Hamlet is a film that people who are not aficionados of Shakespeare could appreciate, although I can understand why people who are not would avoid seeing this film. I do enjoy Shakespeare, having taken two semesters of him in college, and Hamlet was always one of my favorites. In fact, if you’ve never seen it, …
Category: Best Picture Blogs
1947 Winner for Best Motion Picture – Gentleman’s Agreement
An idealistic journalist poses as a Jew in order to write a series for his magazine on anti-Semitism. That’s the logline for Gentleman’s Agreement, 1947’s Best Picture winner. It stars Gregory Peck as Schuyler Green, the steely-eyed crusader like many others that he would become known for through films like this one and To Kill a …
1946 Winner for Best Motion Picture – The Best Years of Our Lives
Three World War II veterans return to their small town after the war and struggle to reintegrate themselves back into society. That would be the logline that I would use to describe The Best Years of Our Lives, which is another one that I hadn’t seen, yet pleasantly surprised me. I didn’t have terribly high …
1945 Winner for Best Motion Picture – The Lost Weekend
I watched The Lost Weekend a couple of days ago, and I’m still not sure what to say about it, other than I can’t imagine how it won Best Picture. The whole time I was watching it, I felt like I was watching an early attempt at surrealism that was doubling as a public service …
Going My Way Addendum
I was thinking a little bit more about Going My Way vs. Double Indemnity so I decided to watch the latter last night. I speculated that perhaps it the acting in Going My Way was superior to the acting in Double Indemnity, and that could have been the reason that Going My Way took home …
1944 Winner for Best Motion Picture – Going My Way
The first thing that I’m going to say about this film was that I found it to be very disappointing. Every once in a while I’ll come across a film that can never seem to close the deal, and this film was certainly an example of that. It was as though director Leo McCarey and …
1943 Winner for Outstanding Motion Picture – Casablanca
What can I say about Casablanca that hasn’t been said or written about by film makers and film historians over the past 70 years? AFI has it ranked #2 on its list of the Top 100 movies of all time, trailing only Citizen Kane. Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman became screen legends off of its …
1942 Winner for Outstanding Motion Picture – Mrs. Miniver
The United States had officially been involved in World War II for just under a year when Mrs. Miniver was released in 1942, and the film, while more than a mere propaganda film, certainly used the growing sense of nationalism and patriotism to its advantage. The film takes place in England and starts out in …
1941 Winner for Outstanding Motion Picture – How Green Was My Valley
In what would historically prove to be one of the most controversial decisions on the Academy’s history, How Green Was My Valley took home the award for Outstanding Motion Picture of 1941. John Ford, one of American cinema’s great directors, helmed this film about a Welsh mining town and one of the families that called its …
1940 Winner for Outstanding Production – Rebecca
David O. Selzinck won his second consecutive Oscar for Outstanding Production (Best Picture) in 1940, following up the transcendent Gone With the Wind with the sublime Rebecca. Directed by Alfred Hitchock, Rebecca took storytelling to new heights, at least as far as the award for Best Picture is concerned. Rebecca had arguably the most sophisticated storyline …