer's wife. Frank Sinatra picked up an Oscar for Best Supporting Actor for his role. Burt Lancaster and Montgomery Clift were both nominated for Best Actor, but (most likely) split the vote and neither won the award.

It's a good film - not my favorite, but it's easy to see why it's become a classic. I definitely felt like throwing things at the screen more than once - ESPECIALLY at the ending - but I also really enjoyed some of the build up to the big event on December 7th. It ranks solidly in the middle of the pack, as far as the rest of the movies we've watched so far. I still rank It Happened One Night as one of my favorites, as well as Gone With the Wind and Rebecca. He preferred the more dramatic films - All the King's Men and The Life of Emile Zola, for example. We are, however, firmly united in our dislike of The Broadway Melody, Cavalcade, and The Great Ziegfeld.

Mr. Sterling is still trying to get back to editing on his new computer, but it's slow going. In the meantime, you can check out his blog and previous Best Picture reviews (as well as his reviews of other films - including 31 classic Hollywood horror flicks last October!) at https://thecinematicpackrat.wordpress.com/.