My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @.
Okay, this is a good stopping point. It takes at least ten years, in my humble opinion, and more like twenty, to get a sense of what is mere hype and what is lasting art from any given crop of movies. I mean, who would have predicted that The Shawshank Redemption or Blade Runner would develop such devoted followings after bombing at the box office, or that Oscar-winners such as [you fill in the blank] would be reviled as stinkers just a few years later?
Drop in after the Oscar nominees for this year are announced (what, end of January? early February?) and we'll vote on them, and maybe we'll vote on long-ago 2010 as well.
In the meantime, be sure to go back and vote on any years you've missed. I'll be listing the current leaders sometime in the New Year.
Thanks for playing along. It's been a lot of fun — for me at least ...
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @.
In retrospect, the failure to nominate The Dark Knight for best picture helped open what is now a yawning chasm between the Academy and the ticket-buying public, where every year the top prize goes to some grim little art film nobody has seen and then the powers-that-be scratch their collective heads and wonder why no one watches the Oscars anymore.
Sometimes the answer is so obvious you only have to look in the mirror to find it.
My choices are noted with a ★. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @.
Crash, which I have not nominated in any category, was (in my opinion) one of the worst best picture winners of all-time, an unworthy choice in any year. Never mind that it beat far superior nominees in Brokeback Mountain and Good Night, and Good Luck, as well as unnominated gems such as Batman Begins, A History of Violence and Match Point, Crash is completely unbelievable (and not in a good way, ala Georges Méliès) and a narrative mess to boot. Yet despite its shortcomings, it seems to think it's brilliant and never let's you forget it — the cherry on top of a smug pile of cinematic manure. And God knows I hate cherries!
But you know, if you like it, that's okay with me. And if you really, really feel the need to cast a vote for it, why, you can just toddle on over to this site (click here) and cast away!
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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