The 95 Best Picture Oscar winners: some statistics

So, I have now watched all 95 winners of the Best Picture Oscar. My preferences are clear, but I thought I might do a bit of comparison between them all.

Sources

28 (29.5%) are original stories written for the film, with little bearing on any other source. The first of these was the very first winner, Wings, and the last the most recent, Everything Everywhere All at Once. The one I liked most was An American in Paris, and the one I liked least (indeed, least of all the Oscar-winning films) was Platoon.

14 (14.7%) are based on earlier dramatic treatments, whether for the stage (all but two), television (once, Marty) or a direct remake of an earlier film (also once, CODA). The first of these was Cavalcade and the most recent CODA. I liked Casablanca the most – it’s my top Oscar-winning film overall – and Cavalcade the least. (I’m counting The Sound of Music, A Man for All Seasons and Oliver! here, because although the first two are based on history and the third on a novel, the films are directly adaptations of the stage plays.)

38 (40.0%) are adapted from written fiction – mostly novels, short fiction in five cases, and two epic poems (the sources of The Best Years of Our Lives and Braveheart). The first of these was All Quiet on the Western Front and the latest Slumdog Millionaire. I liked Schindler’s List most and Cimarron least.

Finally, 15 (15.8%) are filmic treatments of real events. The boundary is a little blurry here, but I am counting all dramatic treatments of non-fiction books which did not go through stage treatment, and also Spotlight and Green Book, which are dramatisations of real-life events The first was The Life of Emile Zola, and the most recent was Nomadland (which I am counting because although the film is clearly fictional, the book of the same name that it is based on is clearly not). Of these I liked The King’s Speech the most and Argo the least.

Time of setting

The punctuation points of history here are the two World Wars, and to a certain extent the Vietnam war and the turn of the millennium.

18 (18.9%) are clearly set entirely before the first world war. Two of those films are set during the US Civil War (Gone with the Wind and Dances with Wolves). To those 18 I would add My Fair Lady, because the King is clearly Edward VII, but not How Green Was My Valley – although the book is set in the late nineteenth century, the film feels more mid-twentieth.

Three (3.2%) are largely set during the First World War – Wings, All Quiet on the Western Front and Lawrence of Arabia – and several others straddle the war with more or less attention given to it: Cavalcade, Cimarron, The Last Emperor, Gandhi, The Great Ziegfeld..

13 (13.7%) are set between the wars, including How Green Was My Valley, for reasons given above, also Rebecca, which is based on a book published in 1938, and The Lost Weekend which is based on a novel set in 1936. This doesn’t count Cavalcade, Cimarron and The Great Ziegfeld, which all conclude in this period, or The Last Emperor and Gandhi, which continue. I guess I should also count half of The Godfather, Part II.

Roughly equal numbers are set before and after the Second World War. Seven (7.4%) are set in the Second World War directly. I would add Going My Way, which doesn’t mention the war but is clearly contemporary, and The Best Years of Our Lives, set in the immediate aftermath. Again, The Last Emperor and Gandhi continue through this period.

15 (15.8%) are largely set between the Second World War and the Vietnam War; also the chronologically later half of The Godfather, Part II. The Last Emperor and Gandhi also conclude during this period. Most of these are datable to a precise year.

Only three (3.2%) actually feature the Vietnam War, The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Forrest Gump, but of course it looms over the rest.

Another 12 (12.6%) are set in the last third of the twentieth century, and 13 (13.7%) are set in the twenty-first century. And The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King is set in a different Age entirely.

36 (37.9%) are set in more or less the present day, at the time of making. Another eight (8.4%) are set in identifiably the last decade (plus Cimarron and Cavalcade which both have most of the action earlier but end almost in the present day). Eleven (11.6%) are set between a decade and a quarter-century in the past (counting How Green Was My Valley, and stretching a a bit for Patton in 1970). Ten (10.5%) are set between a quarter-century and a half century before they were made, fourteen (14.7%) between a half century and a century before. There’s a jump between the 85 years of Titanic (1912-1997) and the 112 years if Unforgiven (1880-1992). Then there’s a steady progression to Ben-Hur (33 AD-1959). I find that I rate the contemporary settings slightly higher on average than the historicals.

Place of setting

It will not astonish you to learn that a clear majority of the Oscar-winners, 54 (56.8%) are set entirely or largely in the United States. Of those, 19 (20% of all winners, 35% of American ones) are set in New York and New Jersey, plus the start and end of Green Book and the end of It Happened One Night.

Another four and a half are set elsewhere in the North-East (Spotlight, The Departed and CODA in Massachusetts, and Rocky and half of The Deer Hunter in Pennsylvania). Still in the neighbourhood, The Shape of Water and much of The Silence of the Lambs are set in Maryland.

Ten (10.5%) are set broadly in the West; five in California, one each in Oregon (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest), Wyoming (Unforgiven), Colorado (Dances with Wolves), Oklahoma (Cimarron) and on the open road (Nomadland). You could add a large part of Rain Man as well.

Nine (9.5%) are set in the South, counting The Greatest Show on Earth whose location is not specified but was filmed in Florida. Georgia is the most popular Southern state (Gone with the Wind, Driving Miss Daisy, part of Moonlight), followed by Texas (Terms of Endearment, No Country for Old Men) with Louisiana (12 Years a Slave), Mississippi (In the Heat of the Night) and a fictional state (All the President’s Men) all represented.

Of the major regions, the Midwest is least prominent with four and a half – the start of Rain Man, also The Best Years of Our Lives, The Sting, Ordinary People and, indeed, Chicago. Forrest Gump roams all over Lower 48 (as well as Vietnam). And then there’s Hawaii, with From Here to Eternity.

25 out of 95 are set in Europe. Nine of those are set entirely in England, and another two partly there (Chariots of Fire and Patton). Five are set in France, plus the other parts of Chariots of Fire and more parts of Patton. Two are set in Austria, with one each for Denmark (Hamlet), Germany (Grand Hotel), Poland (Schindler’s List), Scotland (Braveheart) and Wales (How Green Was My Valley), with maybe one and a half for Italy (Gladiator and parts of Patton and The English Patient).

Counting the films set in Asia is a bit blurry. As mentioned already, The Deer Hunter, Platoon and Forrest Gump all feature the Vietnam war. Moving east to west, Parasite is in Korea, The Last Emperor in China, The Bridge on the River Kwai in Myanmar, Gandhi and Slumdog Millionaire in India; and if we can include the Middle East, there’s Argo in Iran, The Hurt Locker in Iraq, Lawrence of Arabia in, er, Arabia and Ben-Hur in Palestine. That’s twelve-ish.

Two and a bit are in Africa – Out of Africa, Casablanca and parts of The English Patient.

That leaves one in the Pacific Ocean (Mutiny on the Bounty), one in the Atlantic (Titanic), one Around the World in Eighty Days, and one in Middle Earth.

So, the representative Oscar-winning film is adapted from written fiction, set in the USA (probably New York), around the time of the Second World War, set not in the present day but a couple of years earlier. That actually fits The Lost Weekend rather well; I ranked it 42nd of the 95 winners, very close to the middle, and I think it probably is a fairly good taster for the project of watching all of the Oscar winners. Not that I am necessarily recommending that as a course of action.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Everything Everywhere All at Once

Everything Everywhere All at Once won the 2023 Best Picture Oscar, and six others: Best Director (Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert), Best Actress (Michelle Yeoh), Best Supporting Actor (Ke Huy Quan), Best Supporting Actress (Jamie Lee Curtis), Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing. It also won the Ray Bradbury Award and the Hugo Award for Best Dramatic Presentation, Long Form.

I was in the hall in Chengdu when the Hugo result was announced, and there was a collective gasp of delight at what was clearly felt to be a win for the home team. I heard or saw someone comment afterwards that this is remarkable because you can’t actually watch it in China. That comment is rather deluded – for all I know, it may not have been released in cinemas, but you can bet for sure that it has been watched by many many people in China. In any case, it got precisely half the first preference votes for the Hugo, and sailed across the line on the second stage.

The other Oscar nominees for Best Picture were All Quiet on the Western Front, Avatar: The Way of Water, The Banshees of Inisherin, Elvis, The Fabelmans, Tár, Top Gun: Maverick, Triangle of Sadness and Women Talking. I have seen none of them. The other Hugo finalists were Turning Red, Nope, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, Avatar: The Way of Water again and a TV series. The only one of these that I have seen is Black Panther: Wakanda Forever; and I’m afraid the only other films from last year that I can remember seeing are Glass Onion and Enola Holmes 2. IMDB users rank EEAaO 4th on one list and 7th on the other, with only The Batman ahead of it on both.

Here’s a trailer.

I spotted two actors who had been in previous Hugo/Bradbury winners, though none from previous Oscar winners. The first of these, obviously, is Michelle Yeoh, who is the protagonist Evelyn Wang here and was also Yu Shu Lien, one of the lead characters in Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon back in 2000.

You may be scratching your head about the other returnee from a Hugo / Nebula winning film. It is James Hong, who plays Gong Gong, Michelle Yeoh’s character’s father here, and was also Hannibal Chew, the maker of replicants’ eyes, in Blade Runner back in 1982. Given that he was born in 1929, and would therefore have been at least 91 when filming EEAaO, he must be the oldest actor that I have featured in these vignettes. Forty years is also one of the longest gaps between appearances. His cinema career started in 1956.

This is the last of these posts about Oscar-winning films, so I’m also going to salute the other two leads who won Oscars, both of whom I know from other films of long ago. Jamie Lee Curtis is the tax official Deirdre Beaubeirdre here, totally inhabiting the character, and of course was in A Fish Called Wanda back in 1988.

And Ke Huy Quan, playing Michelle Yeoh’s character’s husband Waymond Wang here, was Short Round in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom back in 1984, when he was twelve.

Young F, who is now a wage-earner, bought a Blu-Ray player for our household as a Christmas present, and I went out and bought EEAaO as the first thing to watch on it. (Nineteen years ago, we bought our first DVD player and watched Finding Nemo with F, then aged five, and Casablanca after he had gone to bed.) Of course, it was a Belgian DVD so we had the slight cognitive dissonance of the original soundtrack, in English, Mandarin and Cantonese, and our choice of Dutch or French subtitles, but no option for English subtitles. We opted for Dutch, which is the language of F’s education (and to be honest I’m also a bit more comfortable in it than in French). But we therefore didn’t see quite the same film that you may have done.

Opinnion is firmly mixed on EEAaO, but F and I loved it. It combines the domestic comedy of the central character getting to grips with her failing marriage, her overbearing elderly father, and her relationship with her lesbian daughter, with the revelation that she is one of a number of parallel Evelyns across the spectrum of multiverses, fighting the forces of evil incarnate in a being who looks just like her daughter. This Bilbo-like shift between the domestic and the fantastic is elegantly and eloquently done. Michelle Yeoh in particular conveys the many different aspects of Evelyn well, the action sequences are superb, the special effects are convincing and the music backs up the on-screen performances without intruding.

I think that part of what makes the film work is that it is perhaps a psychological parable too. Like all of us, Evelyn contains multitudes, of which she is not necessarily aware at the start of the story. By the end, she has integrated all of her selves and achieved wholeness, and learned also to accept difference in her family; as well as defeating the forces of cosmic evil. What more could you ask for at Chinese New Year?

I’m ranking it 18th out of 95 Oscar winners, just above 20% of the way down, after that somewhat different domestic drama Terms of Endearment and ahead of that other tale of psychological integration and disintegration, Midnight Cowboy. Stand by for a review of the whole concept of watching the Oscar winners in sequence.

I’m also ranking it 18th, this time out of 65, in my list of winners of the Hugo / Nebula / Bradbury awards, just below the vivid action-filled A Clockwork Orange and above the universe-crossing Pan’s Labyrinth. It’s a stronger field. I may also do a post linking the Hugo / Nebula / Bradbury winners over the years.

But in the meantime, thank you for bearing with me through this series of posts, which I started in September 2017, when the world was a very different place.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

CODA, and La Famille Bélier

CODA won the 2021 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor (Troy Kotsur as Ruby’s father), in fact a clean sweep as those were the only three categories in which it was nominated. Dune won six Oscars that year, and the Hugo, and the Ray Bradbury Award. Apart from CODA and Dune I have seen two of the there nominees for Best Picture, Belfast and Don’t Look Up; I have not seen Drive My Car, King Richard, Licorice Pizza, Nightmare Alley, The Power of the Dog or the remake of West Side Story.

Apart from this, I have also seen the other four Hugo finalists, Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings (which I voted for myself), Encanto, Space Sweepers and The Green Knight. I think the only other film I had seen was The Dig, about Sutton Hoo. Sticking my neck out, I liked CODA better than any of them. IMDB users rank it 23rd of 2021’s films on one list and 35th on the other, which is rather low. Dune and Spiderman: No Way Home top the two lists.

Here’s a trailer:

There’s one actor who has been in Doctor Who, and one who was in a previous Oscar winner. The Doctor Who crossover is rather spectacular: it’s Emilia Jones, who plays CODA’s protagonist Ruby, and was also the child singer Merry in the 2013 Eleventh Doctor story The Rings of Akhaten.

The Oscar crossover actor is the rather less prominent Armen Garo, seen here on the left in CODA as Gio Salgado, the guy who runs the fish auction:

Fifteen years before, he was the unnamed First Providence Gangster in The Departed, on the right here with Leonardo DiCaprio on the left:

The film is about Ruby, the child of deaf adults (hence the title, CODA), who can hear, unlike her parents and older brother, who communicate with her through American Sign Language. They run a fishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, which as it happened I visited with my family in 2005. Times are hard for the family and the fishing industry, and a new music teacher discovers that Ruby has an impressive talent for singing. She navigates her parents’ utter incomprehension, her feelings for the cute boy in the choir, her best friend’s romance with her brother and her own self-esteem in order to get to an audition for a top music school in Boston.

It’s beautifully filmed with the northeast Massachusetts sea, town, school and countryside all vividly depicted. (There are some great scenes with Ruby and the Cute Boy swimming together at an isolated lake.) The acting is absolutely top notch. I loved Marlee Matlin as pollster Joey Lucas in The West Wing (she was in at least one episode in every season, from 2000 to 2006) and I loved her here as Ruby’s mother. As mentioned previously, Troy Kotsur got an Oscar for playing her father.

And I have to be honest, the basic story of disability as a part of life that people live with and get on with, but also the effects that it has on a family, hit home very hard for me. The climax where Ruby sings Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now” (in the video above) had me in tears. The last Oscar-winner that did that to me, I think, was The Sound of Music, though Terms of Endearment and The King’s Speech came close. That doesn’t necessarily make it a great film objectively, but it does shoot it right to the top of my personal table, and I’m ranking it at 7th place out of 94, just below Schindler’s List and ahead of Rebecca,

This is the first Oscar winner specifically made as a remake of an existing film – though Marty was based on a previously broadcast teleplay, and My Fair Lady stands on the shoulders of the 1938 Pygmalion, tracking it shot for shot in some scenes. CODA is based on the 2014 Franco-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, which I also sat down and watched. Here’s a trailer.

It’s almost exactly the same story as CODA, with some changes which don’t affect the thrust of the plot. The Bélier family have a farm rather than a fishing boat. The deaf brother is younger rather than older than the protagonist. The music college is in Paris, not Boston. The dad decides to run for mayor rather than to challenge the vested interests of fishing. (I remember reading somewhere, a couple of decades ago, that out of every sixty adult French men, one on average then held a locally elected municipal office of some kind. That’s probably shifted a bit with population growth and better gender equality, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s still in that ball park.)

We still have the protagonist forced to take on an adult role for her family’s business; we still have the cute boy singer in the choir, and the best friend’s romance with the deaf brother; we still have the hilarious scene in the doctor’s office, and the parents having loud sex while the protagonist’s friend is in the house; we still have the eccentric music teacher who spots the young girl’s talent; we still have the dramatic fade-out of the sound-track during the school concert so that we can appreciate the experience of the deaf parents; we still have the dramatic dénouement of the audition. It’s not a shot-for-shot remake, but it’s very much the same story, told somewhat differently.

La Famille Bélier is funnier than CODA, and it’s also sexier (the songs are much more explicit and there’s a totally hilarious scene involving a condom). The music is also, frankly, better. Here, the music teacher is obsessed with the work of singer-songwriter Michel Sardou, and makes the choir and the protagonist sing nothing else. This gives the soundtrack a musical unity that the American remake lacks, and makes the whole thing much more earwormy. In particular, Paula’s final song at her audition, Sardou’s “Je vole”, made me cry even more than Ruby’s “Both Sides Now” in the American version. It’s a song about suicide, but the film turns it into a hymn to emancipation. Stunning stuff from 17-year-old Louanne, whose real life was not without complications; her father had died the previous year, and her mother died while the film was being made.

Mes chers parents, je pars
Je vous aime mais je pars
Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant
Ce soir
Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole
Comprenez bien, je vole
Sans fumée, sans alcool
Je vole, je vole
My dear parents, I’m leaving
I love you but I’m leaving
You won’t have any children any more
This evening
I am not running away, I’m flying
Understand, I’m flying
No tobacco, no alcohol
I’m flying, I’m flying
Elle m’observait hier
Soucieuse, troublée, ma mère
Comme si elle le sentait
En fait elle se doutait, entendait
J’ai dit que j’étais bien
Tout à fait l’air serein
Elle a fait comme de rien
Et mon père démuni a souri
Ne pas se retourner
S’éloigner un peu plus
Il y a gare une autre gare
Et enfin l’Atlantique
My mother was watching me yesterday
Anxious, troubled
As if she felt it
In fact she suspected, heard me say
That I was fine
Looking quite serene
She acted like nothing
And my poor father smiled
Don’t look back
move away a bit more
There is another station
And finally the Atlantic
Mes chers parents, je pars
Je vous aime mais je pars
Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant
Ce soir
Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole
Comprenez bien, je vole
Sans fumée, sans alcool
Je vole, je vole
My dear parents, I’m leaving
I love you but I’m leaving
You won’t have any children any more
This evening
I am not running away, I’m flying
Understand, I’m flying
No tobacco, no alcohol
I’m flying, I’m flying
J’me demande sur ma route
Si mes parents se doutent
Que mes larmes ont coulé
Mes promesses et l’envie d’avancer
Seulement croire en ma vie
Tout ce qui m’est promis
Pourquoi, où et comment
Dans ce train qui s’éloigne
Chaque instant
I wonder on my way
If my parents suspect
That my tears have flowed
My promises and the desire to move forward
Just believe in my life
All that’s promised to me
Why, where and how
In this train that is moving away
Every moment
C’est bizarre cette cage
Qui me bloque la poitrine
Je ne peux plus respirer
Ça m’empêche de chanter
It’s very weird, this cage
Blocking my chest
Stopping my breath
Keeping me from singing
Mes chers parents, je pars
Je vous aime mais je pars
Vous n’aurez plus d’enfant
Ce soir
Je ne m’enfuis pas je vole
Comprenez bien, je vole
Sans fumée, sans alcool
Je vole, je vole
My dear parents, I’m leaving
I love you but I’m leaving
You won’t have any children any more
This evening
I am not running away, I’m flying
Understand, I’m flying
No tobacco, no alcohol
I’m flying, I’m flying
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
Je vole, je vole
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
La la la la la la
I’m flying, I’m flying

I loved La Famille Bélier, but CODA does score over it in a couple of important respects. The more important issue is that the supporting actors in CODA are genuinely deaf, whereas the French parents are played by hearing actors (the brother is genuinely deaf in both films). This is just really important for honest representation. We’ve come a long way from the second Oscar-winner, The Broadway Melody, where there was a character with a comic disability. (It’s currently at the very bottom of my league table of Oscar winners.) But we still need to give people their own voices.

The other point is that CODA is more politically on point. La Famille Bélier has a patronising mayor ultimately getting his just deserts at the hands of the voters, with Paula’s father as the agent of his downfall. CODA has the grim reality of late-stage capitalism dragging down the entire town and its industry, and the efforts of Ruby’s family to reverse the tide while also overcoming their own challenges. It’s played for real, rather than for laughs, and I think helps give it the edge as the better of the two films.

Only one Oscar-winner left: Everything Everywhere All At Once, which is also up for the Hugo this year.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Nomadland

Nomadland won the 2020 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Director (Chloé Zhao) and Best Actress (Frances McDormand), more Oscars than any other film that year. The other contenders for Best Picture were The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah, Mank, Minari, Promising Young Woman, Sound of Metal and The Trial of the Chicago 7; I haven’t seen any of them. The Hugo went to The Old Guard, which I really didn’t grok, and the Bradbury Award to a TV script.

Apart from this and the six films nominated for the Hugo for Best Dramatic Presentation (Long Form), I have also seen Enola Holmes and the film-of-the-stage-show of Hamilton from that year, which was of course the first full year of the pandemic. I’d put Nomadland somewhere in the middle of that pack. IMDB users rank it an OK 13th on one scale, but a lowly 43rd on the other. The top films on the two IMDB rankings are Tenet, which I also couldn’t get on with, and Extraction, which I have not heard of.

Here’s a trailer.

I normally run through the other appearances of the cast in Oscar/Hugo/Nebula-Bradbury winners and in Doctor Who. This time, there are hardly any professional actors in the film – most of the cast play themselves. McDormand has the most exposure, but I had only previously seen her in Raising Arizona and Almost Famous. (This is a serious omission on my part; Nomadland was her third Oscar win for Best Actress after Fargo and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, putting her level with Ingrid Bergman and Meryl Streep, and more likely than either of them to catch up with Katharine Hepburn.)

The film is about McDormand’s character, Fern, who is displaced from her home by capitalism and links up with the American subculture of people living in their vehicles, crossing the huge area between the Rocky Mountains and the Mississippi, working on subsistence jobs. As I said, while not my favourite film of the year, I liked it well enough.

It is one of a number of Oscar winners to be based on a contemporary factual situation with some fictionalised elements – apart from the biopics, I would include On the Waterfront, The French Connection, Argo and Spotlight. But Nomadland is a very different kettle of fish. In The French Connection, two of the real-life protagonists play minor figures in the story, and one minor figure plays himself. Here, almost all of the speaking roles, apart from the lead character and a couple of others, are played by people playing themselves.

It makes me a little uneasy, to be honest. A documentary is a documentary; it’s a work of art, sure, but one that relies on showing an existing truth to us on the screen. But this is a film where an A-list Hollywood actress pretends to be part of the lives of very real people with very real problems. To tell their story, was it necessary to bring in a fictional person to help them tell it? And if so, is it still their story, or a similar yet different story belonging to the film-makers? Are we getting the real Linda May, Gay, Patty, Angela, Carl, Doug, Ryan, Teresa, Karie, Brandy, Makenzie and Bob Wells? Or are we getting Chloé Zhao’s version of them?

Still, it’s unusual to be asking this question about middle-aged and elderly white people. (cf Slumdog Millionaire.) These folks are making the best of the disruption to their lives caused by late stage capitalism in a crumbling state (ie the USA); they narrate their situation to themselves and to us as a positive choice; we get to make up our own minds. Some may wish that the film had taken a more polemical stance against poverty and its causes, and I think I’m probably one of them, but I don’t know if an angrier film would have been a better film in this case.

Apart from that, you have to admit that the film looks really good and sounds really good. Those landscapes from the sparsely populated Mountain Time Zone speak for themselves. The music could have been gruesomely sentimental and manipulative, but opts for quiet and contemplative. McDormand herself is not called on to do all that much, but does it very well, and it is impossible to take your eyes off her. (Somewhat related: not many actors of either gender get nude scenes, however discreet, in their 50s.)

So I’m putting it about three fifths of the way down my list of Oscar winners, just below Marty and above The Life of Emile Zola.

As previously mentioned, it’s based on a book with the same title by journalist Jessica Bruder. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

Empire was six miles north of “the gyp,” an open-pit gypsum mine nestled at the foot of the Selenite mountain range. There miners detonated blasts of anfo—an explosive blend of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil—to dislodge white, chalky chunks of ore from five terraced pits, the largest a half-mile across. Haul trucks shuttled sixty-ton batches of gypsum up the highway to a drywall plant on the edge of town. There workers pulverized it, heated it to 500 degrees in massive kettles, and shaped it into the wallboard found in homes across the American West.

I’m a huge sucker for the participant-observer mode of anthropology, and this brand of “immersive journalism” comes very close to it. Good writing like this lets the stories come out in their own way and their own time, and although the book is not long, nobody is rushed into fitting into a film scene. Inevitably the book ends up angrier than the film, even if its subjects in general accept their lot, because the mere facts of what the USA is doing to its own people are so enraging, and decent reportage will bring that out.

It also reminded me of Svetlana Alexievich, though Alexievich rarely inserts herself into the narrative as Bruder perforce has to, and her subject matter is much rawer. The collapse of the Soviet Union and the impact on its people was far more gruesome and broad than what has happened in America. So far.

You can get the book here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Parasite

Parasite won the 2019 Best Picture Oscar, and three others: Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best International Feature Film, more than any other film that year. The other contenders were Ford v Ferrari, The Irishman, Jojo Rabbit, Joker, Little Women, Marriage Story, 1917 and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. I have not seen any of them. The Hugo that year went to a TV series and the Ray Bradbury Award to an episode of that same TV series.

It was the year of the pandemic so I don’t think I have seen any other films made that year except Knives Out, which I liked a lot, maybe a bit more than Parasite. (I think this is the least number of films that I have seen from any year since 1958.) IMDB users rate Parasite 3rd and 6th on the two rankings, respectable enough, with only Avengers: Endgame ahead of it on both.

Here’s a trailer.

Usually I run through the crossovers in terms of casting between each year’s Oscar winner, previous Oscar / Hugo / Nebula/Bradbury winners and Doctor Who, but here there aren’t any because the film is entirely Korean.

It’s the story of a deadbeat family in Seoul, the Kims, who manage to insinuate themselves into a rich household, the Parks, without revealing to their employers that they are all relatives. It turns out that there is a secret in the basement, and disaster ensues. It’s very funny and very well done. The Jungian theme of buried secrets is nicely executed. The audacity and sheer chutzpah of the Kims in pulling off their scheme can be seen as a small example of the class struggle, or a metaphor for any other sort of transformation if you like.

It’s great to see a completely local ensemble cast, with as many leading women as men, shining a light on a society that I don’t know very much about at all. English slang is freely used (as indeed it is in the streets of Brussels). European classical music is played. But there’s also the shadow of the nuclear rogue state whose frontier is only 40 km from the centre of Seoul. The Kims joke about it, but you know it’s serious as well.

I found the violence at the end of the movie as their scheme disintegrates rather jarring and not at all funny, after an hour and a half of solid laughs. So I’m bumping it down my ratings a bit. But otherwise this was a real find, and I’m ranking it between two other films about criminals, exactly a third of the way down my table, just below The Godfather and above The Sting.

Next up: Nomadland, of which I know nothing.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Green Book

Green Book won the 2018 Best Picture Oscar, and two others: Best Supporting Actor (Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley) and Best Original Screenplay. Bohemian Rhapsody, which I also enjoyed, won four Oscars that year, more than any other film. As well as Bohemian Rhapsody, the other contenders for Best Picture were Black Panther, which I have also seen, and BlacKkKlansman, The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born and Vice, which I haven’t. The Hugo that year went to Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, with Black Panther second.

The only other films I have seen from that year were Bohemian Rhapsody, First Man and the six Hugo finalists, which I did not comment on because I was the administrator of the awards. I voted for Black Panther, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, A Quiet Place, Sorry to Bother You, Annihilation and Avengers: Infinity War in that order. IMDB users rate Green Book 4th and 7th best film of the year, with no film ahead of it on both lists.

Here’s a trailer.

A couple of high profile returnees from previous Oscar-winners here. Viggo Mortensen, starring as Tony Lip, led the Army of the West to the gates of Mordor before being crowned King of Gondor as the second of two title characters in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. (He was of course in the two previous films of the trilogy as well.)

Mahershala Ali, here the other main character Don Shirley, was Juan in the first section of Moonlight two years ago.

Nick Vallelonga, the writer of the film and son of Tony Lip, appeared as a young wedding guest in The Godfather, 45 years before, and also has a minor speaking part here. (Tony’s father and father-in-law are played by his real-life brother and brother-in-law). I didn’t spot any other Hugo/Nebula or scar crossovers, let alone Doctor Who.

I rather enjoyed this. True, it’s the story of a white man’s education about racism, rather than an in depth exploration of racism from the point of view of the oppressed; but it’s also a witty buddy movie, of two men who are different in many ways coming to a joint understanding of their common humanity, and each having a humanising effect on the other. The mixture of music is sensitively done. The scenery all looks like Louisiana, because it all is Louisiana despite being set in various other places. Loses marks for Tony being a white saviour a little too often, and for not much agency for the women characters. But the banter between the two principals is crackling.

I’m putting it just over half way down my ranking, below It Happened One Night and above Slumdog Millionaire.

Next up is Parasite, of which I know nothing.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Shape of Water

Back after a bit of a break, this is the 90th post I have done on winners of the Best Picture Oscar. Only five more to go.

The Shape of Water won the 2017 Best Picture Oscar, and three others: Best Director (Guillermo del Toro), Best Original Score and Best Production Design. Four Oscars is a relatively low total haul for a Best Picture winner, but no other film did better that year. The other contenders for Best Picture were Get Out, which I have seen and which won the SFWA Ray Bradbury Award, and Call Me by Your Name, Darkest Hour, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, Phantom Thread, The Post and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. To my surprise, The Shape of Water came only fifth out of six in that year’s Hugos; I voted for it myself, though I also enjoyed Wonder Woman, which won.

The only films I have seen from 2017 are the Hugo finalists, which I ranked as follows from top to bottom: The Shape of Water, Wonder Woman, Star Wars: The Last Jedi, Get Out, Blade Runner 2049 and Thor: Ragnarok. IMDB users rank The Shape of Water 9th and 16th of the year’s films on the two rankings, which is not super high but is better on aggregate than any Oscar winner since No Country for Old Men, a decade previously. Blade Runner 2049 is top of one ranking, and Logan on the other. Other films ahead of The Shape of Water on both metrics are Get Out, It, John Wick: Chapter 2 and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri.

Here’s a trailer.

No actors had previously appeared in any Oscar-winning film, or in Doctor Who. (A lot of them are Canadian.) Doug Jones, here the amphibian creature, was also the main non-human in Pan’s Labyrinth, which won the Hugo and Nebula. (We know him also as Captain Saru in Star Trek: Discovery.)

Shout out also to Octavia Spencer, who was in the previous year’s Hidden Figures and got Oscar nominations for both performance, the first African-American actress to do so in consecutive years.

Set in Baltimore in 1962, this is about a humanoid amphibian captured by the US military and brought to a research centre in Baltimore for experimentation. One of the janitors, a mute woman played by Sally Hawkins, falls in love with him and engineers his escape, facilitated by her friend and colleague Zelda (Octavia Spencer), her gay artist landlord (Richard Jenkins) and a disenchanted Russian spy (Michael Stuhlberg). The baddies are the US military personified in the head of the base (Michael Shannon). In the end the amphibian man rescues Elisa, his saviour, from apparent death and she becomes like him and, we are told, they live happily ever after.

I found myself in a surprising debate on Facebook the other day as to whether The Shape of Water is science fiction or fantasy. I must say I had automatically assumed that it is science fiction. A non-human race, albeit from Earth and therefore not alien, getting mixed up with government-funded scientific research – it seemed to me an exact parallel with the Silurians and Sea Devils from Doctor Who, and nobody calls them anything other than science fiction. (Indeed in New Who it turns out that Silurians can have sex with humans too, or at least the females of each species can.)

But I see that the film is generally classified as fantasy, including by the makers, and I suppose the creature’s paranormal healing abilities, and the parallels with the non-human creatures of mythology, establish a case for that reading as well. It’s a live issue for me at the moment as we decide which books are and aren’t science fiction for the Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Anyway. I loved it. I wrote briefly in 2018:

I really liked the detailed paranoid portrayal of the world of 1962, the navigation of race, gender and disability, and the core question of what makes us human at the end of the day. It looks and sounds fantastic.

I will add to that that the acting and direction are also fantastic. There is a great contrast between the explicit but not at all erotic sex between base commander Strickland and his wife, and the erotic but not at all explicit sex between Elisa and the creature. And the music is memorable while also not being at all intrusive.

I’m putting this in the top 20% of my Oscar film rankings, just below Midnight Cowboy and above A Man for All Seasons.

Incidentally, my 3x great-grandfather‘s uncle, Richard Key Heath, had an office on the docks at Baltimore (specifically at the corner of Cheapside, now the intersection of Light Street and Pratt Street). However, The Shape of Water was entirely filmed in Canada and the docks here are not the Baltimore docks of the script but at Hamilton, Ontario.

Now that we’re up to the 90th Oscar winner, I’m going to split my ranking of previous winners by thirds. These are my bottom 30, with those from the last ten years in red:

90) Platoon (Oscar for 1986)
89) The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
88) Cimarron (1930-31)
87) Cavalcade (1932-33)
86) Wings (1927-28)
85) The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
84) All the King’s Men (1949)
83) Argo (2012)
82) Forrest Gump (1994)
81) Patton (1970)
80) Braveheart (1995)
79) American Beauty (1999)
78) The Artist (2011)
77) No Country for Old Men (2007)
76) A Beautiful Mind (2001)
75) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
74) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
73) Crash (2005)
72) Tom Jones (1963)
71) Gone with the Wind (1939)
70) The Departed (2006)
69) The Hurt Locker (2008)
68) Ordinary People (1980)
67) Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
66) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
65) Birdman (2014)
64) Annie Hall (1977)
63) Going My Way (1944)
62) The French Connection (1971)
61) My Fair Lady (1964)

And the middle 30:

60) Gladiator (2000)
59) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
58) Mrs. Miniver (1942)
57) On The Waterfront (1954)
56) The Godfather, Part II (1974)
55) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
54) Grand Hotel (1931-32)
53) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
52) Marty (1955)
51) The Deer Hunter (1978)
50) Rocky (1976)
49) Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
48) The Last Emperor (1987)
47) Titanic (1997)
46) Out of Africa (1985)
45) Dances With Wolves (1990)
44) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
43) Gigi (1958)
42) Slumdog Millionaire (2007)
41) It Happened One Night (1934)
40) You Can’t Take It with You (1938)
39) The Lost Weekend (1945)
38) Hamlet (1948)
37) From Here to Eternity (1953)
36) Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
35) Ben-Hur (1959)
34) The English Patient (1996)
33) Chicago (2002)
32) Spotlight (2015)
31) The Sting (1973)

And my personal top 30 of the first 90:

30) The Godfather (1972)
29) Unforgiven (1992)
28) 12 Years a Slave (2013)
27) Oliver! (1968)
26) The Apartment (1960)
25) All About Eve (1950)
24) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
23) Amadeus (1984)
22) Moonlight (2016)
21) Gandhi (1982)
20) West Side Story (1961)
19) A Man for All Seasons (1966)
18) The Shape of Water (2017)
17) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
16) Terms of Endearment (1983)
15) Shakespeare in Love (1998)
14) Rain Man (1988)
13) The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
12) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
11) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
10) Million Dollar Baby (2004)
9) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
8) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30)
7) Rebecca (1940)
6) Schindler’s List (1993)
5) Chariots of Fire (1981)
4) An American in Paris (1951)
3) The King’s Speech (2010)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

A somewhat polarising decade for me, with half of the winners in my top third, but four out of ten in my bottom third.

Slumdog Millionaire is the only one of the most recent ten based on a novel. The King’s Speech, Argo and 12 Years a Slave are all based on published biographies or autobiographies. The other seven were original material for the screen, though The Hurt Locker and Spotlight drew to a lesser or greater extent on historical events.

Only six and a half of the most recent ten were set in the United States of America, in .a variety of places: Hollywood (The Artist), Washington and Hollywood (Argo), mostly Louisiana (12 Years a Slave), New York (Birdman), Boston (Spotlight), mostly Miami (Moonlight), and Baltimore (The Shape of Water). The others are set in Mumbai, India (Slumdog Millionaire), somewhere in Iraq (The Hurt Locker), Tehran, Iran (Argo again) and London, England (The King’s Speech) – so two and a half in Asia, and one in Europe.

One of these last ten was set in the 19th century (12 Years a Slave), two mostly in the 1930s (The King’s Speech and The Artist), one in the 1960s (The Shape of Water), one in the 1970s (Argo), one stretching from the 1990s to the present day (Moonlight), two in the recent past (Spotlight and The Hurt Locker) and two in the present day (Slumdog Millionaire and Birdman). I’ll do a tally of historical periods when I get to the end of the whole exercise.

Next up is Green Book.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Moonlight (Oscar-winning film)

Moonlight famously won the 2016 Best Picture Oscar, despite a mistake during the ceremony when La La Land was incorrectly announced as the winner. That was the year that I was the administrator of the Hugo Awards for the first time, and we immediately took steps to minimise the risk of that happening during the ceremony in Helsinki. (In fact, one of the presenters did open the wrong envelope on the night, but the slip was caught before most people noticed.)

Moonlight won two other Oscars, Mahershala Ali as Best Supporting Actor (for Juan, the father figure in the first section) and also for Best Adapted Screenplay. Usually when an Oscar-winning film is adapted from another source I try to read it for comparison, but Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue doesn’t seem to have been published.

The other contenders for Best Picture were Arrival, which won the Hugo, and Hidden Figures, also a Hugo finalist; and Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, La La Land, Lion and Manchester by the Sea, which I haven’t seen. La La Land won the most Oscars that year (six).

Again, I have seen very few films from 2016 – I think none at all apart from the Hugo finalists. Moonlight is a very different film, and it’s difficult to give a comparative ranking, but I would put it at least equal with Arrival. IMDB users rate it only 18th and 29th on the two rankings, which are topped by La La Land and Deadpool, with Arrival and ten other films ahead of Moonlight on both lists.

Here is a trailer.

None of the actors had been in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula/Bradbury winning films. In fact, it’s striking how few of them had any film track record at all – IMDB lists this as the first screen appearance for more than half of the 25 named cast, and most of them have done little else. There are a couple of exceptions; Mahershala Ali as Juan is one of them, and so is the fantastic Janelle Monáe as his girlfriend Teresa. (Both were also in Hidden Figures the same year.)

Set mostly in Miami but with a few scenes in Atlanta, this is not the first Oscar winner with a Florida or Georgia setting, but it is the first to be filmed on the real locations – the outdoor scenes of It Happened One Night are rather obviously filmed in California, and the Georgia of Gone With the Wind is mostly in the studio.

It’s the story of a young gay black man growing up in Miami, told in three parts with three different actors playing the protagonist (10-year-old Alex R. Hibbert, 20-year-old Ashton Sanders and 25-year-old Trevante Rhodes). Adjusting for inflation, it is apparently the Oscar winning film that had the lowest production budget ever ($1.5 million at 2015 prices).

I thought it was very good. My biggest complaint is that despite its relative brevity (111 minutes, 16th shortest of 95 winners) it actually moves rather slowly at times. The story is a simple one told well. Although it’s fundamentally about the protagonist and the men in his life, the women get decent screen time too and Noemie Harris got an Oscar nomination as the protagonist’s mother.

I raised an eyebrow at first at the choice of music – a mix of classical-style orchestral and contemporary including rap – as I’ve seen other films get a bit unstuck by relying too heavily on the violins. But in fact I concluded that the balance is good. The fact that the orchestral music was composed specially for the film probably helps.

The first of the three sections is outstanding, while the other two are merely very good. We begin with bullied little boy Chiron being informally adopted by Juan and Teresa while neglected by his mother. There’s a particularly charming scene where Juan teaches Chiron to swim – apparently Alex Hibbert, playing Chiron, really could not swim so he is barely acting.

The middle section sees a teenage Chiron seduced and then betrayed by his childhood friend Kevin, and the end has the two of them meeting again after a decade and getting some closure. The whole thing is beautifully filmed and staged, and the cast, despite their inexperience, are entirely convincing. Definitely glad I got to this one.

I’m ranking Moonlight a quarter of the way down my table of Oscar winners, just below Gandhi but ahead of Amadeus. Next up is one that I have already seen, but will rewatch for the sake of context: The Shape of Water, which will take me up to ninety.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Spotlight (Oscar-winning film)

Content warning: references to child sexual abuse.

Spotlight won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2015 and only one other, Best Original Script. As previously noted, Mad Max: Fury Road won six Oscars that year as well as the SFWA Ray Bradbury Award. The other Best Picture contenders included Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian (which won the Hugo), and five that I have not seen, The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, The Revenant and Room.

2015 is another year from which I have seen very few films. Apart from those already mentioned, I have seen Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens, Terminator Genesys and the Belgian film The Brand New Testament. It is difficult to rank them, especially as Spotlight is the only one which is not science fiction or fantasy, but I think they are all pretty good and Spotlight is perhaps the most Oscar-y. IMDB voters put it 10th on one ranking and 24th on the other, with Mad Max: Fury Road and The Martian ahead of it on both rankings.

Here’s a trailer.

One of the male leads was also the male lead in last year’s Oscar winner, Birdman; is is Michael Keaton, journalist Walter “Robby” Robinson here and disappointed actor/superhero Riggan last year. It’s not the first time we’ve had a lead actor in consecutive Oscar winners, and in fact we had Clark Gable in three years out of six in the 1930s. (Mutiny on the Bounty, It Happened One Night and Gone With the Wind.)

Mark Ruffalo, the other male lead this year as journalist Mike Rezendes, was Bruce Banner / The Hulk in Hug-winning The Avengers in 2012.

Further down the list, Dennis Lynch has a bit part here as a courtroom clerk and was also one of Jack Nicholson’s henchmen in The Departed nine years ago, but I can’t be bothered to hunt down pictures.

The film is about the work done in 2001-2002 by the Spotlight team of journalists at the Boston Globe newspaper to expose the Catholic church’s systematic cover-up of the sexual abuse of children by priests, which resulted in the resignation in disgrace of Boston’s Cardinal Archbishop, Bernard Law. I thought it was pretty good. It is a hugely dramatic and sensitive topic, but the story concentrates on the shoe leather worn out by the team of journalists in pursuing the story, illuminating it with the details of the crimes that had been committed. It’s a subtle approach which works.

Inevitably I must note that there are practically no black speaking characters – there is a cop who I think gets three lines. Of course this is a story about white people being evil to other white people. But I was a bit surprised at just how white the film turned out to be. Boston is 25% African-American, and they can’t all be Protestants or Muslims.

There’s only one important woman character, Rachel McAdams playing journalist Sasha Pfeiffer, and she’s great as are the rest of the leads.

This is the second Oscar winner after The Departed to be set in and around Boston, and the second after Gentleman’s Agreement about journalism exposing a massive scandal. I liked it a lot more than either. Although I am not a journalist, I have hung around enough news rooms to get a sense of what they are like as working environments, and I am part of the information economy in the broader sense. I am sure that many of the actual details in Spotlight are not exactly as they happened in real life, but I liked the fact that the film portrays its protagonists as hard workers rather than heroes; there is a painful scene of reflection at the end where they discuss how and the Globe had sat on the story for years, despite having a decent lead.

The ongoing clerical child abuse scandals were the biggest factor that pushed me personally away from the Catholic church, and I am not alone. Fortunately this is not the result of any personal experience of mine. I was educated by nuns, who are in general less likely to be perpetrators than male priests, but as a sixth-former I did spend a week on an exchange visit to the Catholic school at Downside Abbey in Somerset. I felt then that it had a dreadful internal atmosphere of repression. The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse found that several monks at Downside had abused pupils, though as far as I can tell, none of them were teaching there at the time of my visit in 1984. However, a later headmaster burned a wheelbarrow’s load of confidential personnel files in 2012. I am drawing my own conclusions.

I thought that the film dealt with the subject sensitively. Abuse is at the centre of the story, but it is not sensationalised; key elements of the narrative also include the cover-up of the truth by the establishment, and the bitter disappointment of people like me who expected better from their spiritual leaders.

So, in general a thumbs up for this, and I am putting it a third of the way down my league table of Oscar winners, below The Sting but above Chicago.

Next up is Moonlight, of which I know nothing.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

Birdman won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2014 and three others, Best Director (Alejandro G. Iñárritu), Best Original Screenplay and best Cinematography. The Grand Budapest Hotel also won four Oscars that year. It was one of the other contenders for Best Picture, the others being American Sniper, Boyhood, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything and Whiplash. I have seen both The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything and to be honest I liked them both more.

It’s another year from which I have seen very few films. Apart from The Grand Budapest Hotel and The Theory of Everything, noted above, and Guardians of the Galaxy, noted two weeks ago, I’ve seen The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies, The Lego Movie and Annie. I liked Birdman more than Guardians of the Galaxy, and maybe about the same as the third Hobbit movie, but less than the rest. (Everything is special!!!) IMDB users rank Birdman 12th best film of the year on one ranking and 22nd on the other. Interstellar tops both rankings, and another nine films are ahead of Birdman on both.

Here’s a trailer:

Surprisingly, none of the cast had previously been in Oscar, Hugo or Nebula/Bradbury-winning films. There is a crossover with Doctor Who: Lindsay Duncan, who plays theatre reviewer Tabitha here, was Adelaide Brooke four years earlier in the Waters of Mars special.

It’s the third year out of four where the Oscar went to a film which looked at show biz (after The Artist and Argo), and I slightly suspect the Academy of rewarding story-telling about their own industry. The film is about a washed-up actor known for his superhero films from two decades earlier, trying to regain his credibility by staging a Broadway adaptation of a Raymond Carver short story, haunted by the Birdman, a superhero who he played on film many years ago, and by various family and professional insecurities.

I’m sad and surprised to write this about such a recent film, but I don’t think there’s a single African-American with a speaking part, and the Asian-Americans all have very minor roles – in a film set in New York in 2014.

The stage play in the film is based on a short story by Raymond Carver. This fascinating Forbes article by Jonathan Leaf mercilessly dissects the film’s flaws in passing, but also makes the case that the film fails to honour Carver by taking the wrong version of the story – his editor drastically revised it for book publication. The original New Yorker version is here, the revised version which is now in general circulation here, and I think Leaf is absolutely right that the original is much better.

I also have to say that the film as a whole didn’t really grab me. It shifts between three realities – 2014 New York, the stage play which is at the core of the plot, and the Birdman fantasy – and maybe I’ve just read too much sf not to find it all a bit glib. The central character is not very attractive and it’s difficult to sympathise with his (largely self-inflicted) problems.

The star is Michael Keaton, who of course had played Batman in a similar timeframe to his character’s Birdman. There’s a very good dynamic in his interactions with his girlfriend, played by Andrea Riseborough, his ex-wife, played by Amy Ryan, his co-star, played by Naomi Watts, his rival actor, played by Ed Norton, and especially his daughter, played by Emma Stone. Stone is in only a couple of scenes but really stands out.

The big gimmick is that it’s presented as if it’s been filmed in (almost) a single take, so the pacing is very intense, and we get a lot of close-up dialogue shots (while presumably props and scenery are being rapidly moved around behind the camera). Not having seen many of the other contenders, I can well believe that it deserved the Oscar for Best Cinematography. The music is also good, but was ruled ineligible for the Oscar on a technicality. (The Grand Budapest Hotel won that category.)

However, it’s not one of my favourite films, and I’m putting it in the bottom 25 of my list, between two other films set in New York about self-centred male protagonists, Annie Hall and Gentleman’s Agreement.

Next up will be the award-winning films of 2015: Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian and Spotlight.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

12 Years a Slave, and Twelve Years a Slave

12 Years a Slave won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2013 and only two others, Best Supporting Actress (Lupita Nyong’o) and Best Adapted Screenplay; Gravity got seven Oscars, the most for that year. There were eight other films in contention for Best Picture: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena and The Wolf of Wall Street. I have seen none of them, though Gravity is next on my list as it won both the Hugo and the SFWA Ray Bradbury Awards.

I have seen very few other films from that year. The only one I sat through with my full attention was The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug. I have been in the same room as small children watching Frozen. And I got halfway through Saving Mr Banks before something distracted me and I never got around to finishing it. IMDB users rank 12 Years a Slave 6th best film of the year on one ranking, but only 30th on the other. The Wolf of Wall Street tops both rankings, and Prisoners and The Man of Steel are both ahead of 12 Years a Slave on both. Of my limited sample of the year, I like 12 Years a Slave best.

Here’s a trailer.

A number of actors who appeared in previous award-winning films, starting with the star himself, Chiwetel Ejiofor, who in Solomon Northrup here and was the Operative in Serenity.

Not as high up the list, but Sarah Paulson is the gruesome wife of plantation owner Epps here, and was also in Serenity as Dr Caron, who gets gruesomely killed by the Reavers.

Dwight Henry, as Uncle Abram, and Quvenzhané Wallis, as Solomon’s daughter Margaret, return from last year’s Bradbury winner Beasts of the Southern Wild, where they played the key protagonists, father and daughter. Both films of course are mostly set in Louisiana. Unlike last year, they don’t share any scenes together this time.

Going further down the list, Scoot McNairy is Brown, one of Solomon’s captors, here; last year, with less facial hair, he was Joe Stafford, one of the fugitive diplomats in Argo.

And finally Garret Dillahunt, the treacherous Armsby here, was deputy sheriff Wendell in No Country for Old Men, again with much less facial hair but with a similar hat.

Apart from the above, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt also play significant roles, Cumberbatch and Fassbender as bad guy slaveholders and Pitt as the good guy who eventually gets Solomon freed. This was also Lupita Nyong’o’s first significant role as Patsy.

After many many entries in which I have castigated Oscar winners for their racism, including as recently as last year’s winner, Argo, this is a film entirely about the African American experience of slavery, which goes a little way towards expiating the Academy’s past faults. Closely based on an autobiographical account, it is the story of a free African-American from New York state who is kidnapped and sold into slavery in 1841, and endures twelve years of horrible treatment on cotton and sugar plantations in Louisiana before finally regaining his freedom by getting a message to friends back north. It is gripping stuff.

As usual, however, I’m going to start with the elements of the film that I did not like as much, before going on to its virtues. The thing I liked least about the film was unfortunately at its very core, and the film could not have been the same without it. The violence is graphic and disturbing. I had to fast-forward through the scene where Solomon is forced to flog Patsey (I had already read the book, so I knew what was coming; it’s 4 minutes and 46 seconds in a single take). It’s not possible to make an honest film about slavery without depicting grim, horrible and repeated violence, but it is not something I enjoy watching. Accounts from the set indicate that the actors were psychologically affected by it too.

My other (much less serious) case of side-eye is the casting of actors playing antebellum Americans. Benedict Cumberbatch is English. Michael Fassbender is Irish. Lupita Nyong’o’s family is from Kenya (the other side of Africa), though she also has Mexican citizenship and was educated in Massachusetts so perhaps it’s a less clear case (she still isn’t Southern, though). The star of the film, Chiwetel Ojiofor, is English and sounds totally London when not acting:

Maybe it’s not such a big deal, but I do think it is unfortunate that none of the lead Southern parts is played by a Southern actor. (And Chiwetel Ojiofor is playing a Northerner.)

Apart from that, the film has a good and important story to tell, and tells it very well. There is no sugar-coating the horrors of slavery, or its shameful endorsement by the forces of the state and the church. (Christianity does not come out well in this film.) There is little Hollywoodisation of the facts – the film has stuck pretty closely to the book it is based on (rare enough), and is probably a better film as a result (even rarer). Although Solomon is freed in the end because he was born a freeman, we are left in no doubt that the continuing enslavement of his fellow workers is an appalling injustice. It skips a little over the formalities of how he was freed, but we know what has happened.

I thought the cinematography and film editing were very good, and look forward to seeing Gravity which won the Oscars in those categories that year. And I don’t usually comment on this, because I am rather fashion-unconscious, but I thought the costuming was superb. I did scratch my head at first at how clean everyone’s clothes generally are, but goin back to the source material, I realised how important cleanliness is to people who have otherwise lost most of their dignity, and indeed how important it was for slave owners to put on a good show.

Unusually, the music is a mixture of diegetic and incidental. Solomon Northrup is a talented violinist, both free and enslaved. One of the most memorable scenes is the singing of the spiritual “Roll, Jordan Roll” by the slaves picking cotton.

The acting is top-notch. I grumbled a bit about the casting of Ojiofor, Nyong’o, Cumberbatch and Fassbender earlier. I have no grumbles about their performances, or about anyone else’s. The slaveholders are flawed human beings rather than caricatures. The slaves are individuals who have been placed in awful circumstances. It is of course a didactic story, but it’s at least as much a story about people.

I would have liked to place this higher in my rankings, but the violence really did squick me, so I’m putting it just over a third of the way down my list, in 26th place, just below Oliver! and above Unforgiven.

Next up in the list of Oscar winners is Birdman, but I’ll watch Gravity and Guardians of the Galaxy first.

I also read the original book on which the film is based, Twelve Years a Slave, by Solomon Northrup but edited by David Wilson. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The light admitted through the open door enabled me to observe the room in which I was confined. It was about twelve feet square—the walls of solid masonry. The floor was of heavy plank. There was one small window, crossed with great iron bars, with an outside shutter, securely fastened.

I have previously read a number of slavery narratives – Frederick Douglass, Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Ann Jacobs, the research of Rebecca Hall and the close observations of Fanny Kemble – and they are all interesting in different ways. Douglass and Jacobs were born into slavery, and Equiano born in Africa, so Northrup’s account is unusual in being that of a man born free in the USA but then enslaved. It’s also unusual in the relatively neutral presentation of the means and motivation of the slave owners – these are evil people, sure, but their evil is an inevitable consequence of the system.

I also found it really interesting in the precision of the geography where everything happened – I found myself googling the Williams slave pen in Washington DC, and Bayou Boeuf in Louisiana. Northrup is also very detailed and convincing about the precise techniques of employing slave labour for both cotton and sugar cane farming. And of course he is crystal clear about the brutality of the slavery system.

Not surprisingly, there have been Northrup denialists since 1853, just as there have been Anne Frank denialists since a century later. But the level of verifiable detail about named individuals and places is tremendously convincing. It’s also fairly short, and well-written (as is normal for any mid-nineteenth-century writer). You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Argo

Argo won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2011 and only two others, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Film editing; Life of Pi got four Oscars, the most for that year. There were eight other films in contention for Best Picture; I have seen Les Miserables, but not Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook or Zero Dark Thirty.

The Hugo that year went to The Avengers, and SFWA’s Ray Bradbury Award to Beasts of the Southern Wild. The other films that I have seen from that year are The Hobbit part 1, The Avengers, The Dark Knight Rises, Les Miserables, Brave, Wreck it Ralph and Total Recall. Also, I haven’t yet sat down and watched the whole film, but the Bollywood dance scene set in Dublin from Ek Tha Tiger is a classic.

Sorry about that. I’m just obsessed.

Anyway, back to Argo. IMDB users rate it 10th and 20th film of the year on the different rankings, which is not brilliant but not as bad as last year’s The Artist. Ahead of it on both rankings are Django Unchained, The Dark Knight Rises, The Hobbit 1, The Hunger Games, The Avengers, Skyfall and The Amazing Spider-Man. I would also have put it middle of the pack, but some serious issues came up that bump it to a much lower position in my ranking.

Here’s a trailer.

Returning from previous Oscar winners (and one Hugo winner): first and foremost, Ben Affleck, the star and director here, was Ned Alleyn in Shakespeare in Love.

John Goodman, who is prosthetics expert John Chambers here (the man who invented Spock’s ears, received a special Oscar for Planet of the Apes, and also did Richard Harris’s chest for that scene in A Man Called Horse), was producer Al Zimmer in The Artist last year.

From a previous Hugo winner, Alan Arkin is Hollywood producer Lester Siegel here, and was paterfamilias Bill in Edward Scissorhands back in 1990. (Like many of us, he had more hair then.)

Finally, the Canadian ambassador is played by Victor Garber, who is genuinely Canadian, but I flagged him up previously for his role as the only identifiably Northern Irish character in an Oscar-winning film – Thomas Andrews, the designer of Titanic.

This is the fairly incredible story, Based On True Facts, of how the CIA with help from Canada exfiltrated six American diplomats from Tehran shortly after the seizure of the US Embassy in 1979, by posing as a Canadian film crew looking for locations to make a film version of Roger Zelazny’s great novel Lord of Light.

There are lots of things to like here. But I was dismayed to discover from the memoir by Tony Mendez, the CIA guy behind it all, that the film is significantly more white and male than the real events on which it is based. One of the trapped diplomats, Cora Lijek (who prefers Cora Amburn-Lijek) is a Japanese-American in real life; here she is with the very non-Japanese Clea DuVall who portrays her in the film. (Not that the role is very demanding; the trapped diplomats are basically peril monkeys.)

The film has only one Canadian diplomat, Ambassador Ken Taylor, and his wife Pat, who is also Asian and at least is portrayed by Chinese-Australian actor Page Leong. But in real life, the chief immigration officer and deputy Canadian ambassador, John Sheardown, played a crucial role, along with his wife Zena who is from Guyana. Here she is hosting the fugitives in her house, including Cora Amburn-Lijek on the left.

Almost everyone involved in the story on the US government side was, of course, a white man. But in the book, Mendez is very clear that one memorable meeting – where he made a remark about abortion that is preserved in the screenplay – was chaired by “an undersecretary of state, a dignified woman who was very much in charge.” It took very little research to work out that this must have been Lucy W. Benson, the first woman appointed as US Undersecretary of State; she had left office before the diplomats were successfully extracted from Iran, but would have necessarily been involved with the initial approval process. In his book, Mendez refers respectfully several times to her interventions in the crucial meeting. But on screen, everyone in the room at that meeting is male.

According to Wikipedia, when asked how he felt about being portrayed by Ben Affleck, who is non-Hispanic, Mendez (who was born in Nevada) noted that losing his father when he was young meant he did not learn Spanish nor much of his father’s culture. He said, “I don’t think of myself as a Hispanic. I think of myself as a person who grew up in the desert.” Which is fine; but Affleck did not grow up in the desert either, and his character in the film tells us that he is from New York (Affleck is from Boston), rather than Nevada. A smaller point, but Mendez in real life has three children, a daughter and two sons. In the film he has only one child. Would you like to guess… Yep.

Tony Mendez (the real one) meets President Carter

So basically, Argo whitewashes the protagonist, whitewashes one of the two significant Asian women in the story, erases the most significant black woman in the story, erases the most politically important woman in the story, and even erases the protagonist’s daughter in favour of her brother. Affleck is entitled to make the film he wants to make, and to make the artistic choices that seem right for the story he wants to tell; I too have the right to point out that a lot of these choices go in one direction and not the other, and that the story he tells is much more about white guys vs brown guys than the True Facts that it is Based On. Whitewashing, and erasing women’s agency, are par for the course in Hollywood adaptations, but I can’t remember anything this extensive since All The King’s Men removed the entire African-American population of Louisiana.

It should also be noted that the Canadians dispute the centrality of the CIA to the story, arguing that a lot more of the heavy lifting was done in Ottawa and especially by their embassy in Tehran. And it’s also clear from Mendez’ published memoir that the last-minute hitches portrayed in the film – mission almost cancelled by cold feet in Washington, Iranian security deducing the plan and storming the air traffic control tower in a futile attempt to prevent the departure – are pretty fictional. I’m more forgiving of these changes; it’s a drama, not a documentary, after all. But the Canadians do have a right to feel miffed. (As do the shades of Roger Zelazny and Jack Kirby.)

Apart from that, I quite enjoyed it. I was particularly impressed that the opening sequence described the historic relationship between Iran and the United States in detail, giving context to the hostility that led to the capture of the embassy and the imprisonment of the hostages. Those who were around at the time will remember the apparent impotence of the Carter administration, and the impact of the crisis on his prospects for re-election; for Middle East experts, of course, the 1953 coup orchestrated by the CIA had already set the pattern for US involvement in the region for seventy years. After that opening sequence, the narrative of the film is very one-sided, with frothing Iranians vs innocent Westerners, but credit where it’s due – this political context was crucially missing from the Vietnam films I’ve watched in this sequence, and from The Hurt Locker.

The filmography is particularly good, with hand-held cameras among the crowd storming the embassy bringing it into focus, and the Hollywood, Washington and Tehran locations convincingly depicted. The music is suitable and not oppressive – in the hands of another director we’d have had dramatic chords all the way through to tell us what to feel.

A relatively small element of the film, but I was very struck by the story’s very cynical take on Hollywood, especially after last year’s dewey-eyed The Artist, which also featured John Goodman. The parallel between the make-believe world of Movieland and the deception of espionage is well drawn, and also Arkin and Goodman play the Hollywood scenes for just the right amount of laughs to offset the serious subject matter of the rest of the story.

Chambers: [after hearing plan to exfiltrate the house guests] So you want to come to Hollywood and act like a big shot…
Mendez: Yeah.
Chambers: …without actually doing anything?
Mendez: No.
Chambers: You’ll fit right in.

The film was enjoyable, but the erasure is so shocking that I am bumping it way way down my list to eighth last, just above All The King’s Men and below Forrest Gump.

I also read the original Wired article by Joshua Bearman which inspired the film (paywalled) and Mendez’ memoir Argo. The third paragraph of the Wired article is:

At first, the Lijeks hoped the consulate building where they worked would escape notice. Because of recent renovations, the ground floor was mostly empty. Perhaps no one would suspect that 12 Americans and a few dozen Iranian employees and visa applicants were upstairs. The group included consular officer Joseph Stafford, his assistant and wife, Kathleen, and Robert Anders, a senior officer in the visa department.

It tells much the same story as film and book, with maybe a little more emphasis on the experience of the fugitive diplomats.

The second paragraph of the third chapter of the grandly titled Argo: How the Cia and Hollywood Pulled Off the Most Audacious Rescue in History, by Antonio J. Mendez and Matt Baglio is:

From the beginning, the Carter administration faced a number of challenges. When Khomeini and the Revolutionary Council threw their support behind the takeover, there was basically nobody for the U.S. government to negotiate with. Carter tried sending two emissaries, but Khomeini refused to allow them to even enter the country. With overt diplomacy off the table, Carter then turned to his military planners, who gave him a similarly bleak assessment. If the United States were to launch a retaliatory strike, the Iranians might execute the hostages. The chance of rescue also seemed remote. Geographically, Iran was extremely isolated and the U.S. embassy compound was located in the heart of the capital city. It appeared there would be no way to get the rescuers in and back out without the Iranians knowing.

Strictly speaking, the film was based on the relevant parts of Mendez’ earlier memoir, Master of Disguise, which were then extracted, expanded and updated as the book Argo to capitalise on the film. This updating was not complete. John Chambers’ identity is concealed behind a pseudonym in the book, even though the film uses his real name and anyway he had been dead since 2001, so it hardly mattered by 2012.

But it’s a satisfying read, if obviously partisan. The book is clear about the fact that the protagonist (played by a white actor in the film) is from a Hispanic background, even if he doesn’t choose to identify in that way; that one of the fugitive diplomats was Asian-American (also played by a white actor in the film); that one of the key people on the Canadian side was a black woman (erased entirely from the film); that the senior US official who authorised the plan was a woman (erased entirely from the film); that the protagonist had a stable marriage with two sons and a daughter (rather than the broken relationship and one son portrayed in the film) and that the last-minute hitches depicted in the film are entirely fictional.

The book also gives useful context about Mendez’ previous experience of disguise and exfiltration, including various capers in Iran itself, in other Middle Eastern countries and in south-east Asia. He is frank about the shortcomings of the USA’s governmental wiring diagram and comments approvingly that the Canadians with a lighter government structure were able to make things happen much more quickly than the Americans. And even without the fictional last-minute threats to the success of the mission, the truth is quite dramatic enough. You can get it here.

Next up: that year’s SFWA Bradbury winner, Beasts of the Southern Wild.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Artist

The Artist won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2011 and four others, Best Director (Michel Hazanavicius), Best Actor (Jean Dujardin), Best Costume Design, and Best Original Score. There were eight other films in contention for Best Picture; I have seen Hugo, which was also confusingly a Hugo finalist, but not The Descendants, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Help, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life or War Horse.

The Hugo that year went to the first series of Game of Thrones (I was an early adopter of this idea) but I watched the film finalists as well: Hugo (as previously noted), Captain America: The First Avenger, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows – Part 2 and Source Code. The other four films that I remember seeing from that year are The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, The Iron Lady, Coriolanus, and half of the Iranian film A Separation.

IMDB users rate The Artist a lowly 43rd on one system and a dismal 125th on the other, compared against other 2011 films. We’ve had several others that were in the low 40’s on one ranking, but were much higher on the other – Cavalcade, Shakespeare in Love, Million Dollar Baby and Crash, I think. The 125th place ranking is by far the lowest we have had on either metric, and it’s not even like 2011 was a remarkably good year for films. I too was not hugely impressed by it.

Here’s a trailer.

I counted a couple of actors who had been in Hugo-winning films, and one who had been in a previous Oscar-winner (no crossovers with Doctor Who). The first is Malcolm McDowell, credited here as “the butler” (though his role is actually someone waiting for an audition) and the star of A Clockwork Orange 39 years ago.

Missy Pyle is the mistreated co-star Constance here, and eleven years ago was Lailari the Thermian in Galaxy Quest.

Finally, Beth Grant, Peppy’s unnamed maid here, was the equally unnamed Woman At The Farm House in Rain Man in 1988.

The Artist is entirely in black and white, and almost entirely “silent”, ie the sound track is mostly incidental music, becoming diegetic briefly about 31 minutes in and then for a longer spell at the very end. The last largely black and white film to win the Oscar was Schindler’s List (1993), and the last entirely black and white film to do so was The Apartment (1960, more than fifty years earlier). The only other silent film to win was the very first, Wings, way back in 1927.

The Artist is also generally cited as the only French film to have won an Oscar, but as a patriotic Belgian, I have to point out that the Belgian company uFilm were one of the co-producing companies, utilising a Belgian tax scheme, and the music was recorded in Flagey by the Brussels Philharmonic and the Brussels Jazz Orchestra. French Wikipedia calls it “une comédie romantique muette et en noir et blanc franco-belgo-américain” (surely “-américaine”?).

It is about two actors in the early days of sound in the movies; Paul Valentin, who is on his way down because (as we discover at the end) he can’t get hired for the talkies because of his French accent and because he’s generally an asshole, and Peppy Miller, on her way up as she catches the Zeitgeist. He falls on hard times, and she rescues him and finds him some redemption. He also has a cute dog.

I was not very impressed. Before I get to the specifics of plot and cinematography, it’s the most shockingly racist Oscar winner for years. Everyone is white, even in the crowd scenes, apart from some African warriors who turn up on a film set and later in Paul’s delusions. This really is not representative for Hollywood in 1930, or even for France in 2011 when the film was made.

Most of the plot elements have been done before and better (most notably in Singin’ in the Rain and All About Eve). I found it derivative and pastiche rather than integrated. The good bits were not new and the new bits were not very good. Paul is such an unpleasant person at the beginning that it’s difficult to be very pleased by his redemption at the end.

Another point that really grated is that although a lot of attention was paid to make-up for Jean Dujardin as Paul, and for the main women actresses, it wasn’t really done for the extras and it looks like what it is, a lot of twenty-first century people pretending that they are in the late 1920s and early 1930s. Two of the first five Oscar winners in the list below (The Broadway Melody and The Grand Hotel) are actually set in that time period because it was when they were made, and The Artist just sits wrong.

A further complaint is that Bérénice Bejo as Peppi is frankly too old for the part. As written, Peppy is clearly in her mid-20s at most; Bejo was 35 when the film was made. For the record, I have complained on this score in the past about men as well as women playing roles that were the wrong age (Laurence Olivier in Rebecca, Leslie Howard in Gone with the Wind; also Mary McDonnell in Dances with Wolves.) Bejo is a good performer in the role, but again it just sits wrong.

Despite not feeling attracted to the character, I did think that Dujardin gave a convincing portrayal of Paul.

And the dog is very cute.

Finally, as a patriotic Belgian, I did like the music.

I’m putting this a long way down my list of Oscar-winners, just outside the bottom ten, below No Country for Old Men, whose protagonist was more awful but more compelling, and above American Beauty which was much more skeevy.

Next up, from 2012: The Avengers (Hugo winner), Argo (Oscar winner), Beasts of the Southern Wild (Bradbury winner).

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

George VI’s last appearance; and The King’s Speech

I had planned to publish this post today anyway, after watching the film two weeks ago, but Thursday’s news makes it all the more appropriate. I’m not especially a royalist – I decided not to renew my British passport in 2017 – but there are some parts of the story that fascinate me on a human level. For instance, let me take you to the other end of the late Queen’s reign: here is the determinedly upbeat newsreel reporting the departure of Princess Elizabeth and Prince Philip for Kenya on 31 January 1952, the start of a world tour that was intended to last for months.

This was the last public appearance of King George VI. He looks, frankly, in awful shape. He had turned 56 the previous month, and lost a lung earlier in the previous year. There is dark apprehension on his face throughout the entire three minutes of the newsreel, culminating in his bleak gaze at the plane taking his daughter away from him at the end. His death less than a week later may have come as a shock to the wider world, but watching the film, and knowing what we do now, it’s difficult to avoid the impression that he himself was aware at some level that he would never see Elizabeth again.

My project of watching the Oscar-winning films in sequence takes us from the historical closure of George VI’s reign to the fictional treatment of its beginning, The King’s Speech won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2010 and three others, Best Director (Tom Hooper), Best Actor (Colin Firth) and Best Original Screenplay (David Seidler), tying with Inception for four statuettes on the night. There were nine other films in contention for Best Picture; I have seen Hugo finalists Inception and Toy Story 3, but none of the others, which were 127 Hours, Black Swan, The Fighter, The Kids Are All Right, The Social Network, True Grit, and Winter’s Bone. In fact, apart from the Hugo finalists, I don’t think I have seen any other films made in 2010.

IMDB users rank it 8th on one system but only 41st on the other. I must say that I love it, and, to cut to the chase, I am putting it right at the top of my personal ranking of Oscar winners, in third place, after The Sound of Music and Casablanca, but before An American in Paris. I like it much more than Inception, or any of the year’s other Hugo finalists.

There are several actors returning from previous Oscar winners. Colin Firth, the King here, was Kirstin Scott Thomas’s husband Geoffrey Clifton in The English Patient.

The other male lead, Geoffrey Rush, playing Lionel Logue here, was Philip Henslowe in Shakespeare in Love.

Guy Pearce is George VI’s brother Edward VIII here, and last year was Thompson, they guy who gets blown up at the start of The Hurt Locker.

The royal parents, George V and Queen Mary, both appeared in Doctor Who episodes that same year, 2010. Claire Bloom played the mysterious character in The End of Time, David Tennant’s swan song shown on Christmas Day 2009 and New Year’s Day 2010, who is identified by Russell T. Davies as the Doctor’s mother.

Michael Gambon, George V here, played the bad guy in Matt Smith’s first Christmas special, A Christmas Carol, shown at the end of 2010. He was also doing a lot of Dumbledoring around this time.

The only actor here to have managed both Doctor Who and another Oscar-winning film is Derek Jacobi, here Archbishop Lang, previously Senator Gracchus in Gladiator, and Professor Yana and briefly the Master in Doctor Who.

There’s a few more Doctor Who crossovers (Andrew Havill, David Bamber, Patrick Ryecart, possibly others) but let’s move on.

The film is about the relationship between Bertie, Duke of York, who had a difficult speech impediment, and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue, an unqualified Australian. Bertie unexpectedly becomes King George VI when his brother abdicates after their father’s death, and overcomes his stammer to unite Britain and the Empire in the face of Nazi Germany and the Second World War. It is loosely (see below) based on historical events, with the flow of history interrupted by the channels of artistic licence.

I love most of this film, but I don’t love Timothy Spall as Winston Churchill. In real life Churchill was not prime minister until after the film ends and was out of government for most of the period it covers; there is no way that he would have been at most of the events and conversations he is depicted as having here. Yeah, yeah, I know, you can’t make a movie about the (origins of the) Second World War without somewhat over-Churchilling it. But I felt that this went a bit far. On top of that, Spall’s depiction is pretty much caricature, compared even to Ian McNiece in that year’s Doctor Who, let alone John Lithgow more recently in The Crown.

My historian’s soul twitches at other truncations of history. Most obviously, the film starts in 1925 and ends in 1939, yet the princesses Elizabeth and Margaret do not age, and in general you feel that it is set over a period of weeks and months rather than years. As I discovered from reading the book, the relationship between the Duke/King and Logue was much smoother going in real life, with most of the tension between them invented for the screen. Of course, the makers of fictional drama do need to insert drama somewhere.

And Myrtle Logue knew about it all along, which means the single best and funniest scene of the film, when she comes home early to find the queen of England in her living room, is completely fictional. In reality the Logues started to attend palace events from 1928; by the time this scene is set, in 1937, she would have known the new queen for almost a decade.

Logue did attend and assist King George VI for his radio broadcasts during the war, so the climactic final speech at the start of the war on 3 September 1939, accompanied by the second movement of Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, with Logue conducting his articulation, is a bit closer to history. In fact the Director-General of the BBC was there too – those were the days when a DG knew how to fix a mike – but the music probably was not.

And that takes me to two of the things I particularly love about the film, the music and the cast. I am easily pleased by respectful and appropriate use of some of my favourite classical pieces; Beethoven’s Seventh has been mentioned, also his Emperor Concerto, Mozart’s Overture for the Marriage of Figaro and his Clarinet Concerto (though cutting off just before you get to the clarinet). Purists may sneer that these are just exactly the classical pieces that you would put into a film to easily please the crowds, but I am not ashamed of being pleased.

I’ve identified most of the key cast above, Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush, and so on, and they are all brilliant (with one exception, which has been noted). But the one I haven’t mentioned so far is Helena Bonham-Carter, whose great-grandfather was the prime minister who appointed Winston Churchill to his first cabinet job. She’s one of my favourite actresses anyway (not quite at the level of Juliette Binoche, but who could be?) and I think this is one of her absolute top performances, as the Duchess of York / Queen Elizabeth. Helena Bonham-Carter is less than a year older than me, so must remember the real Queen Mother well – she lived to 2002 – and has done a fantastic job of catching her mannerisms and investing them with more depth and character, if I dare say it, that the original may have had. (Freya Wilson as the young Princess Elizabeth is delightful too.)

Incidentally, Helena Bonham-Carter and Juliette Binoche appear never to have acted in the same film. Spooky or what?

I’ve saved the thing I like most about the film until last, because it’s much more personal to me. There is a big gulf between the disabilities in my own immediate family and the speech impediment suffered by George VI. But I have become acquainted with speech therapists, and I love the fact that the film makers didn’t tell a story about a man being “cured”; they told the story of him learning to live with disability, and getting on with his life, and coping with it as an extra burden when circumstances called on him to do extraordinary things. Sure, he was immensely privileged, but the film makes it very clear that that is not sufficient. Yes, I’m sometimes a sucker for sentimentality.

I read the book on which the film was loosely based less than ten years ago, so I’m not going to reread it this time. Its title is The King’s Speech: How One Man Saved the British Monarchy, which ever-so-slightly overpromises. The second paragraph of its third chapter is:

It was only by chance — and another of the spontaneous decisions that shaped his life — that Logue, by then employed as an instructor in elocution at the Perth Technical School, had found himself aboard the Hobsons Bay. He and a doctor friend had planned to take their families away for a holiday together. The Logue family’s bags were packed and their car ready to go when the telephone rang: it was the doctor.

In 2015, I wrote:

A nice little book to go with the film, though this is not a novelisation but a biography of Australian speech therapist Lionel Logue by his grandson (who never knew him) and a Sunday Times journalist. It’s a fascinating and intricate story of reverse migration – at a time when Australia was still absorbing newcomers from Britain, Logue and his family went in the opposite driection, to try and carve out a career in a new field for which he had no professional qualifications; and he succeeded, and what’s more, he made a lot of people’s lives better, one of whom unexpectedly became King of England.

The film, of course, telescoped the time line and injected dramatic elements to the story where they were needed. One of the most cheering things to find out was that Logue and the Duke of York were friends pretty much from the start; the plotline of the duke needing to be convinced that Logue’s therapy was worth trying was more or less invented for dramatic licence. It is, however, true that Logue was in attendance for the new king’s first radio speeches from Sandringham. It was also rather heartwarming to read their continued warm correspondence even after the king no longer needed Logue’s professional services.

I thought I spotted a Northern Ireland link, but it turned out to be bogus: in the mid-1920s the comptroller of the Duke of York’s household was one Captain Basil Brooke. Was this, I wondered, the future Prime Minister of Northern Ireland? Wikipedia seemed to indicate a gap in his political career in the mid-1920s which was just the right fit; also his highest military rank, achieved in 1920, was Captain. However, further digging revealed that the comptroller was a navy man (and in fairness an exalted naval captain is a more likely candidate for uch a post than a humble army captain), who was Rear Admiral Sir Basil Brooke by 1928. Wikipedia lists two Royal Navy officers of that name and roughly the right age, one born in 1882 and one born in 1895, but neither of them seemed quite right – certainly neither was a Rear Admiral in 1928. It turns out that the royal official was yet another naval Basil Brooke, the first cousin once removed of the future Northern Ireland Prime Minister, born in 1876 and living until 1945. His wife Olave is the subject of a painting by Australian artist George W. Lambert, The Red Shawl.

Next up in this sequence is the Oscar-winning film The Artist; the Hugo and Bradbury awards both went to 2011 TV shows rather than films (Game of Thrones and The Doctor’s Wife) so I’ll be skipping them.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Hurt Locker

The Hurt Locker won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2009 and five others, Best Director (Kathryn Bigelow, the first woman winner), Best Original Screenplay (Mark Boal), Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing and Best Sound Mixing. The other nominees for Best Picture were Avatar, The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, Inglourious Basterds, Precious, A Serious Man, Up and Up in the Air. Amazingly enough, I have seen none of them as yet (this was not a year when I watched the Hugo finalists). The Hugo that year went to Moon, and the Ray Bradbury Award (replacing the Nebula) to District 9.

kinopoisk.ru

IMDB lists it as a 2008 film, 13th on one ranking and 19th on the other. However Oscar procedures took it as a 2009 film. The other 2009 films that I have seen (so far) are Watchmen, Star Trek, Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, Coraline, and I think that’s it.

Here’s a trailer.

I found a couple of returnees from previous Oscar winners, the most visible being Ralph Fiennes as the short-lived British officer. He previously had the title role in The English Patient, and played the lead Nazi in Schindler’s List.

Anthony Mackie, now of course more famous as Falcon, is Sanborn here and was Shawrelle in Million Dollar Baby.

And we have a Doctor Who crossover: Sam Spruell is Contractor Charlie here, and was Swarm in last year’s Flux season of Who.

This is yet another war film. I knew nothing about it going in, but my heart sank as I realised that it was about American soldiers in Iraq; Platoon is my least favourite Oscar winner of them all, and I braced myself for another two hours and eleven minutes of sympathy for soldiers in an occupying army, unleavened by much consideration for the people they were shooting at. In fact it was not quite as bad.

As usual, I’ll start with the things I did not like about the film. As with Platoon, the presence of American soldiers in hostile territory is presented as an unfortunate accident of circumstances which puts our protagonists in danger, rather than the deliberate result of US government policy. (That’s as far as the script goes; but see below for a caveat.)

The US Army is shown as multi-ethnic, with Mackie’s Sanborn the second lead. But apart from the football-loving, DVD-selling kid, the only perspective that we get from actual Iraqis is that they are terrified of the Americans, or trying to kill them, or both. In reality, Iraq is a real country, with real people in it, but you would not know it from The Hurt Locker.

Given that it’s a film about bomb disposal, there is a lot of gore, including a particularly unpleasant scene with a booby-trapped corpse which may have been dramatically necessary but which I found very unpleasant to watch. Lots of shooting and a couple of beatings.

As with many (but not all) war films, it is very male. There is an Iraqi woman who is terrified of the Americans and says so loudly. The protagonist’s wife, played by Evangeline Lilly who deserves much better, appears in the last few scenes as someone for him to talk to. She has a total of one minute and thirty-seven seconds in the movie.

I’m sufficiently familiar with the methods of military bomb disposal to wince at the procedural inaccuracies as portrayed on screen. Sure, our hero is a maverick, but there are a number of basic safety things that we learned as kids in Belfast and were drummed into me again in Bosnia that you just don’t do, even as an expert. This spoiled some of the most suspenseful scenes for me.

What I did like, rather to my surprise, was the fact that the protagonist, Sergeant First Class William James as played by Jeremy Renner, is a real asshole. I think most of us have worked at some time or another with people like him – determined to be the hero, and/or the clown, and/or the rule-breaker. This transposition of a very familiar workplace dynamic into the horrors of a combat zone actually did a lot to humanise the story, more so perhaps than any of the other war movies that I have seen in this sequence. James is not a naïve young man sucked into a conflict that he cannot comprehend; he is a hardened and unpleasant veteran, who is transformed by the suffering that he witnesses, and sometimes causes.

I also really appreciated the filmography, and I am a little surprised that few other reviewers seem to have picked up on this. The whole thing was filmed on location in Jordan, literally next door to Iraq, and the urban scenes in particular conveyed what the script did not: a society devastated by conflict caused by outsiders, with a traumatised population doing their best to pick up the pieces. The desert scene with the British soldiers was a bit gratuitously Lawrence of Arabia, but well done for all that. The effects were also impressive, when I could bear to look at them.

So I’m putting it just below the three-quarter mark in my ranking of Oscar winners, in 63rd place out of 82, just below Ordinary People and just above The Departed.

The next Oscar winner is The King’s Speech, but before that I will look at District 9, Moon and Inception.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Slumdog Millionaire; and Q&A, by Vikas Swarup

Slumdog Millionaire won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2008 and seven others, Best Director (Danny Boyle), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography, Best Film Editing, Best Original Score and Best Sound Editing. The other films up for Best Picture were The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader, none of which I have seen. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to WALL-E.

Slumdog Millionaire is 4th on one IMDB ranking but only 26th on the other, with The Dark Knight, WALL-E and Iron Man ahead of it on both lists. Along with Hellboy II: The Golden Army, those were the Hugo nominees and I saw them all. Weirdly enough I watched Mamma Mia! for the first time also last weekend; apart from the, the only other 2008 film I have seen is The Duchess, based on half a chapter of Amanda Foreman’s book.

For the second time in a row (after No Country for Old Men), I found no credited actors in common with other Oscar-winning films, Hugo or Nebula winners, or Doctor Who; perhaps a bit less surprising in this case, as almost all of the cast are from India and have made their careers there, and the kids in the flashback scenes have in general not become actors now that they have grown up.

It’s a film about a boy from the slums who wins the Indian equivalent of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. As the film starts, he is arrested just before the final question is asked on suspicion of cheating, and explains his knowledge to a sceptical policeman, once they have finished torturing him, providing a series of flashbacks which tell the story of his life.

So, to start with the bits I didn’t like, as usual. I did not like the torture scenes. What can I say. I am squeamish. It’s weirdly out of tone with the rest of the film. They’re in the book as well, but there is a lot more violence in the original novel, so it’s less dissonant, and also you don’t have to watch it on paper.

It’s probably the least white film to have won an Oscar so far in my watching, but it’s very male. There is one female lead character, Latika, played as an adult by Freida Pinto. Again, the book is better on this – it memorably features a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.

It reduces Indian society to 1) the struggle of the poor and 2) the dynamic between the protagonist’s Muslim origins versus the forces of nationalism and/or the state, as specifically experienced in Mumbai. That’s an important story of course, but once again the book has a lot more diversity – it is set in New Delhi and Agra as well as Mumbai, and we encounter Indian Christianity, Sikhs, and quite a lot of stupid white people.

And I must say I twitched when the credits flashed up and there was only one Indian name (Loveleen Tandan) among a host of Brits in the senior production team. Somehow this mattered less for Gandhi, which was as much as anything about the relationship between India and the outside world, especially Britain. Slumdog Millionaire purports to be an Indian story about Indian people, but it isn’t.

Having said all that, I did generally enjoy the film. To be grim about it, the interrogation of poverty and social division is a crucial driver of the narrative, and is firm and not subtle. The story starts with the protagonist’s mother being killed in sectarian riots, and life in the slums is vividly depicted.

To be more positive, Dev Patel is great as Jamal, and all of the cast basically glow. I liked the comfortable bilingualism of the script (thanks to Loveleen Tandan apparently). I love quiz shows. I also love the interweaving of narratives where the past unexpectedly informs the present. It’s nice that a crucial plot point depends on The Three Musketeers, a novel which I like more than it really deserves. It looks fantastic and colourful in all the right ways. There is a happy ending. And the music is good.

I’m putting it just above the halfway point in my ranking of Oscar-winners, below It Happened One Night and above Gigi.

Next on my Oscar list is The Hurt Locker, which I have managed to maintain utter ignorance of since it came out (also in 2007, but it won a 2008 Oscar).

As noted above, I read the original book, Q&A, by Vikas Swarup. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

I don’t read the Maharashtra Times. In fact, I don’t read any newspaper. But I occasionally pilfer a copy from Mr Barve’s rubbish bin. It is useful for stoking the fire in the kitchen, and sometimes, when I have nothing else to do, I flip through its pages as a time pass before they are reduced to ash.

Some repetition below because I’ll be posting this section of the blog post independently to Goodreads and LibraryThing, in due course.

The central concept is the same as the film: a boy from the slums who wins a quiz show because his life experiences happen to mesh with the questions. The book is more violent. It has more sex and more female characters – as noted above, it has a faded actress, a washed-up princess, a sex worker with a heart of gold, and crucially the framing narrative has the protagonist telling his story to a woman lawyer rather than a male police inspector.

It’s also a broader look at India and its interactions with the outside world. The protagonist, Ram Mohammed Thomas, can pass as Muslim or Hindu, or indeed Christian; there’s a memorable chapter where he works for an Australian diplomat (the author is himself an Indian diplomat) and another where he makes a living taking tourists around the Taj Mahal. He also looks at the darker side of Bollywood, and of war heroes.

And at the very end there are a couple of pleasing plot twists, which I might have found rather contrived if the rest of the book had not put me in a generally good mood. You can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

No Country for Old Men (film and book)

This is the first in my series of posts about Oscar-winning films since I switched this blog to its new home; so an awful l0t of faffing with internal linked to make it all work a bit more nicely.

No Country for Old Men won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2007 and three others, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay, which both went to the Coen brothers, and Best Supporting Actor which went to Javier Bardem. The other films up for Best Picture were Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton and There Will Be Blood, none of which I have seen. The Hugo that year went to Stardust (the Nebula effectively skipped that year due to their weird nominations cycle).

No Country for Old Men is the top 2007 film on one IMDB ranking and second to Cleaner on the other. I saw very few films from that year, which was at the time that we were having the worst difficulties with our oldest daughter. The ones I have seen are Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Stardust, Alvin and the Chipmunks, the Zemeckis Beowulf, and 2 Days in Paris; we have Persepolis on the shelf but haven’t watched it yet (I love the books though). Here’s a trailer.

I usually start these reviews by looking at the cast’s other roles in previous Oscar, Hugo or Nebula winners, or in Doctor Who, but despite the big names on the list I didn’t find any. I have, however, had a close personal encounter with Javier Bardem, when I helped him set up the showing of his film “Sons of the Clouds” in the European Parliament; for a fleeting moment I appear in the crowd welcoming him.

It’s a film about an opportunist chap in Texas who tries to get away with a vast amount of stolen cash from a drugs shoot-out, and the nasty guy who comes after him, and the sheriff trying to catch up with them both. Frankly, it did not appeal to me; I think I admired it a bit without really liking it much. To go through my usual list:

Almost all the speaking characters are white men. Lots of Mexicans get killed without a chance to do anything much. Chigurh, Bardem’s character, is the epitome of evil and is coded as definitely foreign and probably not-quite-white. The law enforcers never do anything wrong. I found it quite shockingly racist. A separate but related issue: I was also left very unclear about Chigurh’s means and motivation.

I also did not care for the fetishisation of violence in the movie, the camera lingering over mutilated bodies and emphasising the brutal effects of the gunfire. For people who like that sort if thing it must be almost pornographic. It does not work for me.

A couple of women come into the story as spouses but have zero agency, though I always like seeing Kelly McDonald, a very long way from Edinburgh here.

I will say that the music is good, that all of the cast (especially Bardem) deliver good performances of their unpleasant and unconvincing characters, and that the landscape and atmosphere of Texas are very effectively evoked (which is impressive given that most of the film was made in New Mexico and Nevada).

But I’m afraid I’m putting this way down my list, just outside my bottom ten, between two flawed winners from a few years before, American Beauty (which is just that bit skeevier) and A Beautiful Mind (which is trying just a little harder to be pleasant).

As usual I tracked down the book and read it. The second paragraph of third chapter (in italics in the original, not sure how it will come through here) is:

This other thing I dont know. People will ask me about it ever so often. I cant say as I would rule it out altogether. It aint somethin I would like to have to see again. To witness. The ones that really ought to be on death row will never make it. I believe that. You remember certain things about a thing like that. People didnt know what to wear. There was one or two come dressed in black, which I suppose was all right. Some of the men come just in their shirtsleeves and that kindly bothered me. I aint sure I could tell you why.

This is one of the most faithful adaptations of book to screen that I have come across, and given that the book was originally written as a screenplay, it’s not very surprising. There are a few minimal changes, of which the most drastic is that a cute teenage hitch-hiker in the book (a female character with potential) disappears from the film. However the racism of the viewpoint characters is even less leavened in the book. You can get it here.

So, that’s another ten years of Oscars in the bag; only fifteen more to go. Since this time last year I was writing about the 1992 winner, and I’ve just covered the 2007 winner, I should wind this project up around this time next year, a bit more than five and a half years after I started in September 2017. I will skip Hugo and Nebula winners which I have written up in the last few years.

My totally definitive, authoritative and final ranking of the first 80 winners of the Academy Award for Best Picture (or equivalent) is as follows:

80) Platoon (Oscar for 1986)
79) The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
78) Cimarron (1930-31)
77) Cavalcade (1932-33)
76) Wings (1927-28)
75) The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
74) All the King’s Men (1949)
73) Forrest Gump (1994)
72) Patton (1970)
71) Braveheart (1995)
70) American Beauty (1999)
69) No Country for Old Men (2007)
68) A Beautiful Mind (2001)

67) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
66) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
65) Crash (2005)
64) Tom Jones (1963)
63) Gone with the Wind (1939)
62) The Departed (2006)
61) Ordinary People (1980)
60) Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
59) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
58) Annie Hall (1977)
57) Going My Way (1944)
56) The French Connection (1971)
55) My Fair Lady (1964)
54) Gladiator (2000)
53) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
52) Mrs. Miniver (1942)
51) On The Waterfront (1954)
50) The Godfather, Part II (1974)
49) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
48) Grand Hotel (1931-32)
47) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
46) Marty (1955)
45) The Deer Hunter (1978)
44) Rocky (1976)
43) Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
42) The Last Emperor (1987)
41) Titanic (1997)

40) Out of Africa (1985)
39) Dances With Wolves (1990)
38) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
37) Gigi (1958)
36) It Happened One Night (1934)
35) You Can’t Take It with You (1938)
34) The Lost Weekend (1945)
33) Hamlet (1948)
32) From Here to Eternity (1953)
31) Around the World in Eighty Days (1956)
30) Ben-Hur (1959)
29) The English Patient (1996)
28) Chicago (2002)
27) The Sting (1973)
26) The Godfather (1972)
25) Unforgiven (1992)
24) Oliver! (1968)
23) The Apartment (1960)
22) All About Eve (1950)
21) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
20) Amadeus (1984)
19) Gandhi (1982)
18) West Side Story (1961)
17) A Man for All Seasons (1966)
16) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
15) Terms of Endearment (1983)
14) Shakespeare in Love (1998)
13) Rain Man (1988)
12) The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
11) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
10) The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
9) Million Dollar Baby (2004)

8) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
7) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30)
6) Rebecca (1940)
5) Schindler’s List (1993)
4) Chariots of Fire (1981)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

This has not been the best decade, with half of the last ten winners in my bottom quartile, though I did like three of them enough to put them in my top 20%.

Seven of the most recent ten were set in the United States of America, two of them in Los Angeles (Crash and much of Million Dollar Baby) and a third elsewhere in California (American Beauty), with none in New York, which had traditionally been the main setting for US-based plots in Oscar-winning films – the closest we get is Princeton, in A Beautiful Mind. The other three were set in Tudor England, Ancient Rome and Middle-Earth.

No Country for Old Men is the only one of the last ten based on a novel. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King is based on a third of a novel, Million Dollar Baby on a short story, The Departed is a remake of an earlier film, Chicago is based on a musical, Gladiator and A Beautiful Mind on factual books, and the other four were original screenplays. Again this is very different from the previous seven decades, in which novels predominated as source material, bolstered by written fiction, apart from the outbreak of musicals in the 1960s (and one of those was based on a novel).

Next up is Slumdog Millionaire, but before that, Stardust and WALL-E. And it’s Hugo season so I am taking the past winners more slowly.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Departed

The Departed won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2006, and three others: Best Director (Martin Scorsese), Best Film Editing (Thelma Schoonmaker), and Best Adapted Screenplay Writing (William Monahan). The other Best Picture nominees were The Queen, which I have seen, and Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima and Little Miss Sunshine, which I haven’t. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to Pan’s Labyrinth.

The Departed ranks 2nd and 4th on the IMDB lists of 2006 films, with The Prestige ahead of it in both cases (I really must try and see that). Others from that year that I have seen: Casino RoyaleHappy FeetThe Last King of ScotlandThe Queen, as mentioned;  Charlotte’s Web; the curiously genderflipped Barnyard; and Starter for 10, which is probably my favourite. Here’s a trailer.

A fair number of big names here, starting with Leonardo Di Caprio, who we last saw in Titanic (1997) as Jack; here again he is the top billed male actor, double agent Billy.

After a long interval, we get Jack Nicholson again, here crime lord Costello, three decades earlier the randy astronaut in Terms of Endearment (1983) and the hero McMurphy in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest .

Martin Sheen is of course forever President Bartlett for me. But here he is police captain Queenan, a quarter century after his role as a reporter in Gandhi (1982).

There are a couple of others – David O’Hara was in Braveheart, Mark Rolston was in Aliens, I’m sure there are more – but I don’t have the energy to track them all down now.

This I think the first Oscar-winner to be set in Massachusetts, or even in New England. (The most popular location for Oscar-winning films is New York, though we haven’t had one there since Kramer vs Kramer). It’s a crime story (we’ve had more of those), in which the a police agent played by Leonardo di Caprio is planted by Sheen’s character inside the criminal organisation led by Nicholson’s character, while another character played by Matt Damon does the same in reverse, as Nicholson’s character’s mole within the police.

I admired this film without really liking it all that much. As usual, starting with the points against: it’s two and a half hours long, and I really have better things to do with my weekends. It’s very much a white men’s film – in the credits, the first woman credited is in seventh place (Vera Farmyga, whose character’s purpose is to get romantically engaged with both the leads); and the first non-white actor is in eighth place, Anthony Anderson, leading the alphabet of second-stringers.

Lots of people get killed. None of the characters is especially likeable. The Boston Catholic community is nicely depicted as a backdrop, though you would get the idea that all Irish-descended Bostonians are either cops or criminals (or both).

The central theme of identity, involving two double agents operating in opposite directions, is fascinating and well executed. John Le Carre developed a whole subgenre about spies with conflicted loyalties, well established by the time Scorsese transplanted it to Boston cops.

Eveyone who has seen the Hong Kong film this was based on, Infernal Affairs, tells me that the original is better. Unfortunately I have not been able to track it down, but I’ll keep looking.

Next up, Pan’s Labyrinth and No Country for Old Men.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Million Dollar Baby (aka Rope Burns), by F.X. Toole

Second paragraph of third story (which as it happens is “Million Dollar Baby”, on which the film was based):

The voice of Frankie Dunn pierced. In the same sentence it could climb high and harsh or loop sweet as a peach, like Benny Goodman playing “Body and Soul,” or go on down deep as a grizzly’s grunt. It could move sideways on you and then curl back on itself, but always the voice pierced the mind with images that stuck, because the sound out of the old man painted pictures that became part of you, made you hear his voice when he wasn’t even there. When Frankie Dunn told a fighter how to move and why, the fighter could see it through Frankie’s eyes, and feel it slip on into his own flesh and down into his bones, and he’d flush with magic of understanding and the feeling of power. Some called the old man Doc, some called him Uncle Frank. Old-time black fighters and trainers called him Frankie Dunn Frankie Dunn, repeating his name with a nod or a smile. Frankie loved warriors.

In my sequence of Oscar/Hugo/Nebula film-watching, I generally try and read the books on which films are based in the week and write them up at the same time. This collection of short stories is long out of print, and it took me a lot longer to source than I had expected, so I’m finally getting around to writing it up now, some time after watching the film.

The story of the book is a little sad: the author, whose real name was Jerry Boyd, published the book in 2000 at the age of 70, after many rejections from publishers, and died in 2002, just a few weeks after learning that Clint Eastwood wanted to make a film based on it. The original DVD release included paperback copies of the book in every box (which makes it really weird that it was so difficult to track down a copy). But there you go.

These are six nice short pieces, all of them acutely observed from the perspective of an Irish-American who lived in California. Being stories about boxing, they are mainly about men, with the obvious exception of “Million Dollar Baby”. Most of them have rather downbeat endings; in one memorable case, almost all of the main characters die horribly.

There is a lot of fighting; it’s interesting that the Clint Eastwood film cuts Maggie’s brother from the plot of “Million Dollar Baby”, therefore also losing the crucial physical confrontation in a hospital car park between him and Clint’s character Frankie. But there is a lot of character and human observation as well.

Personally, I’m not at all a fan of fighting, but this did bring me a certain amount of empathy with those who are. If you are lucky, you can get it here.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Crash

Crash won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2005, and two others, Best Original Screenplay and Best Film Editing, losing in another three. Three is a rather low tally of Oscars for a Best Picture winner, and three other films also won three Oscars that year, Brokeback Mountain, King Kong and Memoirs of a Geisha. The Hugo and Nebula that year both went to Serenity.

As mentioned last time, IMDB counts Crash as a 2004 rather than 2005 film; users rate it 16th on one ranking and 40th on the other for that year. The other 2005 Best Picture nominees were Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck and Munichhave seen, it’s mainly sf: Batman Begins, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, Madagascar, Serenity, The Hitch-hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, possibly The Curse of the Were-Rabbit though I’m not sure, possibly also the Icelandic Beowulf and Grendel. Johnny Depp as Willie Wonka left the most enduring impression. Here’s a trailer for Crash with Barber’s bloody Adagio for Strings yet again:

A stellar cast, but only two of them have been in previous Oscar or Hugo winners. Michael Peña is Daniel the locksmith here (almost the only interesting character in the film) and was also (with more hair) Omar in Million Dollar Baby.

A bit more obscurely, Alexis Rhee is Kim Lee here, and twenty-two years ago in Blade Runner she was the woman on the walls.

Crash is about the intersecting lives of a bunch of people in Los Angeles, and about racism. It thinks its heart is in the right place, and the cast are all people who know (or ought to) what they are doing. It left me rather cold. I didn’t think it was completely awful, though a lot of people really do think it was completely awful, and one of the worst Best Picture winners ever, if not indeed the worst (see two such lists here and here). I’ll give you in evidence Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I don’t think there’s a single human being in Crash. Instead you have arguments and propaganda violently bumping into each other, impressed with their own quirkiness. (“Hey look, I’m a black carjacker who resents being stereotyped.”) But more than a bad film, Crash, which won an Oscar (!), is the apotheosis of a kind of unthinking, incurious, nihilistic, multiculturalism.

Clarisse Loughrey in the Independent:

The film’s treatise on modern racism avoids anything that might make its audience feel uncomfortable or, heaven forbid, complicit. Crash’s characters aren’t relatable. They’re limp puppets, posed in various moral scenarios, with all the unsubtle airs of an afternoon school special.

Sean Mulvihill:

…resoundingly ham-fisted in everything that it does, carrying its story of overt racism with all the nuance of a cheap political cartoon … Crash wallows in countless crude racial stereotypes without anything resembling social commentary – Asians are bad drivers, not all Latinos are Mexican, black people don’t like be viewed as criminals even when they are violent criminals, and the job of a police officer will make you a racist even if you start out as an idealist.

Alex Russell has devoted an entire series of blog posts to watching every Best Picture winner, and deciding if they were better or worse than Crash. Spoiler: he still thinks Crash is the worst.

The first thing you notice when you watch Crash is just how quickly it is… stupid. Calling a movie “stupid” is a simple criticism that should generally be reserved for much more base subject matter, but Crash starts off with an onslaught of some of the most asinine and insulting dialogue ever put to film. The first five minutes has dozens and dozens of slurs. You are struck, as a viewer, at how this not only isn’t the best movie of 2004, but how it barely feels like a movie at all. It feels more like a play written in a creative writing class full of teenagers.

Paul Haggis, who directed the film, is not exactly vigorous in its defence (in a 2015 interview whose original text is no longer online, but these words were widely quoted):

Was it the best film of the year? I don’t think so. … You shouldn’t ask me what the best film of the year was because I wouldn’t be voting for ‘Crash,’ only because I saw the artistry that was in the other films. … Is it a great film? I don’t know.

So that’s what other people don’t like about it. I’ll sum up what I didn’t like about it:

The music. I love a good soundtrack, and I don’t usually notice a bad soundtrack. But here the swelling of angel choirs in the background means you’re about to see something Very Significant happening on screen. It’s doing its best to make up for:

The cinematography. I’m astonished that this won an Oscar also for Best Film Editing. At several crucial moments, the camera angles are so badly chosen that it’s not at all clear what is going on. Some find that enigmatic and mysterious, but I found it incompetent.

The racism. For a movie that’s supposed to be all about consciousness-raising, there are a lot of sour notes. Most of the characters are, as noted above, complete stereotypes. Why is it the Iranian character who attempts an irrational vindictive revenge murder? Why does it come as a surprise to Thandie Newton’s character that the police sometimes do bad things to black people?

The acting. Apart from Michael Peña, what are any of them doing? Especially Sandra Bullock?

The weather. Snow? It’s symbolical.

At the same time, however ham-fisted the presentation and leaden the acting, it’s not actually boring, and I did keep watching to see how all the various different plotlines would tie up (though I sighed in disbelief when it turns out who the long-lost brother is). I am putting it four fifths of the way down my own rankings, just below Tom Jones and above The Greatest Show on Earth.

Next up is The Departed, of which I know nothing; before that, Serenity and Howl’s Moving Castle.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Million Dollar Baby

Warning: this review contains massive spoilers for a film that came out in 2004

I mean it. If you have not seen Million Dollar Baby, and think you might watch it some day (and I really recommend it, one of the best Best Picture winners), stop reading now.

Anyway.

Million Dollar Baby won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2004, and three others: Clint Eastwood for Best Director, Hilary Swank for Best Actress and Morgan Freeman for Best Supporting Actor. The Aviator actually won five Oscars on the night, and I might make that my next viewing. The Oscar for Best Picture the following year was won by Crash, which was actually released before Million Dollar Baby. I don’t make the rules, I just report them. The Hugo that year went to The Incredibles, and the Nebula to the previous year’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

The other Oscar nominees were The Aviator, Finding Neverland, Ray and Sideways, and I haven’t seen any of them. The only other films from 2004 that I have seen are The Incredibles, as noted last weekEternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, though I fell asleep half way through; Harry Potter and the Prisoner of AzkabanDownfallBefore Sunset, the sort of romance that I love; The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, many many times; and the Steve Coogan / Jackie Chan Around the World in 80 Days, which is truly dismal, including Arnold Schwarzenegger as an oriental prince. IMDB users put Million Dollar Baby 4th on one ranking but only 43rd on the other, one of the weirdest splits I have seen. Personally, I would rank it alongside Downfall as my favorite film of the year, just ahead of Before Sunset. (Crash, by the way, is 16th on one ranking and 40th on the other.) Here’s a trailer, which impressively barely hints at the denouement.

 

There are a couple of actors from previous Oscar Winners. Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman are the two male leads here, as  and were also the two male leads twelve years ago in Unforgiven, which like Million Dollar Baby was directed by Eastwood.

Freeman of course also drove Miss Daisy three years earlier.

A much more obscure returning face is stuntman Ted Grossman, most famously the first person killed by the shark in Jaws, who is one of the ringside doctors here, was a Peruvian porter in Raiders of the Lost Ark and a deputy sheriff in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. None of the shots I could get of him was much good.

The film is about a woman boxer, Hilary Swank’s Maggie, and her relationship with Eastwood’s Frankie, an embittered Irish-American boxing trainer who has lost all the women in his life, with commentary and sidekickisms from Freeman’s Scrap. Fighting really is not my thing, but I know a little about women fighters in that my old friend Rosi Sexton, who I have known since she was 16, was at one stage Britain’s leading woman Mixed Martial Artist (or cage-fighter if we want to be casual) – this after her first-class degree in maths from Cambridge and her computer science PhD. She retired from fighting in 2014 and was the runner-up in the 2020 leadership election of the Green Party of England and Wales. So any preconceptions I may have once had about professional fighting being an exclusively male preserve were long since knocked out of me by her (though not literally). Rosi was one of two women fighters profiled in a BBC documentary in 2009.

 

I’ll just also note that Frankie is learning Irish (“Gaelic”), which is one of the relatively few times we hear a language other than English in any Best Picture winner (having said which, we recently had Hungarian in Chicago, and Elvish in The Return of the King) and I suspect the only time we will hear Irish in any Oscar-winning film at all. However, Eastwood’s/Frankie’s pronunciation is really terrible; he seems to be learning exclusively from a book, without any coaching from people who actually speak the language; and his stage name for Maggie, “Mo Cuishle”, is wrong – it should be “Mo Chuisle”, though the “s” is indeed pronounced “sh”.

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OK, now we get to the massive spoilers. You have been warned.

The first two thirds of the film are about the gradual maturing of the relationship between Frankie and Maggie as she erodes his reluctance to become her trainer and manager. It’s beautifully done. The chemistry between Eastwood and Swank is among the best depictions of a quasi-parental relationship that we have seen in one of these films. The world of boxing is shown unromantically, including through a number of subplots involving other boxers and managers, and we cheer for Maggie as she overcomes these obstacles and achieves success in various places (which, er, all look rather similar but with different decorations on the walls to try and suggest that they may be in different parts of America or Europe). If the film only consisted of the first hour and a half, it would still be a lovely character study.

But two-thirds of the way through, the story takes a massive swerve. In the most important fight of her career, Maggie’s neck is broken by a foul blow from her opponent, and she is paralysed from the neck down for the rest of her life. Frankie continues to care for her, and eventually, at her request, assists her death. The two threads here are Maggie’s courageous accommodation to her new circumstances (incluing a dramatic showdown with her deadbeat biological family), and Frankie’s internal debate about euthanasia (there’s a tremendous scene with a priest, who Frankie has been baiting throughout the film). Here in Belgium, euthanasia has been legal since 2002, but we are ahead of the game. Legal or not, this is an awful subject, and although of course a film treatment needs to sensationalise it a bit for the drama, I felt that Eastwood carried it off tactfully and well here.

I got a lot more out of Million Dollar Baby than I was expecting to, and I’m putting it in my top ten Oscar winners, just ahead of last year’s Return of the King and behind The Bridge on the River Kwai. Next up is Crash, of which I know nothing except that the screenplay is by the same writer, Paul Haggis.

The film is based on one or possibly several short stories in a book by F.X. Toole, which I have had difficulty in getting hold of – it is long out of print, and new EU import regulations complicate the process of acquiring it from most of the English-speaking world. I have ordered it, and will report back when I do read it.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

So, my sequence of Oscar-winning, Hugo-winning and Nebula-winning films has intersected, uniquely, with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It won eleven Oscars altogether, tying with Titanic and Ben-Hur for the most in history; in fact it did not lose in a single category in which it was nominated, thus also exceeding the nine-strong clean sweeps of Gigi and The Last Emperor. As well as Best Picture, it also won Best Director (Peter Jackson), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Original Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound Mixing, Best Art Direction, Best Makeup, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, and Best Visual Effects. It did not get a single nomination in any of the acting categories (the tenth Best Picture winner out of 76 where this was the case).

The other Oscar nominees were Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mystic River and SeabiscuitFinding Nemo and Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which I have seen, and 28 Days Later and X2: X-Men United, which I haven’t. Because of the (then) weird Nebula rules, the other contenders for Best Script were all from the following year, 2004: The Incredibles, The Butterfly Effect and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless MindTerminator 3: Rise of the Machines, Underworld and American Pie: The Wedding. I would very happily put The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King at the top of my list for the year, as Hugo voters, Nebula voters and Oscar voters all did.

 

We have the Hugo figures, and I can tell you that it got nominations from more than 82% of those who nominated in this category, and romped home on the first count of the final ballot with 69% of the first preferences. I don’t know of any other winner in any category that has done quite as well for the regular Hugos (for the Retros there have been some pretty skewed results).

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I’m not going to go through the returnees from previous Hugo, Nebula or Oscar-winning films because it’s the same as last time. (There are a couple of actors in RotK who were not in the previous films, but don’t have a track record with other award winners either.)

I love this film too. It has a lot packed in – as noted last time, the last 20% of Book 3 and the last 30% of Book 4 were not in The Two Towers and were saved for here. The result is that we lose some stuff – Houses of Healing, Scouring of the Shire, various other bits and pieces. To be honest we can live without them. The major innovation in the film is the rift in the relationship between Frodo and Sam. Like a lot of the additions made by Jackson, the fairly blatant goal is to create more dramatic tension. But unlike the temporary mislaying of Aragorn or the flip-flopping of Faramir on whether to bring the Ring to Minas Tirith, this actually works very well; I would even go so far as to say that by making Frodo a somehat more flawed character than he is in the book, the story becomes more interesting. And the fact that it’s done as a result of Gollum’s manipulation makes him more interesting too.

Incidentally this is the only time since the Hugo Dramatic Presentation category was split that both awards went to the same franchise, Gollum winning the Short Form category for his MTV acceptance speech.

 

I’m really tired today because of weird and disreputable events happening in DC, so I won’t go on at great length about how much I love this film. But I will give you two bits that I particularly love. F, who has not read the book, was completely transfixed by the scene with Shelob. So was I, and I’ve been having nightmares about it roughly since I was nine. It’s a superb bit of animation.

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And when I first saw it in 2003, I was overwhelmed by the lighting of the beacons. It’s not quite as good on the small screen as it was in the cinema, but still pretty good.

 

And the ending gets ever more bittersweet as the years pass.

Also I love the music.

In my running tally of Oscar-winning films, I’m putting this in my top ten, below The Bridge on the River Kwai and above One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. I’m putting it even higher up my list of Hugo and Nebula winners, in second place, behind Alien and ahead of the original Star Wars. Next up are The Incredibles (Hugo winner – there was no Nebula for any film made in 2004) and Million Dollar Baby (Oscar winner)

Of course I went back and finished rereading the book. The second paragraph of the third cahpter of Book 5 is:

Day was waning. In the last rays of the sun the Riders cast long pointed shadows that went on before them. Darkness had already crept beneath the murmuring fir-woods that clothed the steep mountain-sides. The king rode now slowly at the end of the day. Presently the path turned round a huge bare shoulder of rock and plunged into the gloom of soft-sighing trees. Down, down they went in a long winding file. When at last they came to the bottom of the gorge they found that evening had fallen in the deep places. The sun was gone. Twilight lay upon the waterfalls.

Again, I practically know it by heart, but I had forgotten the funny bit with the senior healer in the Houses of Healing. And again the ending hits me harder each time I read it. A welcome re-engagement with a dear old friend.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Chicago (2002)

Chicago won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2002, and five others: Best Supporting Actress (Catherine Zeta-Jones, beating fellow cast member Queen Latifah), Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing and Best Sound. It lost in another six categories, two of them to Roman Polanski’s The Pianist. That year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, also won two Oscars that year.

The other four Oscar nominees were The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, which I have of course seen, and Gangs of New York, The Hours and The Pianist, which I haven’t. This was a year when I was settling into a new job and preparing for our third child’s arrival; the only other 2002 films I have seen are Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets, Minority Report, Die Another Day, Men in Black II, Austin Powers in Goldmember and Scooby Doo. Naming no names, I know someone who watched Scooby Doo in late pregnancy and laughed so much that she went into labour. I think they are all entertaining enough but none stands out for me. IMDB users rank Chicago 25th on one ranking and 28th on the other, behind most films mentioned above. Here’s a trailer.

 

Slightly surprisingly, none of the cast had been in previous Oscar-winning or Hugo/Nebula-winning films, or (less surprisingly) in Doctor Who.

It is a story about murderesses awaiting trial in 1920s Chicago. In some ways it is a blast from the past. Four of the eight winners from 1961 to 1968 were musicals; this is the first one since then. Seven of the eight from 1967 to 1974 were about crime and law enforcement; the only other one since then was The Silence of the Lambs.

I have a bad case of COVID, so I’m not going to go into my usual depth. I did enjoy Chicago. However the erotic and sexualised dancing was somewhat lost on me last week; I think my libido has not been lower since I hit puberty. I was really struck at how well the old classics All That Jazz and Razzle-Dazzle were integrated into the script, and then discovered that both songs actually originated with the 1975 stage show of Chicago. They must have penetrated popular culture really quickly; I am sure I remember Morecambe and Wise doing a routine to at least one of them, which must have been very soon after. The West End show ran from 1979 to 1980.

 

The other song that really made me sit up was the Cell Block Tango:

 

Renee Zellweger as the main character gets only one really good song, with Catherine Zeta-Jones:

 

Also shoutout to Queen Latifa, Lucy Liu and John C. Reilly for their roles.

Sure, Toronto doesn’t look much like Chicago, and one may object that in real life, no woman was executed by the state of Illinois between 1845 and 1962. But that’s beside the point. The film is not at all subtle in calling out the celebrification of criminals and the flaws of a justice system driven by showmanship. Watching it in the week of the Kyle Rittenhouse verdict, I felt the point just as relevant today as in 2002, or when the musical came out in 1975, or when the original play was written in 1926.

I’m putting it about a third of the way down my ranking, just below that other Chicago-set film, The Sting, and ahead of The English Patient.

Next up is the only film to win Oscar, Hugo and Nebula. (But first, The Two Towers.)

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

A Beautiful Mind

A Beautiful Mind won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2001, and three others: Best Director (Ron Howard), Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly as Alicia) It lost in four categories, two of them to that year’s Hugo and Nebula winner, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which also won four Oscars that year.

The other four Oscar nominees were The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, which I have of course seen, and Gosford Park, In the Bedroom and Moulin Rouge!, which I haven’t. The other 2002 films I have seen are Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone, Donnie Darko, Monsters Inc, Not Another Teen Movie and Storytelling. I love FOTR, have affection for Not Another Teen Movie, but am not especially wowed by any of the others, including A Beautiful Mind. IMDB users rank A Beautiful Mind 2nd on one ranking and 11th on the other, behind FOTR both times. Here’s a trailer.

 

We have no actors here who have appeared in Doctor Who, but several returnees from previous Oscar and Hugo/Nebula winners, most notably Russell Crowe, the central character John Nash here, and also the title character of last year’s winner Gladiator.


There’s been a somewhat longer gap since we last saw Christopher Plummer, here psychiatrist Dr Rosen, as Captain von Trapp in The Sound of Music – 36 years, which is the longest interval I’ve so far seen between top billed roles.


Ed Harris, the sinister Parcher who is the product of Nash’s delusions here, was the equally sinister Cristof in The Truman Show two years ago.


Judd Hirsch, mathematician Helinger here, was the psychiatrist in Ordinary People, 21 years ago.

Victor Steinbach is Professor Horner here and was Mikolaj Ternovsky in 2010, but you know what, I have COVID and I’m not able to find pics of him in either role quickly.

I confess that I was not hugely impressed by A Beautiful Mind. It is a biopic of mathematician John Nash, who suffered from schizophrenia for much of his life; a story of romance triumphing over adversity, but you won’t learn much from it, or indeed you may learn the wrong things from it, about mental illness, mathematics, John Nash, or Alicia Nash. Film makers, even makers of biopics, are not obliged to stick rigidly to the historical record. But a lot of Truth here has been sacrificed for Art, leaving only a basic glurge plot about love triumphing over health issues, with some special effects for the central character’s delusions.

As so often, my biggest problems with the film include race and gender, combined in the depiction of Alicia Nash. Jennifer Connolly certainly deserved her Oscar as the only interesting character in the film. But the fact is that in real life Alicia Nash was from El Salvador, and spoke English with a Latin American accent. There is no hint in the film whatsoever that she was anything other than a WASP. We have not had such an egregious example of white-washing in an Oscar winner since All the King’s Men eliminated the entire African-American population of the state in which it was set. And Alicia was herself a gifted mathematics student, but we see nothing of that here.

(And I don’t think there is a single non-white speaking part; Princeton has had at least a handful of black students from the 1940s onwards.)

The real John Nash’s love life was just a little more complicated than is depicted on screen. He had long running affairs with several other men, and had a child by another woman before he met Alicia. He was once arrested for indecent exposure. He and Alicia formally divorced before getting back together again. Apparently the film makers felt that it would be too difficult to depict his bisexuality without implying that it was linked to his mental illness (a link which was mistakenly made by many of those who treated him). They certainly did not even try to do so.

It’s difficult to put mathematics into a mainstream drama. But again, the film-makers did not try very hard. There are a couple of mutterings about game theory, but otherwise it’s an activity done by white men behind the scenes, except when Nash starts writing on windows. I think that A Theory of Everything did it rather better, though I will also admit that perhaps Stephen Hawking’s theories are more telegenic than Nash’s.

Schizophrenia cannot in general be cured by the treatment portrayed in the film. Nash struggled with it for decades. He himself felt that the natural hormonal changes of aging eventually enabled him to reject his delusions; be that as it may, a recovery such as his is unusual. And while the manifestation of those delusions in the personalities of the sinister Parcher, friendly English Charles and Charles’ niece Marcee is compelling cinema and well executed, it really isn’t the lived experience of most people with schizophrenia and wasn’t the lived experience of Nash himself.

Nash’s hallucinations were much more of voices and weird ideas about politics, which is fairly “normal” for his condition. Rain Man wobbled a bit on the reality of autism, but was basically honest about it. A Beautiful Mind, again, went for Art rather than Truth, leading to heaven knows how many ignorant and stressful conversations between well-meaning people who think they know all about schizophrenia from having seen the film, and desperate people who are actually trying to manage its effects in their own lives.

I am not going to totally dump on the film. The acting is good, the music is good, and the cinematography is great – in particular Princeton emerges as something of a character in its own right. (Though again, Nash’s professional life included many stops other than Princeton – but not the Pentagon.)

 

Incidentally, I make this the seventh biopic to win the Oscar, the first for 24 years, and I would put it in the lower half, after Gandhi, Lawrence of Arabia, The Last Emperor and The Life of Emile Zola, but ahead of Patton and The Great Ziegfeld. Overall I’m putting it in the bottom 15% of my list, after Mutiny on the Bounty but ahead of American Beauty.

Next up is Chicago, of which I have higher hopes.

The film is based on a prize-winning biography with the same title by Sylvia Nasar, the second paragraph of whose third chapter is:

What he saw was a genteel, prerevolutionary village surrounded by gently rolling woodlands, lazy streams, and a patchwork of cornfields.2 Settled by Quakers toward the end of the seventeenth century, Princeton was the site of a famous Washington victory over the British and, for a brief six-month interlude in 1783, the de facto capital of the new republic. With its college-Gothic buildings nestled among lordly trees, stone churches, and dignified old houses, the town looked every inch the wealthy, manicured exurb of New York and Philadelphia that, in fact, it was. Nassau Street, the town’s sleepy main drag, featured a row of “better” men’s clothing shops, a couple of taverns, a drugstore, and a bank. It had been paved before the war, but bicycles and pedestrians still accounted for most of the traffic. In This Side of Paradise, F. Scott Fitzgerald had described Princeton circa World War I as “the pleasantest country club in America.”3 Einstein called it “a quaint, ceremonious village” in the 1930s.4 Depression and wars had scarcely changed the place. May Veblen, the wife of a wealthy Princeton mathematician, Oswald Veblen, could still identify by name every single family, white and black, well-to-do and of modest means, in every single house in town.5 Newcomers invariably felt intimidated by its gentility. One mathematician from the West recalled, “I always felt like my fly was open.”6
2 See, for example, Rebecca Goldstein, The Mind-Body Problem (New York: Penguin, 1993); Ed Regis, Who Got Einstein’s Office? (Reading, Mass.: Addison Wesley, 1987); and recollections of Nash’s contemporaries, including interviews with Harold Kuhn and Harley Rogers and letter from George Mowbry, 4.5.95.
3 F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise (New York: Scribner, 1920).
4 Albert Einstein, quoted in Goldstein, op. cit.
5 As recalled by her niece Gillian Richardson, interview, 12.14.95.
6 Donald Spencer, professor of mathematics, Princeton University, interview, Durango, Colorado, 11.18.95.

I got a lot more out of the book than the film. It is honest where the film is not about Alicia’s origins, John Nash’s sexuality and the nature and course of his illness and career. It goes a bit into the mathematics without trying too hard; in the end, the non-specialist has to take the word of the specialist that this was all Really Important Stuff.

But where the book excels is in its examination of the social and political construction of the environment where Nash worked. It had not occurred to me that the Princeton of Einstein (and Nash) was very different from the Princeton of Woodrow Wilson, just a few decades before. Nasar maps out very carefully how the decision of a few intellectual centres of excellence to invest in mathematics – or rather, in mathematicians – was driven by wider political and social currents, including McCarthyism and antisemitism  (Nash himself also lurched into antisemitism, and not only when deluded). Her behind-the-scenes account of how Nash almost didn’t get the 1994 Nobel Prize is one of the most gripping things I’ve ever read in a scientific biography. (Yeah, I know it’s not technically a Nobel Prize. Sue me.)

Some of Nash’s friends queried whether the biography was ethical, given that it was written without his consent or cooperation. In fact his attitude was studiedly neutral, and Nasar clearly had full cooperation from his colleagues and lovers, which he could presumably have deterred if he had really wanted to. He was apparently pleased enough with it in the end, and enjoyed the film too, though he commented (rightly enough) that it wasn’t really about him.

Here’s a lovely short video of Russell Crowe talking to John and Alicia Nash when they visited the set. Unfortunately we can’t hear what they are saying. The Nashes died in a car accident in 2015, returning from the ceremony where he had been awarded the Abel Prize

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Gladiator (2000), and Those About to Die

Gladiator won the Oscar for Best Picture of 2000, and four others: Best Actor (Russell Crowe), Best Costume Design, Best Sound and Best Visual Effects. It lost in seven categories, three each to Traffic and to Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, which won both Hugo and Nebula that year.

Of the other four Oscar nominees, I have not seen Traffic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or Erin Brockovich, though I have seen Chocolat. 2000 was a difficult year for us, and apart from Chocolat, the only other 2000 films I have seen to the end are Almost Famous, Chicken Run and The Dish, all of which I really like, probably more than I liked GladiatorO Brother, Where Art Thou and Bring It On. IMDB users rank Gladiator as the best film of the year on both rankings. Here’s a trailer.

Two actors here have returned from previous Oscar-winners. Most notoriously, Oliver Reed, as gladiator trader Proximo, actually died of alcohol poisoning partway through making the film; way back in 1968 he was bad boy Bill Sykes in Oliver!


More recently, Tommy Flanagan, who is our hero’s loyal servant Cicero here, was also a close ally of the doomed hero of Braveheart in 1995.


There are a fair number of Doctor Who crossovers as well, starting of course with Sir Derek Jacobi, Senator Gracchus here and six years later Professor Yana and briefly the Master in Utopia:


Tony Curran is one of the assassins who fail to kill our hero, and also was Vincent van Gogh in Vincent and the Doctor (2012).


David Scholfield is Falco here and went on to be Odin, leader of the Mire, in The Girl Who Died (2015).


I could not find good Gladiator shots of David Bailie, credited as the engineer operating the catapults in the opening battle scene, and also of course Dask in Robots of Death (1978), or of Alun Raglan, here a Praetorian guard, and Mo Northover in the 2010 story The Hungry Earth / Cold Blood.

So. Before I start, the opening titles greatly amused me:

That’s “Northern England”, or, as the locals call it, “Scotland”. (Subsequent social media discussion revealed that the Antonine Wall has a bit of a marketing problem.)

The film is the story of Maximus, chosen successor of the Emperor Marcus Aurelius, who is displaced by the Emperor’s horrible homicidal son Commodus. Maximus escapes Commodus’ assassination attempt, but is captured by slavers in Spain and sold into slavery in North Africa. He comes to Rome as a gladiator, wins all his battles and challenges Commodus for power in Rome. They both die. It’s great to look at, especially if you are the sort of person who likes to see acres of rippling male flesh (limited appeal for me, I’m afraid). But I think we had a rather similar plot with a happier ending 41 years ago.

The scenes set in Africa, like Casablanca, have a notable lack of actual Africans, apart from Djimon Hounsou as Juba, our hero’s ally and the black guy in the film.

I thought Connie Nielsen was very good as Commodus’ elder sister Lucilla, even though she is given very little to work with and has the only female speaking part to have more than one scene. (Later to appear as Hippolyta, queen of the Amazons, in Wonder Woman.)

The core performances of Richard Harris as Marcus Aurelius, Joaquin Phoenix as Commodus and Russell Crowe as Maximus are all solid and carry the story. (And Oliver Reed and Derek Jacobi, already noted, are good too.)



The filmography is good and the music really good.

https://youtu.be/NBE-uBgtINg
 

But at the same time there isn’t really much there there. I’m putting it two thirds of the way down my list of Oscar winners, ahead of My Fair Lady, which may have more parts for women but is much more sexist, and behind How Green Was My Valley, also a spectacular landscape film but with a bit more of a human heart.

Its influence is undeniable, of course, and I can’t resist posting the stunning 2004 Pepsi commercial starring Britney Spears, Beyoncé and Pink and the music of Queen:

 

The film is supposedly based on Those About to Die, a 1958 book by Daniel P. Mannix IV, which starts off as a historical survey of Roman games and then becomes two short stories, the first longer than the second, about men who worked in and around the arena. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

The greatest naumachia of all time was the naval engagement staged by Claudius. As Augustus’ lake was too small, the mad emperor decided to use the Fucine Lake (now called the Lago di Fucino) some sixty miles to the east of Rome. This lake had no natural outlet and in the spring it often flooded many miles of surrounding county. To overcome this trouble, a tunnel three and a half miles long had been cut through solid rock from the lake to the Litis River to carry off the surplus water. This job had taken thirty thousand men eleven years to finish. For the dedication of the opening of this tunnel, Claudius decided to stage a fight between two navies on the lake. The galleys previously used in such engagements had been small craft with only one bank of oars. For this fight, there were to be twenty-four triremes (three banks of oars), all regulation ocean-going warships — and twenty-six biremes (double bank). This armada was divided into two fleets of twenty-five ships each and manned by nineteen hundred criminals under the command of two famous gladiators. One fleet was to represent the Rhodians and the other the Sicilians and both groups wore the appropriate costumes.

In fact the book is much less about gladiators and more about the people who arranged fights with animals in the arena, particularly the arrangements for torture and execution by damnatio ad bestias. Mannix has a bit of a fixation with the unpleasant things a trained animal can do to a woman prisoner. But he also makes interesting comparisons with the showmanship of the twentieth century, and although it’s really not all that interesting a subject he covers it breezily enough.

The next Oscar-winning film is A Beautiful Mind; but before we get there, it’s going to be Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Fellowship of the Ring.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

American Beauty

American Beauty won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1999, and four others: Best Director (Sam Mendes), Best Actor (Kevin Spacey), Best Original Screenplay (Alan Ball) and Best Cinematography (Conrad Hall). The Nebula that year went to The Sixth Sense, and the Hugo and the next year’s Nebula to Galaxy Quest.

I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were The Cider House Rules, The Green Mile, The Insider and Hugo-winner The Sixth Sense. IMDB users have it 4th on one ranking and 8th on the other, respectable enough, with Fight Club, The Matrix and The Green Mile ahead of it on both.

1999 was the year that our second child was born, and I saw very few films. One of them, oddly enough, was American Beauty, which I caught in early 2000 on a visit to Budapest. It’s one of very few Oscar winners that I saw in a cinema soon after original release – the others are Chariots of Fire, Gandhi and The Return of the King. The other films from that year that I have seen are The Matrix, American Pie, Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me, Cruel Intentions, Sunshine and Never Been Kissed. I will admit that American Beauty is a well-made film, but I probably like it the least of the lot. Here’s a trailer.

 

I normally start off these reviews by listing the actors who have been in earlier Oscar-winning or Hugo/Nebula-winning films, or in Doctor Who. This time there aren’t any. Amused to see Alison Janney, shortly before her breakthrough as C.J. in The West Wing, as the traumatised Mrs Fitts, and Scott Bakula, of Quantum Leap and Enterprise, as one of the two Jims.

As I said, I will admit that American Beauty is a well-made film, but I just don’t like it very much. All of the (100% white) characters are just awful people, with the exception of the central characters’ daughter Jane Burnham, who (rightly) hates her parents, and the two neighbouring Jims, whose healthy relationship is a bitter contrast with the heterosexual couples at the centre of the story. The script tries to make us sympathise with Lester Burnham as he goes through a mid-life crisis, but really he generates a lot of his own misfortunes, and we are invited to share his very creepy male gaze; though admittedly it’s hardly his fault that the next door neighbours are all psychopaths.

When almost every character is so awful, it’s difficult to be interested in what happens to them. The cinematography almost pulls this off, but I wasn’t really fooled when first watching it in Budapest in 2000 and I was even less fooled this time. I’m putting it very low down my list, only just shy of the bottom ten, below Mutiny on the Bounty, which is also about awful people but at least has good scenery, and above Braveheart for not taking its dreadful protagonist quite as seriously.

But the cinematography is very good, and the music also compelling. The theme tune is particularly haunting.

 

But the whole thing left me feeling rather icky.

IMDB trivia points out that this was only the second Oscar winner of the 1990s to have a contemporary setting (after The Silence of the Lambs). It’s closer in spirit to the winners of twenty years before, Kramer vs Kramer and Ordinary People (which I didn’t like) and Terms of Endearment (which I did).

Next up is Gladiator, of which I know nothing except the title. But before that, I look forward to watching The Sixth Sense and Galaxy Quest, and seeing what Hugo and Nebula voters thought was better than The Matrix, which is my favourite of the 1999 films that I have seen.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Shakespeare in Love

Shakespeare in Love won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1998, and six others – Best Actress (Gwyneth Paltrow), Best Supporting Actress (Judi Dench, who is only on screen for 8 minutes), Best Screenplay, Best Art Direction, Best Costume Design and Best Original Musical or Comedy Score. The Hugo that year went to The Truman Show.

I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were Elizabeth, Life Is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. That was the year I lived in Bosnia and then Croatia, so I have seen very few films from 1998; apart from the Oscar and Hugo winners, I have watched There’s Something About Mary, Sliding Doors, Primary Colors, Bulworth, Playing by Heart and that’s it. I like all of these, Bulworth least and, I’ll be honest, Shakespeare in Love most.

IMDB users, as so often, take a different view, ranking it only 15th on one ranking and an incredibly low 44th on the other, which is a worse aggregate ranking than any Oscar winner since Cavalcade (slightly worse than Tom Jones). The Big Lebowski and Saving Private Ryan top the two counts. Among the allegations about Harvey Weinstein is the story that he lobbied mercilessly to get Shakespeare in Love its nomination and win ahead of Saving Private Ryan, but to be honest it’s entirely in character for Oscar voters to go for the big warm-hearted romantic tale ahead of a gritty reality-based war film. (I admit that they have sometimes made the other choice.)

Here’s a trailer.

 

Because this is a film made with mainly British actors in 1999, loads and loads of the cast have also been in Doctor Who, one of whom was also in an Oscar-winning film. That one is Simon Callow, here the randy Master of the Revels, previously impresario Emanuel Schikaneder in Amadeus, and also of course Charles Dickens in The Unquiet Dead, the third episode of New Who.



The only representative of Old Who is Martin Clunes, here Richard Burbage, previously the spoiled aristocratic Lon in an early appearance in the Fifth Doctor story Snakedance.


Mark Williams, the stuttering tailor Wabash here, went on to be Rory Williams’ father in several Eleventh Doctor stories.


Barnaby Kay is Nol here and went on to be the Viking Heidi in The Girl Who Died:

And Nicholas Boulton is the actor Condell here and the Businessman in the Tenth Doctor story Gridlock.


I love Imelda Staunton, the nurse here and the invisible voice of the computer in The Girl Who Waited.

As noted above, this film is far from most people’s top ten films of 1999, and you may not have seen it. It’s a romantic comedy – the first comedy to win Best Picture since Annie Hall, more than twenty years before – set in Merrie England, which was the setting of a spate of Oscar-winners in the 1960s but has since been visited only for parts of Chariots of Fire (which is perhaps too late to be Merrie). The plot is that beautiful (and completely fictional) Viola de Lesseps is in love with young playwright William Shakespeare, disguises herself as a man in order to join his theatre company, and the two of them end up playing the lead roles in the first ever performance of Romeo and Juliet. This is surely the first Oscar-winning film about the writer of a previous Oscar-winning film. The two leads, played by Gwyneth Paltrow and Joseph Fiennes, are tremendously watchable, and I think there’s more sex in this film than in all the previous 70 Oscar-winning films combined.

(I’m going to pause to recommend the Arkangel audio of Romeo and Juliet. Romeo is Joseph Fiennes (who plays Shakespeare himself in Shakespeare in Love) and Juliet is Maria Miles (Elfine in Cold Comfort Farm). But both are somewhat overshadowed by three excellent supporting performances: Clive Swift (who has been in Doctor Who three times over the years) doubling up as both Friar Laurence and the Chorus; Elizabeth Spriggs (who was, among other things, one of the cannibalistic old ladies in Paradise Towers) as Juliet’s Nurse, and best of all, Mercutio is played, in his native Scottish accent, by David Tennant. You can get it here.)

I guess I should try and do my usual thing of going from the bits I didn’t like to the bits I did, but really, there’s very little to dislike here. Historical purists will complain that it’s hugely inaccurate in terms of what people wore, said and did in England in the 1590s, and I would add (as I must) that there actually were non-white people in London then and had been for centuries. Fine. It’s entertainment, not education. It’s very funny and the music is great.

 

As mentioned, Judi Dench is only in it for 8 minutes, but my god does she dominate those 8 minutes.

I think one has to admit that Paltrow and Dench somewhat overshadow Fiennes and the other male actors, good as they are. Again, fine. Too many romances portray the woman as lacking agency; Viola here challenges convention and while she is not ultimately completely successful, the point has been made.

I’m surprised by how far up my ranking I’m putting this – just outside the top ten, below Rain Man but above Terms of Endearment.

Next up is American Beauty, which I actually saw in the cinema when it came out.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Titanic

Titanic won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and equalled both the record of fourteen nominations set by All About Eve, and the record of eleven wins set by Ben-Hur. The other ten were: Best Director (James Cameron), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score, Best Original Song, Best Sound, Best Sound Effects Editing and Best Visual Effects. Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart were nominated in Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress respectively, but did not win. (At 87, Gloria Stuart remains the oldest ever nominee for Best Supporting Actress.) The Hugo that year went to Contact.

I have not seen any of the other four Oscar nominees, which were As Good as It Gets, The Full Monty, Good Will Hunting and L.A. Confidential. I have seen nine other films made in 1998: Men in Black, Starship Troopers, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery, Contact, Wag the Dog, The Peacemaker, Spice World, The Man Who Knew Too Little, Mrs Brown and Fools Rush In. These are all enjoyable films, especially Spice World, and to be honest I’d rank Titanic somewhere in the middle. IMDB users are much more wowed than me, and put it top of both rankings. Here’s a trailer.

 

Three of the cast of Titanic also appeared in the Whoniverse. First off, David Warner, Spicer Lovejoy here, went on to pay Professor Grisenko in the 2013 episode Cold War. He was also the unpleasant Bilfil in Oscar-winning Tom Jones, way back in 1963.


Martin Jarvis plays Sir Cosmo Duff-Gordon here, and has been in Doctor Who three times: as the Menoptra leader Hilio in the 1965 story we now call The Web Planet, the villains’ sidekick Butler in 1974’s Invasion of the Dinosaurs, and the Governor of Varos in the 1983 Vengeance on Varos.


On rather a different scale, there’s Derek Lea, who is stoker Frederick Barrett here and played an alien posing as a paramedic in the 2008 Torchwood episode Sleeper.

There’s a couple of overlaps with Hugo-winning films also directed by James Cameron. The versatile Jenette Goldstein shows up here as the Irish mommy, having previously been John Connor’s foster mother Janelle Voight in Terminator 2 and tough-as-nails Vasquez in Aliens.


Also in Aliens was Bill Paxton, here treasure hunter Brock Lovett, there Sergeant Hudson.

A couple more Hugo-winner appearances: Elsa Raven is Ida Straus here and was the Clocktower Lady in Back to the Future.

Mark Capri is one of the Stewards here and was imperial comms officer M’Kae in The Empire Strikes Back.

And, getting to the end, there are two more crossovers with previous Oscar-winners apart from David Warner. Frances Fisher is Rose’s mother here, and was Strawberry Alice, the brothel manager, in Unforgiven.

Last but not least, Bernard Hill plays Captain Smith here, having previously been Sergeant Putnam, the soldier on the railway station roof, in Gandhi. We will be seeing him again.

Before we get into the meat of it, there’s an interesting linguistic quirk that caught my attention (and probably won’t catch anyone else’s). Thomas Andrews, the engineer who designed the ship, is played by Canadian actor Victor Garber, who I don’t think I have seen in anything else. He’s the very first character in 70 Oscar-winning films to be explicitly from Northern Ireland. Garber gives him a bit of a lilting brogue, to signal to the audience that he is vaguely Irish.

There are no surviving recordings of Thomas Andrews’ voice, as far as I know. But his brother, John Miller Andrews, was interviewed when he became Prime Minister of Northern Ireland in 1940, and as you can hear he has a much more distinctly Ulster twang in his voice. (He lasted only two and a half years, becoming the first but not the last Unionist leader to be ruthlessly ditched by a rebellion in the ranks.)

Anyway. As if you didn’t know, the film is about the 1912 sinking of Titanic, the largest ship in the world at the time, on its maiden voyage. My great-grandmother, born in 1887, told me when I was a child that she had seen it pass along Belfast Lough as it emerged from the Belfast shipyard where it was made, and it’s not difficult to imagine how this massive man-made object would have briefly dominated the natural landscape as it went by.

Belfast has a slightly ambivalent relationship with the ship and the story; there is a massive and impressive museum dedicated to the disaster on the site of the dock where the ship was built, and a big memorial in the grounds of the City Hall. But for a city which has since acquired a strong relationship with tragedy – twice as many were killed in the Troubles as died on Titanic – it’s not a comfortable bit of heritage. The final exchange with the doomed ship is very poignant.

A friend of mine lost her father on the Estonia in 1994Van Ling (also briefly in Terminator 2).

The only other film I’ve seen Leonardo di Caprio in is the 1996 Romeo + Juliet. Sorry to be heretical, but I don’t think he’s a particularly good actor. His part in Titanic doesn’t have much to it, but I don’t feel he brings much to it either. I think he particularly fails to connect smirking self-confident Jack to sensitive artistic Jack. It’s just about plausible that Rose falls for him on the ship, especially given the awfulness of the alternative, but I can’t believe she would have stayed with him for long.

Those are the only two negatives, though. The music teeters on the edge of being annoying, but just about manages not to be. Only five Oscar-winning Original Songs were also in the Best Picture or equivalent; before “My Heart Will Go On” we had “Swinging on a Star” in Going My Way, and “Gigi” in, er, Gigi; we’ll get to the two others in due course. Just in case you had forgotten, here’s Celine Dion.

Kate Winslet on the other hand has a great part and does it well. Rose is one of those rare leading women characters with a serious and interesting arc. The sequence of her wielding the axe is tremendous.

And the film does a traditional story-telling job very well – introducing us to a bunch of very human people, some of them more interesting than others, and then hitting them with a disaster that many of them do not survive. The core narrative is not original but very competently executed, and tying it back to the present day with Gloria Stuart’s brief but impressive performance as older Rose gives it a firm sense of grounding and relevance.

And the effects of course are spectacular. Cameron has set a high bar with his previous work, and just about exceeds it. The sense of scale of the sinking ship, and the subsequent horror of the slow deaths of the shipwrecked, are particularly effective.


So, I thought it was good but not superb. I’m putting it just under halfway down my list of Oscar winenrs, ahead of The Last Emperor which also look good but has no attractive characters, and behind Out of Africa which also looks good but does have interesting men as well as women.

That takes me to 70 Oscar-winning films. The most recent ten have had four really good, four medium (The English Patient is very medium, but I gave it extra marks for having Juliette Binoche) and two awful, which I guess is not too bad. Here’s my full ranking.

70) Platoon (Oscar for 1986)
69) The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
68) Cimarron (1930/31)
67) Cavalcade (1932/33)
66) Wings (1927/28)
65) Broadway Melody (1928/29)
64) All The King’s Men (1949)
63) Forrest Gump (1994)
62) Patton (1970)
61) Braveheart (1995)
60) Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
59) The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)
58) Tom Jones (1963)
57) Gone With the Wind (1939)
56) Ordinary People (1980)
55) Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
54) Gentleman’s Agreement (1947)
53) Annie Hall (1977)
52) Going My Way (1944)
51) The French Connection (1971)
50) My Fair Lady (1964)
49) How Green Was My Valley (1941)
48) Mrs Miniver (1942)
47) On The Waterfront (1954)
46) The Godfather Part II (1974)
45) In the Heat of the Night (1967)
44) Grand Hotel (1931/32)
43) The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
42) Marty (1955)
41) The Deer Hunter (1978)
40) Rocky (1976)
39) Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
38) The Last Emperor (1987)
37) Titanic (1997)
36) Out of Africa (1985)
35) Dances With Wolves (1990)
34) Lawrence of Arabia (1962)
33) Gigi (1958)
32) It Happened One Night (1934)
31) You Can’t Take It With You (1938)
30) The Lost Weekend (1945)
29) Hamlet (1948)
28) From Here To Eternity (1953)
27) Around The World In Eighty Days (1956)
26) Ben-Hur (1959)
25) The English Patient (1996)
24) The Sting (1973)
23) The Godfather (1972)
22) Unforgiven (1992)
21) Oliver! (1968)
20) The Apartment (1960)
19) All About Eve (1950)
18) The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
17) Amadeus (1984)
16) Gandhi (1982)
15) West Side Story (1961)
14) A Man for all Seasons (1966)
13) Midnight Cowboy (1969)
12) Terms of Endearment (1983)
11) Rain Man (1988)
10)
The Silence of the Lambs (1991)
9) One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
8) The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
7) All Quiet on the Western Front (1929/30)
6) Rebecca (1940)
5) Schindler’s List (1993)
4) Chariots of Fire (1981)
3) An American in Paris (1951)
2) The Sound of Music (1965)
1) Casablanca (1943)

Just for fun, I’ve broken down the 70 Oscar-winning films by main date and time of setting. (Obviously some straddle timelines and locations – I’m calling the two Godfather films as set in New York, as that’s where their hearts are, and calling All the King’s Men as set when it was made although it is based on real events that happened between the wars.) Five of the eleven “Other Europe” films are set in France.

Time of settingNew YorkOther USAGreat BritainOther EuropeAsiaAfricaOcean/Other
After WW2Midnight Cowboy
West Side Story
The Apartment
The Godfather
Marty
The Godfather, Part II
On The Waterfront
The French Connection
Annie Hall
Gentleman’s Agreement
Kramer vs. Kramer
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Silence of the Lambs
Rain Man
Terms of Endearment
All About Eve
Driving Miss Daisy
Rocky
The Deer Hunter
In the Heat of the Night
Ordinary People
The Greatest Show on Earth
Forrest Gump
All The King’s Men
 An American in Paris
Gigi
Platoon  
Around WW2The Lost Weekend
Going My Way
The Best Years of Our Lives
From Here To Eternity
Mrs MiniverSchindler’s List
The Sound of Music
Patton
The Bridge on the River KwaiCasablanca
The English Patient
 
Inter-warYou Can’t Take It With You
Broadway Melody
The Great Ziegfeld
The Sting
It Happened One Night
Rebecca
Chariots of Fire
How Green Was My Valley
Grand HotelGandhi
The Last Emperor
Out of Africa 
WW1   All Quiet on the Western Front
Wings
Lawrence of Arabia  
1800-1914 Unforgiven
Dances With Wolves
Gone With the Wind
Cimarron
My Fair Lady
Cavalcade
The Life of Emile Zola  Titanic
Around The World In Eighty Days
Before 1800  A Man for all Seasons
Oliver!
Tom Jones
Braveheart
Amadeus
Hamlet
Ben-Hur Mutiny on the Bounty

The next Oscar-winning film will be Shakespeare in LoveContact.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

The English Patient

The English Patient won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1996, and eight others: Best Director (Anthony Minghella), Best Supporting Actress (Juliette Binoche), Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, Best Costume Design, Best Film Editing, Best Original Dramatic Score and Best Sound. That year’s Hugo went to the Babylon 5 episode Severed Dreams.

I have not seen any of the other Oscar nominees that year; they were Fargo, Jerry Maguire, Secrets & Lies and Shine. I have seen eight other films made in 1996: the three Hugo finalists, Independence Day, Mars Attacks and Star Trek: First Contact, and five others: Trainspotting, Multiplicity, Brassed Off, Michael Collins and My Fellow Americans. They’re all good, apart from Multiplicity, but The English Patient is the only one that has Juliette Binoche.

So, actors in The English Patient who were in previous Oscar or Hugo winners, or in Doctor Who, do not include Juliette Binoche.

The do include Willem Dafoe, who is Carravaggio here and was Sergeant Elias in Platoon ten years before.

Clive Merrrison is Fenelon-Barnes here, but only one of his scenes was not cut from the film and I could find only one half-decent shot of his face. He is not seen on-screen with Juliette Binoche. He was also in two Doctor Who stories, Tomb of the Cybermen (Second Doctor, 1967) as crewman Jim Callum, and Paradise Towers (Seventh Doctor, 1987) as the unnamed Deputy Chief Caretaker.

There’s another Whovian: Lee Ross is Spalding, the soldier at the booby-trapped statue, here, another scene that for some reason does not have Juliette Binoche in it, and went on to be the Boatswain in The Curse of the Black Spot (Twelfth Doctor, 2011).

And although Juliette Binoche won an Oscar for her performance here, she has not been in any other Oscar-winning or Hugo-winning films, or in Doctor Who. (Did I say that already?)

I’m afraid that I didn’t really get The English Patient, even though it has one of my favourite actors in it. (You’ll never guess who that is.) It scores better than some Oscar winners in that one of the lead characters is Indian, Kip the sapper, played by Naveen Andrews, and he actually has an interracial relationship with Juliette Binoche’s character.

The title character is of course male, but the two women who interact with him get a lot of agency, both Katharine, played by Kristin Scott-Thomas, and Hana played by, who is it again, oh yes that’s right, Juliette Binoche.

There are some lovely landscape scenes, particularly in the desert (though these do lose a bit by not having Juliette Binoche in them).

I liked the intercutting timelines, even though only one of them has Juliette Binoche.

And Ralph Fiennes’ make-up as the horribly burned English Patient is very impressive.

But I confess that the film as a whole didn’t grab me by the feelings as I had expected it might. Maybe I was just too tired. Still, because I particularly like one of the actors – you’ll never guess who, I’m keeping that as my special secret – I’m putting it just under a third of the way down my ranking, below The Sting but above Ben-Hur.

Edited to add: Elaine’s take.

I also of course read the original book. The second paragraph of the third chapter is:

Cats slept in the gun turrets looking south. English and Americans and Indians and Australians and Canadians advanced north, and the shell traces exploded and dissolved in the air. When the armies assembled at Sansepolcro, a town whose symbol is the crossbow, some soldiers acquired them and fired them silently at night over the walls of the untaken city. Field Marshal Kesselring of the retreating German army seriously considered the pouring of hot oil from battlements.

I found it really evocative of the times and places of the settings, and liked the integration of the plotlines as representing the healing of the protagonist. But again I found myself curiously unmoved by it. I am a bit surprised that the book won the Booker and the film the Oscar. But there’s no accounting for taste, and I know mine is sometimes a minority opinion.

Next up: Titanic. I wonder what that’s about?

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)

Braveheart, and Blind Harry’s Wallace

Braveheart won the Oscar for Best Picture of 1995, and four others: Best Director (Mel Gibson), Best Cinematography, Best Make-up, and Best Sound Effects Editing. It lost in five categories, two to Apollo 13. The Hugo that year went to the Babylon 5 episode The Coming of Shadows.

I have seen very few films made in 1995, a year when my PhD and my brief political career were simultaneously peaking. Of the other Oscar nominees, I have seen Apollo 13 and Babe, but not Il Postino or Sense and Sensibility. Other 1995 films that I have seen: Goldeneye, The American President, Johnny Mnemonic (which is set in 2021), the wonderful Tank Girl, the brilliant Ian McKellen Richard III, and I think that’s it. Apart from Johnny Mnemonic, I liked all of them more than Braveheart. IMDB users disagree with me and have it third on one ranking and fourth on the other, behind Se7en in both cases.

Edited to add: My sister writes in to remind me that I did in fact see Sense and Sensibility at the time and told her that to my own surprise I liked it. She also points to this piece about Sense and Sensibility which includes a reflection on the contrast with Braveheart.

Here’s a trailer.

 

This being the sort of film it is, there are loads of actors who have also been in Doctor Who, but I’m going to start with one who wasn’t. Edward Longshanks, aka King Edward I of England, is played here by Patrick McGoohan, much more famous as The Prisoner.


There are a couple of Whovians. The biggest Who name is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-huim moment in Braveheart, where Bernard Horsfall asks Mel Gibson a pointed question about the Balliol claim to the Scottish throne. (In real life Wallace was on Balliol’s side rather than the Bruces’.) Horsfall was in several Doctor Who stories,  in The Mind Robber (Second Doctor, 1968), a Time Lord in The War Games (Second Doctor, 1969), Taron in Planet of the Daleks (Third Doctor, 1973) and Chancellor Goth (possibly the same Time Lord as previously) in The Deadly Assassin (Fourth Doctor, 1976).



Rupert Vansittart plays rapey Lord Bottoms here; he went on to be General Asquith (or rather the Slitheen disguised as General Asquith) in the 2005 Doctor Who story Aliens of London / World War Three.


Michael Tierney here is the evil magistrate who kills Braveheart’s girl; a few years earlier he was an assistant to Honor Blackman in the 1986 Doctor Who story Terror of the Vervoids.


I spotted one actor who had been in a Hugo-winning film: Michael Byrne is Michael Tierney’s sidekick here, and was the main Nazi in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.


Noting also that Brian Cox, playing Argyle Wallace here, provided an Ood voice in Doctor Who but was not on screen. (I’m a little surprised that Alun Armstrong has never been in Who.)

OK folks, I’ll be brief: this is a violent and also silly film. Clichés abound. Great use of (mostly Irish) scenery, gallant (but occasionally treacherous) Scots, repulsive English, seductive French women, funny Irish sidekick, sanguinary combat, swirling music, culminating in Wallace’s Christ-like martyrdom. I’m rating it ahead of Platoon, my worst Oscar winner ever, because at least the characters are distinguishable and nearly interesting. I can see how it appeals to those Americans who like historical parallels to how they imagine their own revolution, and to anyone who likes a good romantic nationalist tale (which sometimes even includes me, which is why I’m not putting it at the very bottom of my list; I am neutral veering to positive on Scottish independence). But really, it’s the most utter tosh. I’m putting in 59th place out of 68, two places above last year’s Forrest Gump, just above Patton, which is more boring, and just below Mutiny on the Bounty, which carries off its clichés better.

(My observation that a parallel can be drawn between Wallace and the American War of Independence is not at all original, and was probably not original when Robert Burns invoked Wallace in his Ode on General Washington’s Birthday in 1794.)

Incidentally this is the first Oscar-winning film since Chariots of Fire, fourteen years before, to be set in Britain and the first mainly set in Scotland (Chariots of Fire of course had a number of Scottish scenes; we had Wales back in 1941). Since then we’ve had three in Asia (Gandhi, Platoon and The Last Emperor), two in Continental Europe (Amadeus and Schindler’s List) and Out of Africa. I’ll do an overall tally when we reach #70 in the sequence.

This is the second Oscar-winning film to be based on a work of epic poetry. (The first, fifty years earlier, was The Best Years of Our Lives.) The original 15th-century text of Blind Harry’s The Actes and Deidis of the Illustre and Vallyeant Campioun Schir William Wallace is readily available online, but like most people these days I satisfied myself with the 18th century translation by William Hamilton of Gilbertfield, available in a nice edition introduced by Elspeth King with impressive woodcut illustrations by Owain Kirby. You can get it here.

The opening sentence of Book III, Chapter II of Hamilton’s version is as follows, cross-referenced with the lines it is adapting from Blind Harry’s original.

When Wallace now had vanquish’d in the Field
The Traitor false, that had his Father kill’d,
And Brother also, that brave and worthy Knight,
With many more, that all were Men of Might;
He caus’d provide, and distribute their Store,
To go on new Exploits, and purchase more.
In Clyde’s Green-Wood they did sojourn three Days;
No South’ron might Adventure in those Ways,
Death did they thole, durst in their Gate appear;
And Wallace’ Word did Travel far and near.
Quhen Wallace had weyle wenquist to the playne
The falss terand that had his fadyr slayne;
His brothyr als, quhilk was a gentill knycht,
Othir gud men befor to dede thai dycht;
He gert dewyss, and prowide thar wictaille;
Baith stuff and horss that was of gret awaille,
To freyndis about preualye thai send,
The ramanand full glaidlye thar thai spend.
In Clydis wode thai soiornyt twenty dayis,
Na Sothren that tyme was persawyt in thai wais,
Bot he tholyt dede that come in thar danger:
The worde of him walkit baith fer and ner.

King warns in her introduction that “As far as the battle scenes and the incidents of killing are concerned, Braveheart is a work of restraint and good taste when compared to Blind Harry’s original text.” She’s not wrong. I must admit that the poem has a cracking pace, even with some unfortunate McGonagallisms. Like the film, it’s a bit vague on geography, but very clear about who the good guys and the bad guys are. Unlike the film, it’s mercifully discreet about Wallace’s horrible death. I’m afraid it did read like one incident of biffing the English followed by another of biffing traitorous Scots and so on, but I can see why people liked it.

Next up: The English Patient.

Winners of the Oscar for Best Picture

1920s: Wings (1927-28) | The Broadway Melody (1928-29)
1930s: All Quiet on the Western Front (1929-30) | Cimarron (1930-31) | Grand Hotel (1931-32) | Cavalcade (1932-33) | It Happened One Night (1934) | Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, and books) | The Great Ziegfeld (1936) | The Life of Emile Zola (1937) | You Can’t Take It with You (1938) | Gone with the Wind (1939, and book)
1940s: Rebecca (1940) | How Green Was My Valley (1941) | Mrs. Miniver (1942) | Casablanca (1943) | Going My Way (1944) | The Lost Weekend (1945) | The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) | Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) | Hamlet (1948) | All the King’s Men (1949)
1950s: All About Eve (1950) | An American in Paris (1951) | The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) | From Here to Eternity (1953) | On The Waterfront (1954, and book) | Marty (1955) | Around the World in 80 Days (1956) | The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) | Gigi (1958) | Ben-Hur (1959)
1960s: The Apartment (1960) | West Side Story (1961) | Lawrence of Arabia (1962) | Tom Jones (1963) | My Fair Lady (1964) | The Sound of Music (1965) | A Man for All Seasons (1966) | In the Heat of the Night (1967) | Oliver! (1968) | Midnight Cowboy (1969)
1970s: Patton (1970) | The French Connection (1971) | The Godfather (1972) | The Sting (1973) | The Godfather, Part II (1974) | One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) | Rocky (1976) | Annie Hall (1977) | The Deer Hunter (1978) | Kramer vs. Kramer (1979)
1980s: Ordinary People (1980) | Chariots of Fire (1981) | Gandhi (1982) | Terms of Endearment (1983) | Amadeus (1984) | Out of Africa (1985) | Platoon (1986) | The Last Emperor (1987) | Rain Man (1988) | Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
1990s: Dances With Wolves (1990) | The Silence of the Lambs (1991) | Unforgiven (1992) | Schindler’s List (1993) | Forrest Gump (1994) | Braveheart (1995) | The English Patient (1996) | Titanic (1997) | Shakespeare in Love (1998) | American Beauty (1999)
21st century: Gladiator (2000) | A Beautiful Mind (2001) | Chicago (2002) | The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003) | Million Dollar Baby (2004, and book) | Crash (2005) | The Departed (2006) | No Country for Old Men (2007) | Slumdog Millionaire (2008) | The Hurt Locker (2009)
2010s: The King’s Speech (2010) | The Artist (2011) | Argo (2012) | 12 Years a Slave (2013) | Birdman (2014) | Spotlight (2015) | Moonlight (2016) | The Shape of Water (2017) | Green Book (2018) | Parasite (2019)
2020s: Nomadland (2020) | CODA (2021) | Everything Everywhere All at Once (2022)