And here we are.
The final volume!
Here, I will discuss what I consider to be the 20 best films to win the Best Picture award.
This is certainly an interesting batch of films and I feel like I want to say as another preemptive warning that I find these films to be very worthy winners of the Best Picture prize, but of these 20, only about 7 or 8 of them would actually get my personal vote as Best Film of their respective years.
Let's see how much you agree or disagree with the following:
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#20 - THE HURT LOCKER (2009)
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Written by Mark Boal
A movie like The Hurt Locker winning Best Picture probably seemed like a joke to anyone from the general movie-going public as the film was the lowest-grossing film ever to win Best Picture...and it went up against what was then the highest-grossing film ever to be released: Avatar.
However, as blunt and snobby as this may sound, I am not sure I could respect someone who thinks Avatar was the better film here.
The Hurt Locker also gave us the first female director to actually WIN the Oscar. She remained the only woman to do so for another ELEVEN years until we managed to get two back-to-back women with Chloe Zhao in 2021 and Jane Campion in 2022.
Bigelow is a fascinating director if only for the fact that her career proves that any sexist attitude that women can't make films that deal with more masculine themes is nothing short of an abhorrent viewpoint.
Bigelow directs this film with such intense focus that the tension at times almost becomes unrelented in a way that very few films have achieved.
My favorite films of 2009 were Mother (the one by Bong Joon-ho), The White Ribbon, Up, and An Education...but I would definitely fit The Hurt Locker amongst that group.
I also feel like Bigelow followed up The Hurt Locker with another truly fantastic outing in 2012: Zero Dark Thirty which also would've made a very deserving winner.
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#19 - NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)
Written and Directed by The Coen Brothers
It took me over a decade to come around a bit on No Country for Old Men. When I first saw it, I really did not respond to it well in the slightest. I mostly just felt very intrigued by Javier Bardem's performance and left it at that.
Even now, I still don't rank it as highly amongst my favorite films of 2007 or even in the Coen Brothers' filmography, but I do have to admit that this is a very well-made film and one that does grow on me with repeated viewings.
While the Coen Brothers are typically known for creating their own works, here they end up adapting a novel by Cormac McCarthy about the pursuit of money and drugs involving Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin), a serial killer named Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem), and a Sheriff Tom Bell (Tommy Lee Jones).
That is a very delicate and vague way of discussing the plot, but the film manages to take such a simple story and spin it into something that is truly a bit of a messy spider web. The film was notorious for really splitting people's opinions on its final act which dives off in a direction that only further confused its audiences.
While I may still prefer There Will Be Blood, Michael Clayton, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, and even Ratatouille, I still have to commend this film.
Frankly, aside from the Screenplay win the already won, I think the Picture and Director films were long overdue for the Coens when they were robbed for Fargo.
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#18 - ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)
Directed by Milos Forman
Written by Bo Goldman, Ken Kesey, & Lawrence Hauben
This is an example of a film where I often see it listed as one of the greatest winners ever to the point where even this lofty a placement may still seem too low.
The truth is that I have never been as ardent a fan of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest as most film fanatics seem to be.
As the typical rhetoric for me tends to be in these cases, the film is especially buoyed up by its ensemble. Jack Nicholson gives one of his best performances as MacMurphy while a lot of the supporting players are simply fantastic like Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd, and particularly Brad Dourif as the tragic Billy Bibbitt.
In fact, it is the final moments of Dourif's Billy onscreen up to the end of the film that really elevate this film even more.
I wasn't always truly pulled into the film, but the final act of Cuckoo's Nest might be one of the best ever for a film.
So yes, I can condone a win but from 1975, I preferred these films more for various reasons.
Dog Day Afternoon, Jeanne Dielman, Mirror, Jaws, Barry Lyndon, and Nashville.
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#17 - 12 YEARS A SLAVE (2013)
Directed by Steve McQueen
Written by John Ridley
This might be one of the more brutal films to have ever won Best Picture...and to think it came close to losing to a truly flaccid film like Gravity.
It took a filmmaker like Steve McQueen, who was fresh off of two truly masterful indie films: Hunger, about the IRA-led Hunger Strikes of 1981 and Shame, about sex addiction, to truly make a film about what is America's most horrendous sin and manage to ride the balance between making it brutal and bleak without being exploitative and melodramatic.
A story like this shouldn't be sugar-coated in the slightest, and thankfully that is not what McQueen does.
The performances here are truly exquisite. Chiwetel Ejiofor is a compelling screen presence, Michael Fassbender (McQueen's frequent collaborator) is simply stunning as the vile Edwin, Sarah Paulson gets a truly remarkable showcase as the suffering and rather sinister wife of Edwin named Mary, Alfre Woodard gives one of the best brief performances ever committed to film as Mistress Shaw, and lastly, this was the great debut of Lupita Nyong'o, one of the most luminous actresses working today.
As it stands, I actually responded a tad more to two films from that year: Her and Blue is the Warmest Color...but this was such a deserving winner and a choice by the Academy that must be commended...even if they would destroy a lot of credibility with their selection of Green Book a few years later.
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#16 - REBECCA (1940)
Directed by Alfred Hitchcock
Written by Robert Sherwood, Daphne du Marier
Hitchcock never won a competitive Oscar in his career...which is laughable when you think about films like Psycho and Vertigo and even Rebecca.
Rebecca has the distinction of being the only film of Hitchcock's to take the top prize and it does still remain one of his finest works.
Led by the legendary Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine (in what would've been a better Oscar winning role than in the following year's Suspicion), we see Fontaine as "The 2nd Mrs. DeWinter" who marries Max DeWinter following the death of his wife, Rebecca.
Rebecca still has a strong hold over everyone at the mansion, particularly that of the chambermaid Mrs. Danvers (Judith Anderson) who will simply not accept someone other than Rebecca as the new mistress of the house.
Rebecca is a movie of such great style and sleek presentation. It shows how well Hitchcock adapted to the more glamorous Hollywood style of filmmaking after working with lesser budgets in his native UK.
Rebecca had stiff competition from the likes of The Great Dictator and The Philadelphia Story, but each film is so drastically different that I may as well throw a dart at a board to choose which I like the most.
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#15 - ORDINARY PEOPLE (1980)
Directed by Robert Redford
Written by Alvin Sargent
Another one of those infamous winners that people love to bash because it beat the more critically acclaimed Raging Bull. It also beat the truly masterful David Lynch film The Elephant Man along with slipping in the national consciousness behind a film like The Shining or masterful efforts by a legendary director like Kurosawa with Kagemusha.
I have to say though that Ordinary People is one of those films that just spoke to me. I talk a lot about how films either connect or don't connect with me and if there was ever a film that found a way to speak to me on a deep emotional level, it was Ordinary People.
As a teenager, I was never suicidal...however, I was often feeling lost in how I felt as a person and I also felt very repressed when it came to my emotions.
Timothy Hutton's work as the depressed Conrad (which earned him a Category Fraud Supporting Actor Oscar) is a performance for the ages and one of the best acting debuts in a film we will ever see.
As his parents, Donald Sutherland is sublime and was robbed of an Oscar nod (he has never been nonimated!!!!) while Mary Tyler Moore is simply chilling as his distant and repressed mother who seems to resent the fact that Conrad can't cope with anything in his life.
Conrad's older brother Buck died in a boating accident during a storm on Lake Michigan to which Conrad was a witness and he was unable to save him. This depression leads him to trying to take his own life, something that his mother Beth seems to resent if only for the fact it breaks the private facade she wants to uphold.
Also, Judd Hirsch as Dr. Berger, Conrad's psychiatrist, might be my favorite depiction of a psychiatrist on film. What a wonderful performance that is the perfect mix of no-nonsense and compassion.
I also want to single out Dinah Manoff, who is only in one scene but leaves a very key and lasting impression as a meek and depressed former hospital mate of Conrad.
Robert Redford does good work with his actors here and he directs the film admirably, though I might have to agree that Director probably should've gone to Scorsese or Lynch.
The film does drag a little at times, but the emotional power of the film resonates so much with me that it overcomes that.
I will always defend Ordinary People as being one of the more underrated winners/films of the last 50 years.
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#14 - THE SILENCE OF THE LAMBS (1991)
Directed by Jonathan Demme
Written by Ted Tally
As perhaps the closest example to a horror film to have ever won this award, The Silence of the Lambs remains one of the boldest and best choices the Academy ever made.
That year, they could've been boring and given the award to one of the following:
Bugsy - a relatively standard biopic about the life of Ben 'Bugsy' Siegel
JFK - another cocaine-fueled concoction from Oliver Stone about the JFK assassination and the conspiracy surrounding it with many fabrications.
The Prince of Tides - a mildly better than a Lifetime movie sap fest
I would like to think that the award came down between the two unlikeliest of contenders: The Silence of the Lambs and the first animated film to be nominated: Beauty and the Beast.
I think they made the right choice, although I do have to agree that the portrayal of Jame Gumb AKA Buffalo Bill is a bit problematic, and I can see why many protested it as a horrible depiction of the LGBTQ community (though Ted Levine was fantastic in the role).
Otherwise, this is basically the perfect blueprint of how a suspenseful/psychological thriller should be made. Demme is a bit of an underrated director, and this represents some of his finest work.
Foster is truly at her best her as Clarice Starling and very few film villains are as iconic as Anthony Hopkins' Hannibal Lector...though I have to admit that it seems rather convenient for a cannibal to be named Hannibal...though I will have to take that up with novelist Thomas Harris.
I do want to single out a couple of other fantastic films from 1991, such as Barton Fink, Boyz n da Hood, A Brighter Summer Day, My Own Private Idaho, Raise the Red Lantern, Dead Again, The Double Life of Veronique, Thelma & Louise, and one of the best sequels ever made, Terminator 2.
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#13 - AMADEUS (1984)
Directed by Milos Forman
Written by Peter Shaffer
I absolutely adore Amadeus and of the nominees, it was my easy winner. However, it was my vote for the 2nd best film of 1984. My #1 film would've been Wim Wenders' truly hypnotic Paris, Texas.
If that film had actually been in the running and lost to Amadeus, I certainly couldn't complain as Amadeus was truly a fascinating film adaptation of a truly fascinating play. Peter Shaffer was perhaps best known for writing one of the most groundbreaking and successful plays in Broadway history: Equus.
With Amadeus, he takes the death of one of the most iconic classical composers in history and tells the story of how he died based on one legend: he was murdered by envious composer Antonio Salieri.
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart is portrayed in the film by Tom Hulce as a childlike prude and he is wonderful, no question.
However, I am of the group that does still agree that F. Murray Abraham as Salieri is one for the ages. It is not a bombastic role by any means, but the complexity and journey of Salieri is so fascinating to watch. I actually would love the chance to play the role on stage one day.
I had seen the film prior to this, but in my 8th grade Music Appreciation class, we were shown the film and the remarkable thing was that my classmates mostly loved the film.
That was a truly a testament to how well this film turned out, especially since many of them were dreading it when the film was first brought up.
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#12 - SCHINDLER'S LIST (1993)
Directed by Steven Spielberg
Written by Steven Zallian & Thomas Keneally
I actually go back and forth on Schindler's List sometimes. On one hand, the brutal nature of the film here goes beyond most of what Spielberg would ever tend to put in a film...but my problem with Spielberg as a filmmaker is that even at times when he is dealing with darker subject matters (and it is hard to find a subject matter darker than the Holocaust), his films have this undeniable Spielberg touch that makes things feel sweeter than they should be.
For example, The Color Purple suffers greatly from that.
However, I think Spielberg did his finest work on this film. It is certainly made with a great visual eye in many scenes and the emotional undercurrent is certainly palpable.
There is a lot that one can discuss with this film, but I am going to single out one particular aspect and that is Ralph Fiennes.
Keep in mind, this was essentially the breakthrough role for Fiennes and he is playing the disgustingly vile Nazi Amon Goeth. However, the remarkable thing about this performance is how much charm and wit he imbues into the character which makes him so compelling to watch to the point where you almost forget that this is simply a truly deplorable human being who, frankly, you love watching get hanged at the end of the film. Fiennes thankfully didn't receive any kind of unfair backlash (though he should've won the Oscar in a cakewalk), and still thankfully has an illustrious career to this day.
1993 was also the year of Jane Campion's haunting THE PIANO along with the dementedly hilarious GROUNDHOG DAY from Harold Ramis.
My favorite film from that year was one of the three films from Krystof Kieslowski's Three Colors Trilogy: Blue.
That film still contains what might be my favorite portrayal of grief in a film in a truly transcendent performance by Juliette Binoche.
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#11 - THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)
Directed by David Lean
Written by Carl Foreman, Pierre Bouelle, & Michael Wilson
I feel like 1939 is often deemed the greatest year for film in the history of cinema...and I can see enough truly great films from that year to understand the argument.
However, when it comes to truly magnificent years that don't get enough praise, one of those has to be 1957.
Aside from The Bridge on the River Kwai, just look at this list!
12 Angry Men
Wild Strawberries
The Seventh Seal
Nights of Cabiria
Paths of Glory
Throne of Blood
A Face in the Crowd
Witness for the Prosecution
Mother India
What a stellar year!
I tend to lean more towards Bergman's efforts (Wild Strawberries & The Seventh Seal), but there is no denying the brilliance of The Bridge on the River Kwai.
David Lean was one of those directors who often made sweeping epics but was able to find a way to give them great emotional depth while so many others lacked that.
In fact, as we enter my top 10, we are going to be treated to the crown jewel of Lean's career.
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#10 - LAWRENCE OF ARABIA (1962)
Directed by David Lean
Written by Michael Wilson & Robert Bolt
Very few films manage to be so large in their scope and yet so fascinating as a character study than that of Lawrence of Arabia.
You could make a case for calling this the most visually stunning film ever made for how expansive its cinematography is, and then on top of that, you have a truly magnificent performance by the late great Peter O'Toole to lead the way.
Steven Spielberg once made a comment that watching Lawrence of Arabia made him almost reconsider even wanting to make a movie.
I do have to understand that sentiment. I think when it comes to full blown epics, it doesn't get much bigger or better than this one.
Much like 1957, I actually think 1962 was another stellar year for films.
I want to single out Agnes Varda's Cleo from 5 to 7 as a personal favorite but look at the rest of these!
The Manchurian Candidate
Days of Wine and Roses
The Miracle Worker
Jules & Jim
Lolita
Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
David & Lisa
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#9 - ANNIE HALL (1977)
Directed by Woody Allen
Written by Woody Allen & Marshall Brickman
Perhaps I should address the elephant in the room?
Woody Allen has made some rather perplexing and questionable decisions in his personal life over the years...and in addition to this, the man hasn't truly made a great film in over 30 years. He has made a couple of good or even very good films, but he is simply far gone from his prime.
Annie Hall is definitely an example of him being in his prime. It still holds up remarkably well, too.
For being one of the shortest Best Picture winners ever, Annie Hall manages to pack in a lot when it comes to wit and charm and pathos.
I also first saw Annie Hall as a very young teenager and simply didn't get it. I understood why many complained that it was not a good winner...but that was never due to the fact it beat Star Wars because that I couldn't care less about.
It wasn't until I watched the film again in college and it was like a brand-new experience. In fact, I would even argue that when I rewatched the film last year that it still felt very refreshing.
Diane Keaton's Annie is truly a major reason why this film works so well and her chemistry with Allen is infectious. I also feel Woody Allen playing his prototypical self has never been better than it was in this film.
I fully support this win, but I also want to call out a couple of other masterpieces from 1977.
Robert Altman's 3 Women
David Lynch's Eraserhead
John Cassavetes' Opening Night
Ettore Scola's A Special Day
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#8 - ON THE WATERFRONT (1954)
Directed by Elia Kazan
Written by Budd Schulberg
Speaking of directors with problematic personal lives, Elia Kazan is well-remembered for being...rightly so...a rat.
Kazan was known for naming names to Joe McCarthy's HUAC. The ripple effect of this was so profound that in 1999, the Academy faced a lot of scrutiny when they chose to give Kazan an Honorary Oscar.
If you go back to watch the clip, some give him a standing ovation (Meryl Streep, Kathy Bates, Lynn Redgrave) while some just politely clap while remaining seated (Spielberg). Though what I love are the people who choose to just sit in stoically like Ed Harris, Amy Madigan, Nick Nolte, and Sophia Loren.
Kazan was a masterful director, but it is truly hard to view him as anything other than a rat even if he himself fought so hard to make us view him as otherwise.
That filter makes On the Waterfront a truly complex film to try to talk about. It truly is a great film; one of the best to come out of the Hollywood system...and yet, Kazan's agenda is fully on display here.
Brando's Terry Molloy is our hero ratting out the leaders of a crooked Union...but despite knowing that there have been crooked Union leaders over the years, I think it is hard to ignore the corruption was something worth fighting. Not every union is going to be perfect by any means.
Despite the issue with the Union angle, I do think this film contains Brando's best performance along with a truly lovely performance by Eva Marie Saint.
The cringe may be there with anti-Communist rhetoric and placing it on Unions, but it is also one of the best structured films to ever come out of Hollywood at the same time.
However, 1954 also gave us one of the most influential films ever made: Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai.
That is a film that everyone should see at least once.
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#7 - MOONLIGHT (2016)
Directed by Barry Jenkins
Written by Barry Jenkins & Terrell Alvin McCraney
As the producers of La La Land walked up to the stage to give their acceptance speeches after winning Best Picture, I sort of slowly began to check out. It was the expected outcome and while I thought the film was fine, I didn't get the rapturous praise it received...and this is coming from someone who is a fan of and has performed in several musicals onstage over the years.
Then...it happened...
Moonlight was crowned the rightful winner.
This was a monumental moment considering it proved to many conspiracy theorists that if the wrong winner were announced, Price Waterhouse Coopers would correct the error (sorry Rex Reed, Marisa Tomei did actually win for My Cousin Vinny...) and on a truly historical note, Moonlight then became the first film to win Best Picture that featured a predominantly African American cast and have an LGBTQ+ theme as a main storyline thread.
I saw Moonlight at Nitehawk Theatre in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on a very cool January evening in 2017. Trump had just taken office and things felt incredibly bleak.
I had also been very out of the loop when it came to films, and I wasn't keeping up with a lot of the buzz around them like I had done through my pre-teen/teenage years.
Moonlight's take on a young kid struggling with his sexuality and how decisions can lead you down a destructive path was done in such a profound and artsy way that, at times, I couldn't believe how beautiful the film was playing.
Chiron is our lead, and we see him in three stages of his life: childhood, adolescence, and young adulthood.
While Mahershala Ali got the Oscar, I personally thought the MVPs of the film were Naomie Harris (who plays Chiron's drug addicted mother) and Ashton Sanders, who plays Chiron as a teenager.
Moonlight helped invigorate my love for movies, which only blossomed in the following years of the 2010s...even if I do feel like TV these days often surpasses what cinema has been achieving.
I do want to mention two other films from 2016 that were simply masterpieces in their own right: Arrival and The Handmaiden.
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#6 - ALL ABOUT EVE (1950)
Written and Directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz
You could make a case for All About Eve having the greatest screenplay ever. It does contain a lot of great dialogue and wit to spare, but it is also just one of those classic stories that feels so timeless and so familiar that you can't help but praise the achievement.
A lot of film buffs often battle about which film truly deserved Best Picture: All About Eve or Sunset Boulevard; I am in the camp of the former (although I think Gloria Swanson should've won Actress for Sunset Boulevard).
The film tells the story of actress Margo Channing, who ends up taking the mild-mannered Eve Harrington under her wing only for Eve to actually be seeking to achieve more fame at the expense of Margo.
It is all the catty and delicious backstabbing one might expect from that cuckoo world of stage and screen, and with it, we get to experience "a bumpy night" for everyone involved.
I must single out one film in particular that I do find to be another masterpiece of the highest order: Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon.
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#5 - THE APARTMENT (1960)
Directed by Billy Wilder
Written by Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond
The Apartment gets the ultimate title of being a film that was easily the best in its category, but was lucky because a couple of other films weren't there to challenge it.
However, the truth is that The Apartment is such a unique spin of the Romantic Comedy genre that I really can't say anything negative about it. It all comes down more to a matter of taste and even if I thought a little more highly of snubbed films like Psycho or L'avventura, I have to admit that The Apartment was just as worthy and contains some of the best acting, direction, and writing you could ask for in a film.
Jack Lemmon is always his reliably strong self, but the revelation of this film is Shirley MacClaine as the depressed and suicidal Fran Kubelik, who "lost to a tracheotomy"...or rather Elizabeth Taylor for one of the worst Oscar winning performances in Butterfield 8.
The Apartment is also a masterclass on how to perfectly blend comedy and drama within a film. It is also a masterclass on how to structure a film and to leave you on your toes until nearly the final moments.
The Apartment is the gold standard of the modern-day romantic comedy, even if it really transcends the idea of a genre.
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#4 - CASABLANCA (1943)
Directed by Michael Curtiz
Written by Julius & Phillip Epstein
Considering how this was an era of the Academy's history where they often seemed to go for the film that would not stand the test of time, it is kind of remarkable that Casablanca, a film that had originally opened with little fanfare practically a year before the ceremony, would end up winning and becoming one of the most beloved films ever made.
Casablanca is one of those films where you might not look at a single aspect of the film and find it to be masterful, but somehow, when you put the acting and the writing and the directing and the performances together, it is simply magic.
I mentioned earlier how I wasn't the biggest fan of Citizen Kane when it came to films that often get singled out as the greatest ever made.
I am here to make the claim that out of classic Hollywood cinema of the 20s-40s, I would easily rank Casablanca as the best. It just has that special quality that earns its legendary status.
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#3 - THE GODFATHER PART II (1974)
Written and Directed by Frances Ford Coppola
Co-written by Mario Puzo
And here we have the greatest sequel ever made.
Seriously, I would even go as far to say that I might even be slightly more entertained by this film than I was its predecessor but that is just being a little nitpicky.
As it stands, The Godfather Part II manages to enthrall us by telling us how Vito Corelone went from peasant orphan immigrant to the Don while also showing us the further descent into evil with his son Michael that we began to see in the final stages of the first installment.
The scope that this film covers is nothing short of breathtaking and then, at the end, it all ends with a simple shot of Al Pacino as Michael sitting all alone rueful over how he is left all alone with nothing to blame but himself.
Pacino is a master, DeNiro is a master, Keaton is a master, and the late great John Cazale is a master.
Coppola was on fire in the 70s with his two Godfather films, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now. I am truly hoping he can have a major comeback with his new film Megalopolis starring Adam Driver.
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#2 - THE GODFATHER (1972)
Written and Directed by Francis Ford Coppola
Co-written by Mario Puzo
My history with The Godfather is a little murky, because I actually used to call the film very overrated. I tried sitting through the film on three different occasions (only with sporadic sittings with my grandmother who absolutely adored all the movies, even the dreaded third one), and I just never really got it.
It wasn't until a few years ago when I sat down to watch the film again that it all came together like some sort of crazy puzzle that I was missing several pieces for.
I don't know what it was, but it was like "How did I not see this before?!"
The Godfather is also the perfect example of taking what was a trashy and pulpy novel and turning it into high art.
Coppola may get a lot of flak for not having made a truly great film in over 40 years, but I am sorry, if you are a man that creates The Godfather I and II, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, you will always get a well-deserved seat at the table represented legendary and still-relevant filmmakers.
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DRUMROLL PLEASE.....
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#1 - PARASITE (2019)
Directed by Bong Joon-ho
Written by Bong Joon-ho & Han Jin-won
Okay, hear me out.
Honestly, I truly could've made a case for any of the films in my top 5 for this slot...and to further confess, I did originally have The Godfather in this slot.
However, Parasite gets my selection for a mix of various reasons.
As a film, it is truly a masterpiece. It is one of the finest films I will ever see, and it also singlehandedly pushed over the edge to go on a movie rewatching spree in the early stages of the COVID pandemic because I wanted to revisit so many of the films that made me fall in love in the medium in the first place....particularly foreign films.
That's another reason I am actually choosing it here: the true joy I feel over the historical importance of its win as a foreign film.
No other foreign-language film won the award for Best Picture prior to Parasite and only about a dozen or so even achieved a nomination. As someone who has championed foreign cinema for most of his life, seeing a film like this take off like wildfire made me incredibly happy. It was like the whole filmgoing world, for the most part, rallied behind this one film despite the fact in recent years of the past, it probably would've been ignored.
The script is simply perfect. Much like The Apartment, the way Bong is able to weave through many genre shifts is nothing short of masterful. He keeps you on your toes and second guessing every second...and just when you think you may have something figured out, he tricks you again.
The cast is fantastic; easily one of the best ensembles I know I will ever see in a film.
Song Kang-ho, Choi Woo-shik, Park So-dam, Cho Yeo-jeong, Lee Jung-eun, Jang Hye-jin, Park Myung-hoon, and Jung Hyeon-jin.
They all deserve to be mentioned, although I still think it is a crime that despite the film's historical awards success that none of the actors got any real attention on the award's circuit.
All of the women, particularly Cho Yeo-jeong, were far superior to any of the Supporting Actress nominees that year, including the winner Laura Dern...and don't get me wrong, I adore Laura Dern but nothing about her performance in Marriage Story was the least bit worthy of even being in consideration for a nomination, let alone a win.
Parasite getting this selection is certainly driven as much by sentiment as it is by my belief that it is truly a modern-day masterpiece. I can contend that maybe The Godfather is the more worthy selection, but I feel like the passion I felt for Parasite was something I hadn't experienced for a film in a very long time...maybe even ever in some ways.
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CONCLUSION:
As we come to a close, I want to thank everyone who took the time to read through all 5 volumes. This kind of stuff can prove to be a bit much or even difficult at times, because it can be hard to compare various films. The amazing thing I discovered was that it often felt surprisingly easy to rank them and that I had more of an issue with going "Oh that film is going to be this high?!" rather than "Oh...I feel bad for ranking this film so low!!"
I guess that just goes to show you some of the horrid choices that the Academy has made.
Maybe in the future I will try to tackle some other similar races, like with acting but those are often far more ambitious to try to tackle.
Let me know what you think of the ranking and perhaps a lively debate could ensue.
HERE ARE THE LINKS TO THE REST OF THE VOLUMES:
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