I missed the deadline for Edward Copeland’s survey of Oscar’s worst Best Pictures ever while waffling over whether to actually play by the rules or instead cover my favorite and least favorite nominees ever. (And then still cite Crash in the number one spot of all-time worsts, just to prove a point.) Karma suggests it’s better to just stick with the positive, but I’m still not quite playing by the rules. For starters, these aren’t quite “The Ten Best” in my opinion. Towards the bottom of the list I swapped out some films I think are plenty great but whose reputation is solid enough (such as the two Godfather films) in favor of some films that are either underrated or are just sort of amusing to me as “Best Picture Winners.” That’s how I play this game. Also my number one choice for Oscar’s best ever Best Picture didn’t actually win the award.
01.
(F.W. Murnau, 1927) – It’s pretty common knowledge that in 1927, its first year, the Oscars actually had two categories that could’ve been taken to designate Best Picture. Wings won “Best Production” and “Most Unique and Artistic Production” went to F.W. Murnau’s elaborate endorsement of romantic naiveté. I mean that in the best possible sense. I haven’t seen Wings yet, and I’m aware that The Celluloid Closet’s Vito Russo has shed light on the at least homo-suggestive subtext of the landmark war epic, which (if even sort of true) would still make it more subversive than almost anything that’s won the award since. But the omnisexuality of Sunrise, the entire plot of which could be summed up in a sentence clause like “countryside husband, seduced by city flapper, almost kills his wife but they miraculously fall back in love,” extends beyond odd little tangents (like hunky George O’Brien, as the husband, receiving a lascivious shave from a notably adoring male hairdresser). The heady androgyny extends into Murnau’s lush stylism itself, German expressionism refracted through Hollywood romanticism (stripping the former style of any trace of toniness). In that, it’s sort of a forerunner to Jean Vigo’s similar and similarly hot-blooded L’Atalante. So, unless the Academy is fine with the idea that they only ever gave their top award for “artistic” qualities in its first year, I’m saying rules be damned. Sunrise counts.
02.
(Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1950) – Showgirls rears its glittery weaves once again. Bitchiness. So much bitchiness. So much bitchiness from Bette “If Anything RAT” Davis, Anne “Milkshake” Baxter and Thelma “Snapping at Her Rear End” Ritter that Celeste Holm’s underrated cuntiness (”the moment I learned little girls were different from little boys”) still registers as sheer, Bells of St. Mary’s altruism. So many brassy performances by women or, in the case of George Sanders (and arguably Hugh Marlowe), men who would probably rather be women. Is it any surprise that the most cogent representation of masculinity, Gregory Ratoff as Broadway producer Max, doesn’t even speak legible English? (And even he gets memorably tagged by Davis: “you sly puss.”)
03.
(John Ford, 1941) – I, for one, certainly don’t get the backlash against this one for not being Citizen Kane, especially given the fact that the difference in quality between The Magnificent Ambersons and Mrs. Miniver is far far more insultingly vast. Plus I’d argue that John Ford (admittedly winner of more Best Director trophies than anyone else) deserved his own Best Picture as much as Welles. More so if you expect Oscar to subscribe to the whole Bogdanovich “smuggler” idea of which Hollywood auteurs deserve accolades from within the industry. While it doesn’t have the same orchestral resonance as On the Waterfront’s union busting-then-patching brutality (most of that from Leonard Bernstein’s moving but unabashedly hysterical score) or cinematography by Gregg Toland like The Grapes of Wrath (what most people consider this award to be a make-up for). Valley, like Ambersons, is an impassioned and skeptical look at the questionable rewards of industrial progress.
04.
(Woody Allen, 1977) – Just like New York City is clearly a superior city to Los Angeles, Annie Hall is one of the best Best Pictures and Crash is by a significant margin the worst. Easy peasy. Additionally, it’s oh-so-’70s (read: bleak) in ways that exceed some of its decorated compatriots like The Deer Hunter and “but he really lost kinda sorta” Rocky. Unlike De Niro and Stallone, Allen really is an antihero whose lack of virtuous qualities are unimpeachable. That he beat Star Wars ten ways to Oscar Sunday (and while avoiding the ceremony by playing clarinet back in Manhattan, at that) even still gives me hope that, though blockbusters have won and will drive the art of pop moviemaking into the dirt, the guy who is and who has the smallest prick can still trump ‘em all. Maybe that’s why I still cry like a native New Yorker during the last ten minutes of this one.
05.
(William Wyler, 1946) – Unlike with Valley, here we do have some tasty Gregg Toland D.P. work. No real trick shots, but you can’t expect the most important movie ever made (well, maybe in its day) to show Harold Russell dancing with some office party chorus girls reflected in the windshield of a grounded B-52 Bomber while a nurse coming to tend to Frederic March appears in the shards of the beer schooner that just slipped out of his hand while Myrna Loy nurses a drink, tells Dana Andrews to “get out!” and Toland cranes the camera up and out of the divey bar’s ceiling, disguised with a flash of lightning. Instead, the most memorable deployment of glass occurs when real-life war amputee Russell plunges his two hook-hands through his shed window to show a pack of trembling kids the freak show they want. Both Best Years and the now-more-beloved film it beat It’s a Wonderful Life are tough-minded epics that put a real price on patriotic optimism.
06.
(James Cameron, 1997) – Call me a gadfly, but this is the only big-assed-big-titted Hollywood epic BP winner that I’d ever want to watch once instead of frame enlarge and mount on a wall like so many pinned butterflies. Schmorence of Schmarabia. I would try to argue that maybe it’s because, unlike Schmavid Schmean, James Cameron seems to know just how ridiculous his gastronomic bloatiness is, but… nah. He’s drunk on his own self-importance and the shots he stole from A Night to Remember. Still, Titanic is a great movie movie. Just as some today justify Gone With the Wind by admiring how nimbly it moves along for being a plus-size movie, similarly Titanic takes two movies that are either crappy or ripped-off and mashes them up into one-half a great film.
07.
(William Friedkin, 1971) – At this point, we’re sort of below the line. The French Connection doesn’t even get purple on my favorite film lists. (Doesn’t show up there at all.) But I like this one as a BP winner even more than the scandalously X-rated Midnight Cowboy. Because Doyle is not likeable as are Ratso and Joe. Because Doyle chases skirts from his cop car. Because the music is so hard-boiled it turns the trumpet section into rotten eggs. Because of that shot of the Pan Am Building. Because Fernando Rey is slippery in subways. Because of those cut-rate Supremes and the vapidity of their song about living on the moon. Because there is no reason for Doyle to fire another shot off camera without the end titles telling us what he was shooting at except for that it’s moodier that way. But mostly because Taxi Driver didn’t win the Best Picture Oscar that would’ve made this choice irrelevant.
08.
(Robert Redford, 1980) – I didn’t really pick any of these to thumb my nose at the people rushing to defend some unjustly snubbed alternate nominee. Except in this case. Fuck Raging Bull. I’ll take my domestic abuse in the form of a prissy Mary Tyler Moore hastily shoving fresh french toast down the garbage disposal and blinking her eyes a hundred times. Or refusing to take a picture with Timothy Hutton (her only remaining son following a boating accident that killed her favorite son) at Christmas and blinking her eyes a hundred times when he roars “just take the goddamned picture!” Or trying to bond with Hutton by telling him how hot his brother used to be until her cracked out mental case son starts barking like a dog, leading her to freeze up and blink her eyes a hundred times. Later remade as A Nightmare on Elm Street 2: Beth’s Revenge, Ordinary People is inhuman. Who would’ve thought Redford had a touch of John Waters in him?
09.
(Clint Eastwood, 2004) – I always love it when a modest piece of second-gear genre cinema manages to buck odds and take the prize from the bloat-as-usual candidate (The Aviator) and that’s the movie that gets the backlash. Well alright, every BP gets flayed these days (except for Lord of the Rings, but that’s only because only the die-hard fanboys were still around by the time the third one oozed to a close).
10.
(Bruce Beresford, 1989) – Eh. I was going to work up some more lather on sort of unintentional Oscar camp and small movies beating out big ugly ones, but we’ve already covered that. Like Bee-uh and Arr-ah.
Postscript caveats… In retrospect, it almost feels like I was trying to work against the reputation that Oscar’s recent choices have been getting worse in the last couple decades. This is Pauline Kael-brand horse pucky. They’ve been consistently terrible throughout. Anyway, I guess the closest runner-up I could think of here is Rebecca (Alfred Hitchcock, 1940). And among the Best Pictures that, against all odds, have decent reputations, I still haven’t seen All Quiet on a Western Front (Lewis Milestone, 1930) or The Apartment (Billy Wilder, 1960).
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