What can I say about Gone With the Wind that hasn’t already been said by film historians and film scholars over the past 75 years? The film’s results speak for themselves. It won an unprecedented 10 Academy Awards, including Outstanding Production (Best Picture). To this day it remains #1 at the box office by a …
Category: Best Picture Blogs
1938 Winner for Outstanding Production – You Can’t Take It With You
In the eleventh year of handing out Academy Awards, Frank Capra became the second director to helm two winners of the award for Outstanding Production (Best Picture). He followed up his 1934 win for It Happened One Night with a win in 1938 for You Can’t Take It With You. This is a film that …
1937 Winner for Outstanding Production – The Life of Emile Zola
I have to be honest with you. This film frustrated me. Don’t get me wrong, it’s an excellent film in many ways. However, I feel that it could have been a great film and an important film and a classic film, and it just missed the opportunity to be all of those things. Perhaps if …
1936 Winner for Outstanding Production – The Great Ziegfeld
Simply put, The Great Ziegfeld is a spectacle. It is everything that The Broadway Melody tried to be but couldn’t. It is ostentatious and over the top. As I was watching it, I couldn’t help but be reminded of The Wolf of Wall Street. On the surface, neither film has anything to do with the other, …
1935 Winner for Outstanding Production – Mutiny on the Bounty
Frank Lloyd became the first director to helm two Best Picture winners, with Cavalcade having taken home the statue just two years earlier. You won’t find two more different films than Cavalcade and Mutiny on the Bounty, and the latter is a much stronger film. Likewise, Clark Gable was the leading man in back to back winners, having …
1934 Winner for Outstanding Picture – It Happened One Night
There are a couple of notable changes for the 1934 Academy Awards. Most notably, the Academy changed the award year to contain a single calendar year, rather than taking pictures from August first of one year through July 31st of the following year. That was the big change as far as the Academy was concerned. …
1932/1933 Winner for Outstanding Picture – Cavalcade
Let’s just start out by saying that this is a grandiose picture. The film makers pulled out all of the stops with this one and spared no expense. There were literally thousands of actors requiring thousands of costumes. One scene in particular used over 2,500 extras. This was a massive undertaking, the likes of which …
1931/1932 Winner for Outstanding Production – Grand Hotel
The Academy expanded the number of film nominated for Outstanding Production to an unprecedented eight for the year 1931/1932. They had previously never had more than five nominated films, so we can see again that even in its infancy, the Academy was retooling and tweaking its process for determining the year’s best film. Grand Hotel, …
1930/1931 Academy Award Winner for Outstanding Production: Cimarron
This was certainly the most epic of the films to receive this award so far. Cimarron was a film that was trying to be big, trying to be important, and trying to be meaningful. It succeeded on all accounts and was rewarded by being named the best picture of the year by the Academy. I found Cimarron …
1929/1930 Academy Award Winner for Outstanding Production: All Quiet on the Western Front
As the excess and frivolity of the 1920’s dissolved into the sobering and disturbing reality of the bill that came due in the 1930’s, so too did the Academy award its highest honor to a film that reflected that transition from fun and carefree to coming of age seriousness. The Broadway Melody, so representative of …