The Sting is fifty years old — fifty! — which means I'm even older. I saw it in a theater with my dad and little brother when it came out. Maybe my all-time favorite movie-going experience was hearing my dad groan at what was then the entirely predictable end of the movie then him laughing with pure pleasure when it turned out not to be. For years prior to that — thanks to the suffocating morality of the Production Code then the hipster nihilism of the New Wave — caper films always ended the same empty way. The Sting was something new.
Of course, now the end of The Sting is predictable and the nihilism of postwar noir feels fresh. These things run in cycles.
My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
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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