Here we are — the end of the road after many years of viewing and blurbing.
What have I learned? The Academy Awards are a fascinating way to chart the evolution of how a business sees itself and what inspired awe at any given time. It’s a great reminder that a fantastic movie is its own reward and will live on far longer than any industry laurel. The voting body chooses what strikes them in the moment, frequently with little regard toward what will stand up to historical scrutiny.
But these 10 winners are both timely and timeless, wearing the seal of Best Picture as an honor rather than a scarlet letter. Without further ado, here’s how I size up a group of unimpeachable masterpieces.
CATCH UP ON THE COUNTDOWN
Part 1: #94-71
Part 2: #70-51
Part 3: #50-31
Part 4: #30-11
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10. 12 Years a Slave (2013)
There are many striking images in Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave — hanging bodies and bloody whippings come to mind —but none have stuck with me more than the sight of Solomon Northup’s fiddle in tattered fragments on the ground. This beautiful instrument is capable of such majestic artistic expression. However, it is also party to acts of despicable cruelty, forced to provide gaiety and merriment at occasions where it is hardly appropriate. McQueen’s indictment of slavery as an institution (as well as the people who perpetuated it) takes art not only as its form of expression but as its very subject. His paradoxical and painfully juxtaposed incongruities serve to drive home the simple, brutal truth of the film: this is real. Slavery happened in America, not as an isolated occurrence but as a systematic, legalized form of barbarism. It's a fact both nasty and necessary to acknowledge, and 12 Years a Slave ensures that such inhumanity cannot be ignored by forcing us to look it squarely in the face. McQueen's images echo a philosophy best articulated in a maxim by the German sociologist Theodor Adorno, "To write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric." What good is the aesthetic beauty of art, the film asks, if it cannot prevent the suffering of real people? 12 Years a Slave cannot erase the stain of the past, nor can it repair the scars left behind by anyone it touches. Once Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup makes eye contact with the camera, seemingly offering a silent plea for help, that implication extends to us as viewers, too.
9. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957)
David Lean takes his sweet time organizing all the pieces of The Bridge of the River Kwai, and you can feel the length at the beginning as he delineates the various narrative threads. There's Alec Guinness's Colonel Nicholson attempting to uphold British decency among the men he commands even as the Japanese take them prisoner. At the same time, there's also the story of William Holden's grizzled Major Shears, the jaded American who manages to get out only to find himself inexorably drawn back into the action in Thailand. But my goodness, the payoff for all the waiting is unlike anything else I've ever seen. You don't even realize how everything will come to a head in a climax to explode in a collision of story and spectacle. Lean wholly earns the "epic" label here as plot and theme collide in a pulse-pounding finale that remains peerless decades later. (It also doesn't hurt that this is one of the era's few movies that maintained something of a clear-eyed vision of the paternalism fostered in the ingrained colonialism of the British imagination.)
8. Casablanca (1943)
Casablanca, simply put, is the golden age of Hollywood in its shiniest, sleekest form. Perhaps on first watch, it can seem a little standard-issue or simple. But it's on later watches when the film really starts to sing. The brilliant contours of its deceptively complex script capture both the wistful longing of expatriates looking back to nostalgic times with their urgent need to flee Northern Africa in the moment. Add to that memorable dialogue with perhaps the highest zinger-to-minute ratio ever recorded, the balance of proto-noir shadowy lighting with a zippy comedic pace, and the soulful performances of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman star-crossed lovers Rick and Ilsa ... and you've got something that manages to encapsulate an entire era in 102 minutes that still satisfies entirely on its own terms. Here's looking at you, indeed.
7. No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Coens themselves would probably appreciate the irony that the film that the Oscars recognized them for is so distinctly un-Coen-esque. No Country for Old Men contains not a trace of the brothers' trademark sardonicism or off-kilter perspective as they submerge their style into translating Cormac McCarthy's sparse novel to the screen. The duo's precision of tonal control proves the perfect filter for the author's taciturn prose. The Coen Brothers boil the story down to its elemental core: a battle of an ordinary man trying to outrun seemingly unstoppable evil in the human form of Javier Bardem's chilling assassin Anton Chigurh. All the while, institutional law and order can only trail several steps behind and forlornly survey the wreckage. Not a frame feels out of place in this thrilling tale of apocryphal proportions. It's the kind of film watching experience where you feel firmly in the hands of masters at the pinnacle of their craft.
6. Parasite (2019)
At a time when wealth inequality is both bigger and more visible than ever, we're not exactly starved for cinematic metaphors for the gaping global class divide. But with Parasite, Bong Joon-ho cuts through the clutter with clear and precise frameworks that extend to both his visual and narrative storytelling — up and down, light and dark, smell and sight — that effectively deliver a scintillating scammer saga. But the film never feels schematic or simple. These structures are populated by people, after all, and Bong never lets anyone in the movie devolve into easy caricatures. Their sympathies and shortcomings alike add such rich complication to the film, giving it the spark of life that steadily builds towards a raging inferno against arbitrary class satisfaction.
5. The Godfather (1972)
"What is it with men and The Godfather?" bemoaned the character Kathleen Kelly in Nora Ephron's You've Got Mail. While she asked in exasperation, the question is worth posing in earnest. Few films grip the endurance of patriarchal power as Francis Ford Coppola’s masterpiece does. Al Pacino’s Michael Corleone enters the film insistent on realizing that American ideal of rugged individualism, believing he can succeed entirely apart from the forces that delivered him to a place of prosperity. But as soon as rival families put a target on the back of his father, Marlon Brando’s Don Vito Corleone, it’s as if something instinctual just snaps back into place and makes him a family man once again. The Godfather crystallizes the triumphant and terrifying truth that men cannot foreswear our emotional inheritance. There’s always more depth to discover within Coppola’s classic, and the richest terrain might just lie in the subtleties of Pacino’s performance as he embodies the journey of both character and film alike.
4. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946)
William Wyler's The Best Years of Our Lives poignantly captures a moment in America where pride and pain lived side by side. In the immediate wake of World War II, society underwent a great reset as the population tried to return to normalcy as the men returned home from battle. (Among the many ways the film depicts a different country: the burden of war was evenly distributed rather than left entirely for the working class to wage.) How is it possible to move forward when it is impossible for three soldiers to fully explain what they went through? Sergeant Al Peterson (Frederic March) was a family man who begins to turn to alcohol as he realizes the extent to which his wife, children, and co-workers learned to exist without him. Captain Fred Derry (Dana Andrews) starts to feel adrift as neither his employer nor the wife he married just before shipping overseas possess the slightest understanding of what he saw and endured in battle. Petty Officer Homer (Harold Russell), who lost both his arms during the war and now sports prosthetic hooks instead of hands, must learn to feel as comfortable emotionally with his new appendages as he does physically. The film is a moving testament to how a nation can rally with resiliency so long as it is willing to feel through the darkness. Wyler's camera always finds the right place to capture the immense wells of emotion under the surface without needing the geysers to sprout saccharine sentimentality. His three-hour intimate epic appeals to the best in us all with a quiet, unassuming grace.
3. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975)
An epochal struggle that plays out on the most intimate and personal of terms, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest charts nothing less than the battle between freedom and control. Jack Nicholson, capping off an all-time heater in the '70s, represents the great human impulse for liberation and self-determination as the rambunctious Randall P. McMurphy. Louise Fletcher, as chilling and tightly coiled as they come, embodies the forces of control as his mental institution's authority figure Nurse Ratched. Director Miloš Forman finds that sweet spot of digging in so deep with the specifics of these two characters that they can become paradoxically universal by extension. This is one of those classic movies that I know I'll spend my whole life rewatching, rethinking, and growing alongside to discover new dimensions that open themselves up to me with time.
2. The Departed (2006)
The people who tell you The Departed is just the make-up Oscar for three decades of snubbing Scorsese are WRONG. Though the director himself is even inclined to express surprise that this is the film that finally got him over the hump with the Academy, it’s for precisely that reason the film stands as such a testament to his talents. There’s a version of this tale of mob/police double agents (a remake of an acclaimed Hong Kong thriller, to boot) that is standard director-for-hire material. But there’s something intangible that Scorsese brings to the mix here that elevates the story by imbuing it with his pet themes: the thin line between law and disorder, absent fathers and lost sons, intergenerational struggle, the contradictions of masculinity. The Departed is a thrilling tribute to Scorsese’s consummate craftsmanship and sublime stewardship of any project he touches.
1. Annie Hall (1977)
In 2014, I was asked what film I would choose if I could only take one with me into the distant future. The answer came instantly: Annie Hall. As I wrote then, "I cannot think of another film that better encapsulates all the potential of cinema. If film had ceased to exist in this hypothetical future society, Annie Hall could single-handedly regenerate the art form and produce a remarkable diversity of movies in the process." Woody Allen's masterpiece is everything I want a movie to be: a representation of reality and an expression of pure cinema. A little funny, a little serious. Imaginative yet grounded. Alive in the moment (something the film achieves largely due to Diane Keaton's luminous performance as the titular character) and yet retrospective about what it means to be alive at all. Not just my favorite Best Picture winner but, on most days, my favorite movie ever made.
Thanks for following along! I did find it interesting that, upon reflection, the top 3 movies were all ones I first encountered between the ages of 13-15 when my tastes in film were taking shape. I’ve gone through many cycles of rewatches with each, finding new understandings of them as my own maturity grew. I do think that did ultimately make a big difference in them landing where they did. (It’s a personal list, after all!)
With all that in mind, where would I rank the 2022 nominees? It really only matters for one of them, but just for the hell of it…
The Banshees of Inisherin: #15
Everything Everywhere All at Once: #17
Top Gun Maverick: #33
Avatar: The Way of Water: #38
The Fabelmans: #41
TÁR: #43
Triangle of Sadness: #60
Women Talking: #62
All Quiet on the Western Front: #67
Elvis: #82
Yours in service and cinema,
Marshall