I've been reviewing movies for more than 25 years and considered myself a cinephile for the better part of a decade before that, so I don't want you to think that I don't "understand" editing. I know what's involved in editing, I know what function it serves for the film, and I can quickly and instinctively identify when the craft is done well and when it is done poorly.
What I maybe don't understand as well? What makes editing good enough that it deserves to have an Academy Award bestowed on it, especially since editing can take different forms that impress other editors -- the ones who nominate each other -- for different reasons.
And so for my monthly series in 2025, I am going to watch 12 films that won the Oscar for best film editing, with a specific focus on the editing and what I believe distinguished it from the rest of the competition that year. (Maybe just generally and not taking into consideration the specific other nominees, but we'll see as we go.) This series will be called Understanding Editing and it will kick off later this month.
This series will also contain a first for this blog: It'll be my first time doing a series where the films are neither all new to me nor all rewatches. I've done both of those things separately, but this time I figured I'd combine them. So that means I'll watch six movies I've already seen, and six movies I haven't seen.
I figure this hybrid approach has benefits in terms of the improvement of my appreciation of the craft. Some movies will be movies that are brand new to me, and I can try to see if I notice right away that the editing is superlative. However, then I'll also get to see movies I already know (and love? more on that in a minute), looking at them specifically through the lens of how they were cut together.
And right now I've got another first: The first time I will list all the films I intend to watch before I start watching them. I may have done this in a bi-monthly series before, but not yet in a monthly series.
I'll go chronologically from the early days of the Oscars, alternating between movies I've seen and movies I haven't seen. And here's what it will look like:
January - Lost Horizon (1937) (unseen)
February - The Adventures of Robin Hood (1938) (seen previously)
March - Sergeant York (1941) (unseen)
April - The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) (seen previously)
May - King Solomon's Mines (1950) (unseen)
June - From Here to Eternity (1953) (seen previously)
July - How the West Was Won (1962) (unseen)
August - The French Connection (1971) (seen previously)
September - The Right Stuff (1983) (unseen)
October - Saving Private Ryan (1998) (seen previously)
November - The Bourne Ultimatum (2007) (unseen)
December - The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo (2011) (seen previously)
The only thing I didn't check was whether all these are easily accessible for rental or streaming, so it's possible I'll have to switch out some titles if I can't find them.
The films I haven't seen include some titles I've been meaning to watch for ages (particularly The Right Stuff), while the films I have seen are all films I've seen only once, though they are not all personal favorites. If I selected them it means I thought there was something specifically well known about the editing that I wanted to interrogate, though some of them were more because they fit in chronologically to the schedule and because they were just movies I feel I should have seen multiple times already.
Because the films span almost exactly 75 years of Hollywood history, they will also feature significant changes in what's possible to accomplish via editing and what's considered merely very good functional editing vs. editing that calls attention to itself.
In any case, I'm looking forward to it ... which means the two other ideas I have for year-long series will have to again wait their turn, either for 2026 or for 2027.
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