Swartz was criticized for waiting until early December to send out the DVDs, even though the whole strategy revolved around getting the movie seen by as many voters as possible. She also had to get attention from Academy voters and guild members for a movie without any marquee names and a subject that put off many people already weary of a war that never seemed to end. Meanwhile, Fox seemed to downplay awards campaigning, letting Cameron take the lead. And what Cameron wanted to talk about was how frustrated he was that his actors, whose performances were captured by CGI technology, were not taken as seriously as live-action actors.
That backlash might have mattered, because actors are by far the largest bloc of voters in the Academy. In the end, both movies tried to position themselves as important parts of screen history. But come the Oscars, "Graffiti" was denied by the s-set crime caper "The Sting. The pitch-black comedy about class upset odds-on-favorite "" Metascore: 78 to win the top prize and three other Oscars. The envelopes at the Oscar show might have caused confusion — and a declaration, however quickly retracted, that "La La Land" Metascore: 93 was the winner — but critics were always clear: Filmmaker Barry Jenkins' coming-of-age portrait was the best of the bunch.
The mostly silent film about silent films may be remembered by some as one of Oscar's worst Best Picture winners , but the critical consensus is that "The Artist" was a better movie than nominees such as "The Tree of Life" Metascore: 85 , "Moneyball" Metascore: 87 , and "The Help" Metascore: But critics were saying all along that "Hurt Locker" was better than "Avatar" Metascore: 83 — as Bigelow became the first female Best Director Oscar-winner.
If critics had their way, Peter Jackson's "Lord of the Rings" movies would have won back-to-back-to-back Best Picture honors. Academy voters finally came around with "Return of the King. Despite 17 career Oscar nominations to date, Steven Spielberg has won just three competitive Academy Awards, including two for "Schindler's List. The story of Mozart and his rival was a critical favorite and Oscar frontrunner that made good on its promise: "Amadeus" won a field-best eight Academy Awards, including Best Picture.
Meryl Streep earned the first of her record-setting 21 career Oscar nominations for "The Deer Hunter," the Vietnam-vet drama that claimed Best Picture and four other Oscars but not one for Streep. The film won four awards overall, including a Best Actress statuette for Diane Keaton. Francis Ford Coppola's mobster classic lost in more Oscar categories eight than it won three , but it claimed Best Picture, and it is one of only two films in this rundown with a perfect Metascore.
A Francis Ford Coppola-penned drama about U. Army Gen. George S. Patton, "Patton" earned the respect of critics and Oscar voters alike. Scott, who declined the statuette. With one of the lower Metascores on our list, the X-rated "Midnight Cowboy" nonetheless distinguished itself in a Best Picture field that included "Hello, Dolly!
Chrome Safari Continue. Be the first to know. Get browser notifications for breaking news, live events, and exclusive reporting. The 43rd Academy Awards provided even more evidence of the upheaval happening in the movie business. Peter Bogdanovich made his feature directorial debut in with the inventive, low-budget thriller Targets , but his meteoric ascent began a few years later with this Larry McMurtry adaptation about a small Texas town and the reckless youth that call it home in the early s.
Bogdanovich grew up idolizing and later often befriending the directors and actors of classic Hollywood, but he never slavishly imitated them.
Instead, he made films that bridged the gap between new and old. Film from non-English-speaking countries, however remarkable, usually have to settle for winning in the Best Foreign Language Film category, but every once in a while one breaks through. Even if The Sting is, admittedly, much more fun.
In , the feel-good picture of the year told the story of a scrappy boxer who rises from obscurity, fights the champ — and loses, securing only a moral victory in the process. Director Martin Scorsese and screenwriter Paul Schrader take the film to the sort of dark places few movies dare to go.
The ill-defined Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film idea may or may not return in the future. Mainstream films mostly stayed away from the topic of the Vietnam War until years after the fall of Saigon, but in , two such films earned Best Picture nominations.
Filmed and set in Bloomington, Indiana, it keeps a light tone without losing sight of the limited options to the working-class children of the quarry workers who built the college town that now looks down on them. For years the highest-grossing movie of all time, its emotionally rich, visually stunning storytelling captures everything Spielberg did better than everyone else at this point in his career. He made it look easy. In other words, it stays true to the tone cultivated by Wolfe, a movie equally at home depicting awesome achievements and the flawed men and women who made it possible.
Written and directed by Robert Benton Kramer vs. Benton drew from his own memories growing up in Texas, and the mix of affection for and repulsion toward the place that made him can be felt from beginning to end. Few directors stayed as engaged and interested in risk from the beginning of their career to the end as John Huston, who kept taking chances until his death in The team became a kind of lazy shorthand for tastefully unadventurous filmmaking, and unfairly so.
Their best films burst with intelligence and passion. At once a funny, carefully realized look a complicated relationship and an incisive, prescient study of the power of mass media, James L. Some types of movies that often have a hard time winning Best Picture Oscars, especially in the past few decades: comedies in general, romantic comedies in particular, and most films focused more on women than men. Ten years after making one of the best films of his career and losing the Best Picture Oscar to a movie star making his directorial debut, Martin Scorsese did it again.
One of the most beloved products of the Disney animation renaissance that began in the late s — a string of films that breathed new life into both the studio and theatrical animation on the whole — Beauty and the Beast made news as the first animated feature to earn a Best Picture nomination. Combining classic hand-drawn animation with some computer-assisted flourishes, Beauty and the Beast now looks like a bridge between the past and the future.
It works both as a propulsive suspense film and as an exploration of the slipperiness of identity — national, ideological, sexual, and otherwise. The Fugitive almost plays like the result of a dare: What if you made a movie that was basically one long chase scene?
Could it work? Could it still feel substantial? The films of , however, offered just such a chance. Of the five nominees, only one, Jerry Maguire , came from a major studio and even it mostly played like an indie. The award went to the stately The English Patient , arguably the nominee most indebted to classic Hollywood filmmaking.
The result was a fresh take on classic noir themes set in a seedy, bygone L. Some of these confirmed emerging directors like Spike Jonze and David O. Russell as major talents. Others, like The Matrix , broke new ground with stunning special effects. Nor were The Cider House Rules or The Green Mile , or even The Insider , a fantastic Michael Mann movie, but one from an established director challenging himself to bring the same sort of tension to a docudrama that he had previously brought to crime films.
Of the nominees, The Sixth Sense provided the best indication of what was happening elsewhere in the film world. A seemingly out-of-nowhere supernatural drama crafted with discipline by M. Night Shyamalan, a filmmaker most moviegoers had never heard of, it became a cultural phenomenon by taking viewers by surprise — but the twist never would have worked without the patience Shyamalan invested in the filmmaking or the careful performances by Bruce Willis and Haley Joel Osment. They went with the one that emphasized the action over the lyricism, however.
Big often wins at the Oscars, and in most years, indies struggle to compete with deep-pocketed studio projects. Despite its critical acclaim and multiple nominations, In the Bedroom never really stood a chance. The first official Sundance selection to earn a Best Picture nomination, the debut film from actor turned director Todd Field is a gutting depiction of violence and its aftermath, watching as the marriage of a happily married couple played by Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek fractures after the murder of their son.
Martin Scorsese would finally win an Oscar a few years later for The Departed , but it would have been just as fitting for him to have won for this story of a rough, long-lost New York starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Daniel Day-Lewis. The film has its problems, particularly toward the end, but its ambition and commitment to recreating 19th-century Manhattan, down to its last muddy detail, mark it as one of the last of the old-style epics, before green screens and CGI made depictions of the past much less tactile and, all too often, much less immersive.
We said up front that this would not necessarily be a collection of films that should have won over less deserving winners. Martin Scorsese finally directed a Best Picture winner and nabbed a Best Director award for The Departed , but the Academy could just as easily have given a third trophy to Clint Eastwood for the second of two films revisiting the Battle of Iwo Jima.
Flags of Our Fathers , which recounted the struggle to take a rocky island stronghold from the Japanese in World War II from the American side, is also worthwhile. But its counterpart, which treats the battle from the perspective of the Japanese forces, is even more remarkable, capturing the hellish conditions in which the soldiers fought and the unforgiving ideology that brought them to the battlefield in the first place.
Both are tough, violent films anchored by frightening, larger-than-life performances by great actors. And both find darkness at the heart of different chapters of American history. The award went to No Country , a fine choice.
The film turns an important chapter in American history into a compelling personal story that shows, rather than tells, how one person can make the first ripples leading to sweeping changes. The tear-jerking opening segment contains some of the best storytelling the studio has ever created, and the rest is pretty terrific, too especially if you like talking dogs.
For his magnum opus, The Tree of Life , Terrence Malick set about telling the smallest possible story — the midth-century coming-of-age of a Texas boy who shares some biographical details with Malick — and the largest possible story, leaping from the beginning of time to the afterlife. In the process, the director erases any distinction between the two, letting one life and all its joy and anguish stand in for all of existence.
Stranding Sandra Bullock in space and following her increasingly desperate attempts to find her way home, Gravity is a special-effects triumph meant to be seen on the biggest screen possible and one of the few post- Avatar films to make meaningful use of 3D.
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