What Each Best Picture Winner Tells Us About Hollywood

as much as I love the Oscars they are definitely going through a bit of a rough patch right now the awards used to stand as a true cultural institution something that could get people talking and provide water cooler moments for the general public the next day now unless you happen to catch one of the tepid viral moments that might trend on Twitter for an hour or two it's pretty easy to ignore the awards entirely really it's almost impossible to imagine that less than a decade ago the awards telecast Drew in almost a quarter of the country and I know that times change and live TV is dying right now and people are into streaming and all the things that journalists will list off when they write about this topic but it really feels to me that we've turned a corner on a behavioral level when it comes to these broad monocultural let's all gather around the living room events the way our media consumption habits have changed just isn't conducive to that anymore and I think what upsets me most about the decline in Oscar's viewership is that it represents a complete dismissal of the institution's legendary influential history the awards just don't mean anything to people any anymore and I don't think that's a good thing as someone who's been that guy who cares about the Oscars for around half my life I'm very familiar with all of the common complaints people will say I haven't seen any of the movies I don't care about Hollywood Hypocrites patting themselves on the back the awards are totally elitist they never nominate anything that's popular and I think when you hear this it's easy to create a caricature of this imaginary Philistine art hater who can't comprehend anything that isn't a Marvel movie but really I find that a lot of movie lovers hate the Oscars just as much they all say things like the actual best movies of the year are always ignored they'll say it's all commercialized the academy only goes for a safe Oscar baby biopics they'll bring up people that don't have one and say that the awards mean nothing and these ideas that the academy is elitist middlebrow lazy out of touch or basically one big popularity contest are not new at all even way back in the 1930s when the Oscars had basically just started there are already plenty of examples of critics attacking the institution for one reason or another I found one article from 1935 accusing The Academy of showing quote a discouraging lack of appreciation for True artistic Merit in Hollywood and for handing out Awards based on box office popularity and winning personality rather than histrionic excellence and it wasn't just critics it was celebrities and members of the industry too Francis Marion was one of the most successful screenwriters of that era she won her first Oscar at the third Academy Awards and looking at her statue she apparently quipped quote I saw it as a perfect symbol of the picture business a powerful athletic body clutching a gleaming sword but with half of its head the part which held its brains completely sliced off I even found a fan letter in picture play Magazine from 1932 after just five years of Academy Awards already complaining that the group lazily Awards performances based not on Merit but on how Bady the performances are they said a splendid piece of acting depends not on the player's makeup but on his ability to make the audience feel both medals this year were awarded for character portrayals dependent on slathers and slathers of makeup why none of the critiques we're hearing today are new and really none of these critiques are necessarily wrong either obviously the Oscars are on some level an out of touch self-congratulatory popularity contest but I really do think when you totally dismiss the Oscars as a worthless corrupt organization with no regard for merit or Talent whatsoever you miss out on a really fascinating through line of history that takes you from the very beginnings of film as a medium up through today and that lineage becomes most clear when you take a look at the long list of 94 Best Picture winners now these movies are definitely not the best 94 movies of all time or always the best movies of their respective years or even all good movies on their own but if you actually take the time to watch them all as I have I've done my homework you start to see a real narrative that transcends the movies themselves all of them in their own ways share a sense of ambition and Humanity that provides not just a play-by-play history of the movie industry but also a very specific large-scale window into public life during the past tumultuous century they show us examples of why we love movies and their proof of what movies can do and I'm about to plead my case as to how I think the easiest way to unpack all this best picture stuff is to start from the very beginning and understand what the award was designed for in the first place I promise this will be quick but we do have to do a little bit of Wikipedia word vomit just to make sure that we're all on the same page The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences was founded in 1927 and was the brainchild of Louis B Mayer a huge producer at the time who co-founded MGM Studios which was at that moment the largest movie studio on Earth at this point the movie industry was still pretty young and the whole complex money making and star making machines that power it were still taking shape so mayor took this opportunity to stake his claim on the industry creating an organization that would help establish Hollywood as the most prestigious and Innovative new place where art and business would flourish together he and his executive friends also wanted the organization there to consolidate their own power and squash any potential unionizing that might happen among the lower level creatives in the industry but that's a whole separate thing I'm not getting into that right now I want to go back to a phrase that I used a few seconds ago art and business this pairing is mentioned Often by mayor during this period he said when the academy was first started it was my thought that there must be a closer understanding between the artistic and business side of making pictures to him the task of the Oscars was to push movie making as a medium forward looking at the award from mayor's perspective best picture isn't just a metric of quality it's a way to get a glimpse into the interconnected world of Commerce and art Hollywood and the people and I found that when you zoom out and take a look at the Best Picture winners year after year you really can track a cool unique Narrative of both Hollywood history and the history of the United States that I find to be pretty valuable so let's track it let's go through all 90 some odd years of Academy Awards history and see what the Best Picture winners can tell us we start out at the first Academy Awards in 1929 our first Best Picture Winner Is wings and it's pretty great it's a silent movie about two World War One combat Pilots their friendship and a love triangle they have with the definitive late 20s it girl Miss Clara Beau we are only on winner one but the industry has already set the standard for what best picture can mean Wings is a massive epic story about war it features some of the biggest stars on Earth it's technologically impressive they shot crazy aerial battle scenes using actual flying planes and it all looks incredible even by today's standards it's melodramatic it's about love and loss and The Human Experience this should all sound familiar here's our blueprint for Gone With the Wind From Here to Eternity Ben Hur Schindler's List Forrest Gump The English Patient Titanic Lord of the Rings we can go on and wings fits in perfectly with Mayer's ideal vision of the Oscars that we just talked about it's both an artistic feat and a massive Commercial Success it was something that got people talking got them excited about movies and got them in a theater seat which is exactly the sort of thing that he and all of his friends and boardrooms would want to encourage our next Best Picture Winner in 1929 is the Broadway Melody and I promise I'm not going to go through every winner like this but the early ones are important this was one of the first movie musicals ever made and one of the very first true talkies to be an all-out hit it follows two sisters as they enter Show Business and it's pretty unremarkable when you watch it now but it was huge for the time MGM advertised it as the first all talking all singing all dancing picture and it became the highest grossing movie of that year just like wings the Broadway Melody helped push the industry forward it helped Pioneer the musical genre which trust me we will see a lot more of later in this video but most importantly it embraced sound as the New Frontier of movie making way Melody and speaking of sound this brings us to our first colossal industry shift the First full feature with sound The Jazz Singer came out in 1927 and in the blink of an eye talkies overtook silent movies as standard practice in Hollywood at the first Oscars in 1928 every best picture nominee is a silent movie at the second Oscars in 1929 every best picture nominee is ataki except one and after that we literally never get a silent movie nominated for the award ever again until 2011 but film critic Andrew Sarris talks about this in a piece for film comment magazine he mentions that with the academy dedicated to keeping Hollywood on The Cutting Edge they wanted to Usher Out The Silent era as quickly as they could even though great silent movies were still being made this is why in 1931 for example works from Total masters of Silent Cinema like Chaplin and renau got ignored in best picture and the academy instead gave the award to Cimarron which is a decade spanning epic about a family that settles out in the American West and it does have sound but it isn't very good after that we get a few more unique winners that I think I like more than most people Grand hotel has an All-Star ensemble cast and a great early John Crawford performance cavalcade retells a couple decades of American History through the lens of one family and after these we get another huge industry shift the implementation of the haze code I'll keep it quick because this is very I like movies 101 but the code was basically a set of Industry rules that censored most sexual violin or otherwise risque content from showing up in movies the code was officially enforced in 1934 which means that in the few Best Picture winners that came before it we see a pretty stark contrast in some of the content that's allowed to be on screen in wings for example we get an intimate gay kiss at the movies emotional climax even though it's sort of ambiguous whether it's explicitly sexual or more of a we're best friends dying in war sort of thing in 1930s All Quiet on the Western Front we get a ton of intense violence in the trenches of World War One including a notorious scene that shows a soldier's severed arms left hanging on barbed wire after he gets blown up by a bomb we also get a lot of overt anti-nationalist anti-war themes that probably wouldn't fly after the haze code either in cavalcade there's a scene where a nightclub singer undresses after a show while another character a man watches without her knowing none of these things would have flown after the code and you could argue that American movies wouldn't get this openly dark or experimental again until after the code dissolves in the late 60s but we'll get to that later let's get back to Best Picture later on in the 1930s we get our introduction to a notorious genre for the Oscars the biopic first there is the life of Emil Zola which tells the story of the aforementioned author and his involvement in France's Infamous Dreyfus Affair there's also the great Ziegfeld about the legendary Broadway producer Florence Ziegfeld creator of the Ziegfeld Follies to be honest neither leave that much of an impression but I guess that's usually the case with biopics isn't it and we cap off the decade with the crown jewel of the golden age of Hollywood Gone With the Wind Gone With the Wind is so grandiose and daring in scope that it basically redefined what a movie could be it was enormously expensive had a crazy production history was highly anticipated and a huge huge huge success it grows more than any other movie it earned more Oscar nominations than any other movie had at the time it won more Oscars than any movie had at the time if there was a record gone with Owen broke it it was a true maximalist work of art in every way imaginable and it represented the peak of what the studio system could do the Hollywood Machine in 1939 was truly firing on all cylinders and the Oscars by awarding Gone With the Wind as much as they did are helping to prop it all up the beginning of the 1940s is a pretty fascinating time for the Oscars because we see the onset of a real life event World War II actively impacting the movies that are getting made and the movies that are winning Mrs Miniver the 1942 melodrama that stars Greer Garson as the stoic mother of a British family living through the war is probably the most glaring example the movie ends with a big patriotic speech and a crumbling Church very subtle about sacrifice and freedom and fighting tyranny and it became such a symbol of wartime strength that it was reprinted in Time Magazine and Roosevelt even ordered that it be translated into different languages and airdropped over German territory the following winner is Casablanca which is fantastic obviously but also definitely captures that sense of looming Terror and claustrophobia of wartime and the next year Bing Crosby starred in going my way which won a ton of awards with its subtler themes about community and younger Generations taking up the torch from their older mentors to keep their communities going then in 1946 just months after the last veterans returned home from Asia William Weiler hits us with the best years of Our Lives it's interesting because Weiler also directed Mrs Miniver so these two movies sort of bookend America's involvement in the war and reflect two very different attitudes about it the movie is basically just three hours of the American public processing the war that had just upended their lives the movie even famously cast an actual World War II veteran and amputee Harold Russell in a role which he won an Oscar for so this movie was enormous and it got crazy critical praise Bosley Crowther in his Rave New York Times review described it as being quote cut from the Heartwood of Contemporary American Life a 1946 review in Motion Picture Herald took it a step further saying that the movie's near documentary style and tackling of contemporary issues could Mark the beginning of a new school of filmmaking one where the lines between fiction and reality are blurred the back half of the 1940s is a pretty contemplative period for Best Picture the movies are primarily focused on real world issues from honestly terrifying depictions of alcoholism with nightmare dream sequences in Billy Wilder's the Lost weekend a pretty tame anti-Semitism PSA in gentleman's agreement and All the King's Men a rip from the headline story about a politician who starts out as a champion of the working class before eventually becoming corrupt and I certainly can't forget the Lawrence Olivier Hamlet adaptation we get thrown in there you know everyone give it up for Laurens as we move into the 1950s things are looking kind of horrible for the movie business not 2020 is horrible but still pretty bad the studio system is crumbling at this point partially due to the famous 1948 Paramount Anti-Trust case but also because of a new screen that was popping up in every home across the country in the late 1940s almost no Americans had televisions in their homes and by the late 1950s almost every American home had one this left movie studios with an audience who could get their entertainment right from their couch so getting them outside of their homes and into a theater was going to take some effort and this sounds very familiar doesn't it so through the 1950s we see a mix of winners we get a couple of grounded stories about working class men like on the waterfront and Marty and we also get some last bits of post-war reflection From Here to Eternity it was a massive movie that depicted the nihilism and loneliness of soldiers stationed in Hawaii right before the attack on Pearl Harbor and Bridge on the River Kwai explorers masculinity Obsession human progress and destruction all from the setting of A POW Camp in Thailand but we also get a lot of totally overblown larger-than-life epics like these are the movies you think of when you think of the word Epic Ben Hur the winner in 1959 is maybe the most insanely ambitious Hollywood epic ever made it's a perfect synthesis of melodrama costumes production design the biggest sets the biggest stars the biggest action scenes it's amazing Around the World in 80 Days From 1956 is basically one big extremely expensive travelogue with a bunch of gorgeously photographed vignettes filmed on location throughout Europe Asia and North America The Greatest Show on Earth from 1952 is a very boring movie about circus performers that almost feels like a documentary it features extended sequences of real circus acts so even though it's a bad movie I can see why audiences may have liked it because going to see it was almost like going to see a real show all of these movies Incorporated flashy tools like Technicolor Panavision cinemascope basically anything that would make the movie going experience something you couldn't get on TV the aspect ratio could be bigger the color is brighter the shots more breathtaking and you see the studios try to push all of this in the ad campaigns for the movies where these technical aspects are heavily featured many ads highlighted specific scenes within the movies that were particularly impressive like the 17 minute long multi-set dance sequence at the end of An American in Paris or the boat battle scenes of Ben Hur really so much of the press for Ben Hur leading up to its release was just focused on how much of a spectacle it was it's crazy run time it's absurd production costs if you can't tell by the way I'm talking about it this is a pretty fun time for best picture a lot of the movies are very long some are kind of boring but they're definitely all impressive in one way or another and I think this decade really represents what I love best picture for it's movies that really have no right to exist they're gigantic they're insane they're ambitious but they're interesting pieces of film history that I think are worth watching through the 50s we also see the academies start to award one of Cinema's most tried and true genres the vibrant brightly colored musical which would become very dominant over the next two decades we had seen a couple musical winners before this like the Broadway Melody kind of and the great Ziegfeld kind of but those were more musicals in the sense that they were about Broadway and they had a couple of songs thrown in they weren't musicals in the way that we think of them today the musicals of the 50s and 60s are big colorful bold you really can't miss them We Begin this trend with two Parisian musicals from Vincent Minnelli and American in Paris and Gigi both of those starred Leslie Caron one of them starred Gene Kelly and is great the other one won nine Oscars and is not great but as you'll see this musical Obsession would continue on throughout the 1960s with an assist from another cultural phenomenon in some ways the 1960s are a continuation of 1950s Trends spectacle is popular and big Winners that sweep upwards of seven awards are common we've got a lot of Heavy Hitters here the apartment West Side Story Lawrence of Arabia the universally beloved Tom Jones but crucial to the 1960s is the British Invasion at this point in America beetlemania is in full swing we've got mod fashion we've got Twiggy we've got James Bond movies we've got Julie Andrews we've got a one two three four five six punch of movies this decade that were produced in the UK take place in the UK or feature British stars and half of these were musicals I would imagine that if you were following the Oscars at this point things would start to feel pretty formulaic around here but things are about to get shaken up by the end of the 1960s the Civil Rights Movement the Vietnam War anti-war protests and political assassinations are all continuing to rock America the mood has deflated a lot and we start to encounter some darker more intense winners again 1967s In the Heat of the Night is a detective drama and star vehicle for Sydney Poitier Poitier plays a detective who finds himself in the Deep South where a murder was just committed and he has to work alongside the bigoted headstrong white police chief to solve the case the murder plot is honestly mostly a MacGuffin I don't remember most of it but the real drama of the movie isn't watching the two men butt heads as it completely mirrored the racial tensions that were playing out in real time throughout the country the most notorious scene in the movie comes when a wealthy local man slaps Poitier and instead of sulking back in shame as was originally written in the screenplay Patia slaps the guy back times were changing just two years later after a pit stop at the Academy's only G-rated Best Picture Winner we get probably the most daring experimental movie The Academy ever gave the top prize Midnight Cowboy this is a completely misanthropic Gay Odyssey about a male prostitute and his sleazy friend as they Shuffle around the cruel dirty streets of New York it takes cues from the cross cuts and iconoclastic realism of the French new wave that had just shook Europe earlier in the decade and it feels experimental in a way that Best Picture winners hadn't felt since the wild west of the pre-code where movies had similarly bizarre editing and narrative ambiguity we've now officially reached the era of new Hollywood and it's [ __ ] fantastic here we Usher in a new Young crop of autores and the dark grimy scary amazing movies of the 1970s a tonal shift which again reflects American Sentiments of the time the Technicolor awe of the 50s and 60s is quickly replaced with the dirty streets of New York or Philadelphia singing and dancing are replaced with gunfights and Garrett wires movies about the trauma of War for example are certainly not new for the Oscars but here they're taken to new darker Heights essentially the events of the last decade had left people questioning their place on the world stage and within their own country the myth of America was beginning to show signs of wear so in came anti-heroes ambiguous endings grainy cinematography and a scrappy New Frontier approach to movie making this combined with the collapse of the rigid Studio system over the past couple decades and the official retirement of the haze code in the late 60s allowed movies to really start going there in ways that they hadn't before and this means that we get the darkest decade of Best Picture winners by far in 1971 there's The French Connection uh neo-noir about a detective's obsession with catching a drug Smuggler in the crime underworld of New York City there's both of the Godfathers which document the corruption of man in the crime underworld of New York City There's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest a pretty harrowing look at a man in a mental institution which has its fun moments but spoiler alert does not turn out well for him in 1976 there's Rocky the ultimate Underdog Story about the Despair and impotence of the working class every man in a very gray grimy Philadelphia there's the deer hunter in 1978 a three-hour mood piece following a bunch of factory workers who go to war and then come home to deal with PTSD and a loss of faith in the American system and in this one we've got not one but two horrifying Russian Roulette scenes I think the general running themes here are pretty clear violence corruption hopelessness despair anger feeling trapped in broader systems that you can't get out of and at the end of the very masculine 70s we get the only two winners of the decade that are even somewhat about women Annie Hall and Kramer versus Kramer Annie Hall with Diane Keaton's gender bending style and Woody Allen's neurotic self-insert is a reflection of new age gender Dynamics interpersonal connections and narcissism of the modern day in a way that feels totally prescient creamer versus creamer feels like an Aftershock of the second wave feminism of the 60s and early 70s it was the biggest box office hit of its year in 1979 and Merrell's oscar-winning performance opened up a national conversation around divorce and marital malaise and the expectations of motherhood and really the issues that Meryl's character is facing feel like they could have been plucked directly from the pages of the Feminine Mystique which had come out around 15 years ago at this point the following year in 1980 Ordinary People wins best picture it's a melodrama about the hot box of psychological turmoil that is the affluent Suburban family home here we get another complex Mother character played by Mary Tyler Moore these two smaller family-based psychodramas feel like the perfect place to cap off the 70s and transition into our next decade we've had our 10 years of cynicism of pulling back the curtain on American society the American dream on our Notions of honor and heroism and morality and once again the pendulum is going to swing back in the other direction and we're about to enter one of the more feel-good modeling commercial periods of Hollywood history now we're in the 80s this is the decade of Spielberg and Lucas tag teaming America for 10 years straight at the box office total Blockbuster dominance there's John Hughes and the rise of computer generated effects sequels VHS sales can't be slashers and crowd Pleasers at this point America is in a period of economic prosperity and the general mood has definitely lifted think less the panic in Needle Park more The Goonies to deal with continually diminishing ticket sales and with the new model of the Blockbuster in front of them Studios begin to do what we've become very used to prioritize effects big budgets and bankable stars this leads to a decade of popcorn spectacle and sentimental dramas and in my opinion it's the worst decade for Best Picture winners in terms of quality just going through the list we've got a good amount of filler to be honest there's Chariots of Fire a movie about running track that I would call slow and uneventful at absolute best there's platoon a pretty good Vietnam War movie contemplating moral ambiguities of War but we've really been there done that we get some stately epics like Gandhi and The Last Emperor and Out of Africa all of which are admirable for their scope and I actually think the last emperor strikes a pretty unique tone for a Best Picture Winner but they all have pretty bloated run times and I don't know they're just missing the classic movie Magic that the epics of the 50s and 60s had but when I think of the 80s I really think of the winner as like terms of endearment rain man driving this Daisy all of which reflect a specific saccharine small-scale almost TV movie tone that really stands apart from anything that had won the award in the past 30 years or so they're all very commercial low stakes character your studies that feel ripped from a completely different world than the harsh stuff we saw in the 70s or the really imposing ostentatious movies of the 50s and 60s some of them are good some are not I am a pretty big fan of Terms of Endearment but if you can't tell I do not really care for this decade's winners that much so I'm done talking about them I love the 90s the 90s are a little bit like the winners of the 50s and 60s but on steroids almost every movie here is a big movie with a capital B just take a look at the winners most are three hours long most are period pieces many are regarded as some of the best movies ever and maybe most importantly all of them are populist box office hits as well the public and the suits and boardrooms are in total Harmony Louis B Mayer would have loved this decade but in the 1990s coming off of the 80s movie stars are more individually powerful than ever this gives us not one not two but three movie stars directing their own star vehicles that would win best picture Kevin Costner runs around the American frontier for three hours in Dances with Wolves Mel Gibson leads Scotland to freedom for three hours in Braveheart and Clint Eastwood gives his take on the western genre that made him famous in the first place in Unforgiven there's a level of garish self-indulgence in these winners that we hadn't seen in forever and haven't seen since and I really love this decade for that in 1998 the New York Times published an article reflecting on James Cameron's speech after he won best director for a Titanic he ended his speech by stretching his arms out like Leo and exclaiming on the king of the world apparently this speech made an impression on the industry quote on one hand the comments startled many producers and Executives in Hollywood who are accustomed to Oscar speeches with a degree of humility on the other hand Mr Cameron was absolutely right with Titanic the synthesis of Art and commerce reached a peak that we hadn't seen since Gone With the Wind movies were unquestionably on top again helping Drive culture forward it spurred album sales and a run on bookstores for something anything Titanic can't keep the books on the show as soon as we put them on they're gone in retrospect Cameron's speech really defines this decade at the Oscars for me the 90s were a pretty great time for Americans if we're going to generalize the entire mood of an entire country for an entire decade the economy was prosperous the Arts are flourishing digital technology is taking off progress is happening fast and there was a general sense of optimism as we moved into the new millennium America was like chain of the world so to speak millions and millions of people were showing up to theaters to watch way too long period pieces War romances celebrity vanity projects and then gathering around their TV screens on Oscar night to watch Billy Crystal or Whoopi Goldberg crack some jokes the industry machine was running totally smoothly in retrospect The Ugly Duckling of this decade is Shakespeare in Love middling light Romantic Period dramedy the movie it beat Saving Private Ryan actually fits in much better among the winners of this decade but this classic Oscars upset would actually prove to be the most Prussian indication of the Oscar's future we are about to enter the Weinstein era the political campaigning the kissing babies and attending screenings and winning for movies that were designed in a lab as Awards magnets and obviously this kind of stuff happened in the past too but Weinstein really got it down to a science and these strategies were only going to grow stronger and stronger as we move into the 2000s might be the most eclectic decade for best picture where we see the definition of the award shift from the stereotypical Academy mindset of the past Century towards the beginning we see some familiar fare big epics like the borderline Ben Hur remake Gladiator there's the very very bad drama A Beautiful Mind we also get another musical which we're very familiar with by now but this time it's a little more post-modern in tone a little more winking and meta in 2003 Return of the King wins and this becomes really the first and only time that the academy has honored a giant Blockbuster franchise phenomenon then at the middle of the decade we start to see a bit of a shift and we lean into darker and more unconventional endings no spoilers for a Million Dollar Baby but oh my God if you know you know crash depicts a tapestry of racial tensions around Los Angeles The Departed it's about deception in the Boston Irish mob There's No Country for Old Men in 2007 with its haunting ambiguous ending it's opportunistic protagonist and it's Unforgettable Psychopathic inhuman villain all of these share a certain nihilism and ambiguity about human nature that would fit right in among the fleet of 70s movies we talked about earlier and this little mood shift also matches up pretty well with American sentiment at the time the gradual public disillusionment we see Post 9 11 pretty closely mirrors the declining trusting government of the post-vietnam decade hence the similar bad vibes there are definitely no Olivers here we then end the decade with a figurative and literal bang with The Hurt Locker a quasi-documentary style account of a bomb disposal Squad in Iraq which stood out for a couple of reasons for one thing it's the first Best Picture Winner directed by a woman it's also the first time since World War II that the academy is awarding a movie about a war that's still in progress just as movies like Mrs Miniver or the Best Days of Our Lives examine the tolls of war and its ugly aftermath The Hurt Locker asks audiences to examine America's place in Iraq and confront what seems to be man's natural inclination towards war and violence the movie also stood out at the time for being the lowest grossing Best Picture Winner ever not only that but it beat out another nominee that just so happened to be the highest grossing movie of all time The Hurt Locker was huge for the future of the Oscars it showed that box office isn't everything and that the massive technical Juggernaut could sometimes be beaten by the small Indie and this got the ball rolling on a trend that continues into today prior to The Hurt Locker the Best Picture Winner was almost always in the top 10 highest grossing movies of its year smaller dramas that today probably wouldn't even get a theatrical release like Kramer vs Kramer or Rain Man were the number one movies of their years even some of the most under the radar winners from back then like take the last emperor a 2.5 hour long actionless biopic about the collapse of Imperial China still at least finished in the top 25. and The Last Emperor as off the beaten path as it was may as well be Avengers [ __ ] end game compared to the winners of today most of which can barely clear the top 100 of their respective years so this brings us to the 2010s and to today the festival circuit has grown into a full cottage industry with events like Tiff Venice Telluride and Sundance serving as jumping off points where we now expect Oscar frontrunners to premiere the name of the game is mostly low budget low grossing Indie movies and now after the pandemic rapidly accelerated the collapse of movie theaters and of our entire cultural system our last Best Picture winners haven't made a dent in movie theaters at all the Louis B mayor model has crumbled Awards movies are now a niche a genre that gets its own separate category on Netflix instead of consisting of normal movies that are both commercially successful and artistically valuable at the same time again the industry has cut itself in two there are movies that a bunch of people see and those come out about once every three months as fast as Marvel can work their visual effects team and there are movies that win things like Indie spirits and Oscars or are forgotten completely and we're finding that there is increasingly little overlap between these two categories and I know for a fact I'm not the first person to tell you about this whole streaming era industry shift stuff but there's also been a pretty clear cultural shift in the Academy's tastes in the past decade where best picture used to have a greater focus on spectacle technological Feats and melodrama things have become dramatically more issue driven with recent winners focusing on the gay experience racism racism allegories racism socioeconomic inequality socioeconomic inequality individuals with disabilities and these Trends have gone hand in hand with the 2010s expansion of the academy to include a younger more diverse membership that these changes become noticeable around the middle of the decade is probably no exception given the political climate that's taken hold since then and the fact that around that time we saw one of the biggest upsets in Oscar's history where a freely musical spectacle lost out to a more nuanced inclusive story feels like a clear course correction from the academy now in the past five years we've seen a foreign film win best picture for the first time ever and a number of female-directed movies nominated for and winning the award two we've seen a streaming giant like Netflix become an awards Mainstay this year marks the third consecutive year where it's been the studio with the most total Oscar nominations and as if the Oscar gods were trying to give me the perfect point to end on we've just seen our first streaming movie win best picture a movie that essentially didn't hit theaters at all box office is not only less important now but it's totally irrelevant and for the first time in a long time the very definition of what makes a movie a movie is being redefined so that's it everyone stand up do some stretches take a breather we've just gone from the very first Best Picture Winner ever one of the last successful silent movies that one amid the largest shift the industry had ever seen to this year where we have a winner that represents an equally huge industry shift I know this was a whole lot of talking and a whole lot of information but I really do find it fascinating to zoom out like this and view the history of the Best Picture award as an extension of both Cinema history and American culture if you only look at a decade or two of winners it's easy to picture the typical stereotypes and complaints if you were in the 60s you'd be rolling your eyes every time another musical got a nomination in the 90s you'd see a three hour long War epic and assume it was going to win and you'd probably be right in the 2020s you'd be complaining as people are right now that they give it to movies nobody's ever seen but when you look at the Grand scope of it all you can observe these Cycles over time where the industry has shifted from experimentation into conventional Studio fair from cynicism into optimism Studio epics to streaming Indies and through all these changes when you look back at all of the nearly 100 winners to me what stands out the most is the profound humanism found in almost everyone which always feels true to whatever time they were working in some of them are pretty boring or way too long or a little reductive but even those are all important pieces of our shared cultural mythology a time capsule of certain viewpoints a new technology that needed to be experimented with a story the director felt needed to be told and maybe that's part of what the academy wants to reward in an industry where playing make-believe and creating things that aren't real is the name of the game the Oscars give people a chance to not just reward movies that show the world as it is but the world as we want it to be or think it ought to be I wanted to end with an article I found while making this video there are plenty that are just like it but this one is a 2021 piece from The Washington Post titled the Oscars always get it wrong here are the real best pictures of the last 45 years the intro reads let's take a walk through the past four decades plus of Best Picture winners of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences it's an almost unbroken chain of incorrect decisions but with the perspective lent To Us by the passage of time we can now confidently look back and discern what was actually the best and when I saw this I guessed my real intention for making this video fully clicked into place for me it's to try and dispel this exact sort of attitude it's a given that the best movie doesn't always win depending on who you ask the academy may have only awarded the actual best movie of the year a handful of times in their entire Hundred Year history because that's not actually the point of the Oscars and not why we should care about them when you're sitting through an award season you aren't necessarily there to witness the best movie of the year Ascend to the front of the pack and get its flowers I think we all know that that doesn't happen most of the time you are following the awards to witness a piece of Hollywood history a blip on a line graph that in 20 years will probably represent an industry or cultural Trend that you got to Bear witness to the Best Picture award doesn't show us the best movie of every year it shows us what some people thought was the best movie of the year at that time it's a snapshot of the time a reflection of the culture the academy is steeped in an annual window into the state of the industry and the American psyche and like it or not it's one that we aren't able to get any other way [Music] thank you

Channel: All Talking Pictures

Views: 167,463

Keywords: best picture, academy awards, oscars, list, hollywood, ranking, every, winner, parasite, coda, green book, godfather

Id: YAh34ca7d3k

Length: 43min 13sec (2593 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 29 2022