Ranking all 88 (!) best picture winners

I promised you a wrap-up of my Audient Auscars series in the form of a ranking of all 88 best picture winners, and now I've delivered.

And Memorial Day in the U.S. seemed like a good time to do it, as I will certainly be looking back on -- remembering -- the experience of watching a lot of highly regarded movies.

Because there's a lot to say about the films in the blurbs that follow, I'll limit my up-front commentary to a couple quick bits:

1. The order of the films is based on my rankings in Flickchart, not an organic order chosen specifically by me for this purpose. I probably could have done that, but I implicitly trust Flickchart to do it for me, even if it's not "perfect." I'll try to note the films that I think are too high or too low as they come up.

2. Not wanting to spoil the surprise about my #1, nor have the poster for my #88 appearing up at the top of this post, I've decided to go with the poster in the exact middle of my rankings. Since there are an even number of films, I had another choice for the middle of the rankings, but went with this one because a) it has a picture of an Oscar statue on the poster, and b) the title seems to speak perfectly to a project involving good movies watched over a number of years. (I'd say that the years I've spent watching movies are the best of my life, except I think that makes me sound a bit pathetic.) Also, it's Memorial Day and that's a movie about World War II.

3. The number listed next to each film is its ranking on Flickchart out of 4289 films. (Which is nearly 250 fewer films that I've actually seen -- I am just very behind in adding them.) I thought about listing each film as xxxx/4289, before I realized I'd be writing 4289 88 times, 87 of which would be redundant. However, I have included a percentile, to give you another quick way to assess where this film sits relative to all 4289 I've seen (or, er, ranked).

Suggestion: If you get overwhelmed, just note the order of the titles and skip the blurbs. If something really shocks you, read the blurb.

Don't think we need to delay any more, do you? Let's get into it:

88. Gigi (1958, Vicente Minnelli) - 3838 (11%)

This would not have been my guess for worst best picture, but I certainly did not like it. There's one song in it that I think kind of redeems it (no, not the creepy "Thank Heaven for Little Girls"), but overall, this is a morally suspect piece of patriarchal bullshit -- simultaneously frivolous and damaging to social progress.

87. Around the World in 80 Days (1956, Michael Anderson) - 3656 (15%)

The fifties were just awful for best picture winners, weren't they? This was what I thought might be a leading contender for worst best when I saw it last year as part of this series. (In fact, my bottom three were all ones I had neglected until this series.) I found this movie dramatically inert, culturally insensitive, and in all other ways full of meaningless bluster. The remake is like ten times better, and it's not even all that good.

86. Tom Jones (1963, Tony Richardson) - 3628 (15%)

Probably the worst looking best picture winner, and one of the oddest. As I said in my post about it, it reminded me more of an episode of Benny Hill than a period piece with some pretensions toward seriousness. Even my love for Albert Finney could not lead me to consider this as any more than a strange tonal misfire and one of the more improbable best picture winners of all time.

85. The Lost Weekend (1945, Billy Wilder) - 3586 (16%)

Another that I thought was a likely contender for my least favorite. What was Billy Wilder thinking? I probably need to heed my own advice about movies from other eras, remembering that certain things that seem cliche were actually brand new back then, and this story about alcoholism is probably a shining example of that. But my goodness is it heavy-handed, and oh so overwrought.

84. Crash (2005, Paul Haggis) - 3213 (25%)

From one type of shining example to another, this is the shining example of the movie everyone agrees should never have won best picture. The weirdest thing about Crash is that I remember stumbling out into the daylight and saying to my wife (then girlfriend) that it was probably the best movie I'd seen so far that year. That was in the summer so it wasn't saying as much, but what a thought to have about a movie you would grow to hate upon the slightest consideration of it after the fact. (The huge amounts of backlash certainly helped in that regard.)

83. How Green Was My Valley (1941, John Ford) - 3209 (25%)

The first movie on this list that earns its spot just by boring me. Before I ever saw this, an ex-girlfriend referred to it as "How Long Was My Movie," and I don't think I ever fully got that pre-damning out of my head. It is indeed a long slow movie that ultimately just left me shrugging. (Interestingly, it's less than two hours long.)

82. The Life of Emile Zola (1937, William Dieterle) - 3054 (29%)

One of the other worst-looking best picture winners, this one is pretty much totally lacking in artfulness and dynamism. It's basically the meeting of a courtroom movie and a biopic, and it's kind of the worst of both. Yawn.

81. The Broadway Melody (1929, Harry Beaumont) - 2659 (38%)

I graded this one majorly on a curve, giving it points for the era in which it was made (or rather, not subtracting points from it for that reason). It's not really a good movie but I found it appealing enough. This is the one that prompted them to change the rules, as one of the producers of the film was intimately involved in the selection of best picture (or something like that, I can't remember and I can't be bothered to look it up).

80. Cavalcade (1933, Frank Lloyd) - 2583 (40%)

Another somewhat boring choice from Oscar's first ten years, this movie at least has a certain grandiose quality as it charts a British family through some four or five decades of British history. I had a limited fondness for it.

79. The Great Ziegfeld (1936, Robert Z. Leonard) - 2544 (41%)

This is one of those you'd have thought I wouldn't have seen until this series, but in actuality I caught this about ten years ago (on the same day that I saw another best picture winner, From Here to Eternity, for the first time). It's pretty dull but at least it has some good dance numbers. Probably should be ranked right around the same spot as Emile Zola -- I kind of think of these as similar films, even though they aren't.

78. Marty (1955, Delbert Mann) - 2516 (41%)

The first movie on this list that I know a lot of people love. People I respect, too. But I just couldn't get into this story of a schlub falling in love. I probably should see it again. The thing I still remember about this movie most is the thing I knew about it before I even saw it -- that it was the answer to one of the questions in Robert Redford's Quiz Show.

77. An American in Paris (1951, Vincente Minnelli) - 2510 (41%)

The first of two movies on this list that I ranked in my other ranking post this past week. As I said there, I just don't like Vincente Minnelli. (Who also directed my least favorite best picture winner, Gigi.) I probably owe this one a rewatch, but I already know I still won't be impressed by the fact that the movie just abandons its narrative for an extended expressionistic dance number at the end. Should definitely be below Marty (but is only six spots above it).

76. Going My Way (1944, Leo McCarey) - 2327 (46%)

Corny and well-meaning. Definitely the first movie on the list I feel considerably more positively than negatively toward, but pretty forgettable nonetheless. But it did give us the song "Would You Like to Swing on a Star?", so there's that.

75. The Hurt Locker (2009, Kathryn Bigelow) - 2233 (48%)

This is too low. Plain and simple. However, I do still have considerable problems with the narrative of this film, changing protagonists as it does and going in a generally unsatisfying direction over a series of vignettes. It deserves better than being in my bottom 15 best picture winners ... but maybe not much better.

74. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Lewis Milestone) - 2218 (48%)

This barely counts because I barely remember watching it in junior high, or some unfathomably long time ago. In fact, this could be the first best picture winner I ever saw. But barely does count on my movie list, because I did indeed watch it. And I barely remember being bored. Methinks I have been ranking it on reputation rather than actual enjoyment.

73. No Country for Old Men (2007, Joel & Ethan Coen) - 2199 (49%)

I admire the heck out of many aspects of this movie, more so after I saw it a second time. But I still don't like the choices the Coens make in the final third of this movie, what to show and what not to show, and how not to really end. Some people think the third act of this movie is perfect. Well, they can choose to rank it higher than I do.

72. Platoon (1986, Oliver Stone) - 2008 (53%)

This movie didn't do all that much for me, honestly, when I saw it in March. I can probably blame having seen a bunch of movies about Vietnam already, but I still have a hard time figuring out why this was such a hit. I also think the death scene of [spoiler alert] is laughably melodramatic.

71. It Happened One Night (1934, Frank Capra) - 1967 (54%)

This has all the hallmarks of a movie I should see again, especially since I've seen (and loved) several other Frank Capra movies since I saw this. But even as much as I love Clark Gable, this one was pretty unmemorable for me.

70. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952, Cecil B. DeMille) - 1964 (54%)

This was one of the bigger surprises of Audient Auscars. It's still not a particularly high ranking, but I was far more entertained by this than I expected to be. It was cheesy in a good way.

69. Mrs. Miniver (1942, William Wyler) - 1909 (55%)

Law & Order might have thought it invented "ripped from the headlines," but Mrs. Miniver got there some five decades earlier. I suppose there were a number of World War II movies that were actually released during World War II, but this still seemed like a pretty bold stroke. Not that memorable otherwise, though.

68. Million Dollar Baby (2004, Clint Eastwood) - 1893 (56%)

I was probably more grumpy about this winning than No Country winning, but for some reason I rate it higher -- perhaps because No Country beat one of my favorite movies of the past 15 years, There Will Be Blood, while Baby only beat the still-very-good The Aviator. It's a good movie, it's just not my good movie. Didn't connect with it emotionally. I do like to make fun of it by saying "mo chuisle" at random times, as though that Irish phrase is some indication of its unconvincing sentimentality.

67. Gentleman's Agreement (1947, Elia Kazan) - 1875 (56%)

This one came to me with a lot of negative attention upfront. Someone (my wife?) characterized it as didactic and overwrought. Given that kind of introduction, I don't remember all that much about it, even though I saw it within the last ten years. Liked it better than I thought I would, given the advanced billing. The subject is anti-semitism, an important topic especially for that time.

66. The Sting (1973, George Roy Hill) - 1770 (59%)

One of the first best picture winners I saw that I remember being disappointed by. (Also, the best picture winner from the year I was born.) The story of a complicated long-con just wasn't that long for my memory, despite the star wattage of Paul Newman and Robert Redford.

65. All the King's Men (1949, Robert Rossen) - 1727 (60%)

This seems to have gotten ranked a little higher than I meant to rank it. I liked this movie fine, but even less than a year after seeing it I remember very little about it.

64. Out of Africa (1985, Sydney Pollack) - 1671 (61%)

I don't think I really thought all that much of this movie when I saw it, but I'm also pretty sure I thought I missed something, or that I was too dense to figure out why it was so good. Its reputation has come to be that of one of the more forgettable best picture winners, so I was probably right on in the first place. For some reason, I'm still ranking this at a very respectable percentile.

63. Oliver! (1968, Carol Reed) - 1523 (64%)

This is one of the others I saw prior to becoming a cinephile. I have a real fondness for it, even if I don't know if that fondness is based on anything real. I should probably have some "more!!" of this before I know how I really feel about it.

62. Forrest Gump (1994, Robert Zemeckis) - 1513 (65%)

I like Forrest Gump pretty well. I think I'd even see it a second time, if only to marvel at some of the technical tricks they pull off. But it's hard to avoid the backlash on this one.

61. Gladiator (2000, Ridley Scott) - 1450 (66%)

Gladiator might deserve to be ranked a bit higher, but not a lot higher. I know one Flickcharter who has this ranked at #1, which is obviously too high. But it's a pretty rousing spectacle. Side note: Russell Crowe, who looks kind of like me, has never looked more like me than in some of the scenes of this movie.

60. My Fair Lady (1964, George Cukor) - 1410 (67%)

A pretty highly ranked movie from this past year's challenge ... but not quite as highly ranked as I thought it might be. I was really charmed by this, especially coming off the awful Gigi, which has some of the same dynamics (and the same composer and lyricist, Lerner and Loewe). One of those movies that further awakened me to the talents of the great Audrey Hepburn.

59. Kramer vs. Kramer (1979, Robert Benton) - 1371 (68%)

If you can believe it I actually reviewed this movie. No, not in 1979 -- I was six then. I reviewed it in helping flesh out the review section of All Movie Guide. This is a really solid film if not for one factor that really gives me pause -- it's much more his story than hers. The title promised something more balanced. I'd rank My Fair Lady above it at the very least.

58. Terms of Endearment (1983, James L. Brooks) - 1329 (69%)

I have to assume I'm ranking this on reputation as a best picture winner because I'm not particularly stirred by this movie. Pretty maudlin. Jack Nicholson is fun though.

57. Gandhi (1981, Richard Attenborough) - 1276 (70%)

One of the last films I watched for the challenge, and I really liked it. I suppose it suffers some of the problems with your typical bloated Oscar biopic, but Kingsley is great and the key moments in his life were filmed expertly (and were real eye openers to me in some cases).

56. A Man for All Seasons (1966, Fred Zinnemann) (72%) - 1222

I don't remember a lot about this film, which I saw maybe 15 years ago, except that I really, really liked it. Would like to see this one again. Fifty-sixth does not really seem like a suitable position for this, though the percentile is decent.

55. Chariots of Fire (1981, Hugh Hudson) - 1210 (72%)

Here's a film that would be ranked lower if I had re-ranked it after watching it again five years ago. Thinking I loved it (because I always loved the score), I discovered in 2011 that it's at least somewhat pedestrian. But it still holds that comparatively lofty rank because I never re-ranked it. Might drop ten spots on a re-rank.

54. Ordinary People (1980, Robert Redford) - 1186 (72%)

Here's another one I am probably ranking on the general prestige of having won best picture. It's probably not as overwrought as I remember it ... but I remember it as pretty overwrought.

53. 12 Years a Slave (2013, Steve McQueen) - 1155 (73%)

I wanted to like 12 Years a Slave more than this. Some of the aesthetic and dramatic choices are absolutely enthralling, and there are immensely powerful moments. But I remain bothered by the structure of the film, which switches from Solomon's story to Patsy's story. That doesn't quite work.

52. In the Heat of the Night (1967, Norman Jewison) - 1101 (74%)

A really incendiary examination of racism in the south among fellow police officers. Should be ranked higher.

51. Cimarron (1931, Wesley Ruggles) - 1077 (75%)

Okay, here's a major ranking anomaly. I do count Cimarron as one of my bigger surprises in Audient Auscars, but this is ridiculous. Like Chariots of Fire, should probably be at least ten spots lower. But this is a surprisingly good early frontier epic. And it still doesn't make my top 50 best picture winners, so ... yeah, maybe it's ranked alright.

50. West Side Story (1961, Jerome Robbins & Robert Wise) - 1053 (75%)

At first blush I thought this classic musical was a bit small-scale, but its heartfelt performances ultimately won me over. One of the more pleasing viewings from Audient Auscars.

49. Casablanca (1942, Michael Curtiz) - 1034 (76%)

The film most desperately in need of a revisit on the whole list. I saw it for the first time about ten years ago, and it just didn't really grab me. I need to have a second Casablanca reckoning, stat.

48. The Last Emperor (1987, Bernardo Bertolucci) - 1002 (77%)

Was quite taken with this, my last viewing in Audient Auscars. Seems like it should be higher, especially than the next couple ahead of it on the list.

47. The French Connection (1971, William Friedkin) - 994 (77%)

Since my overriding takeaway from The French Connection was a feeling of disappointment, it should not be ranked this high. I love the 1970s and I love that car chase and I love the film's aesthetic, so I think I think I should like this more than I do. It would benefit from either a revisit or a reranking.

46. Wings (1927, William A. Wellmann) - 981 (77%)

Like Cimarron, this has an inflated ranking, but I did quite like it when I watched it in a month of Clara Bow movies a couple years back. It's fun and rousing and quite an accomplishment for the era in which it was made. It deserves a high ranking ... just maybe not this high.

45. You Can't Take It With You (1938, Frank Capra) - 976 (77%)

I don't remember this film all that well but I remember finding it joyously satisfying. Capra does that to me generally, I guess. Would like to see this again.

44. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946, William Wyler) - 916 (79%)

This one had a pretty big impact on me. Not only was it a profound consideration of men returning from war, but what about that incredible performance by Harold Russell -- who really lost his hands in World War II.

43. Midnight Cowboy (1969, John Schlesinger) - 895 (79%)

I respect this movie a lot more than I actually like it. Music and setting and an elegiac ending go far.

42. Spotlight (2016, Thomas McCarthy) - 806 (81%)

Last year's best picture winner is an incredibly solid film that I probably fall just short of loving. I may watch it again, but I may not watch it again. I do cherish it, though.

41. Amadeus (1984, Milos Forman) - 763 (82%)

I saw Amadeus so long ago that I really only still carry snippets of it with me. But those snippets are very positive. Been meaning to rewatch this one for some time.

40. The King's Speech (2010, Tom Hooper) - 754 (82%)

I think of myself as anti-King's Speech because I so badly wanted The Social Network to win that year. But really, it's quite good. Satisfying.

39. Shakespeare in Love (1998, John Madden) - 746 (83%)

Very much like The King's Speech in that I clearly wanted another film to win that year (Saving Private Ryan), but could not deny the affection I felt for the eventual winner. Perhaps slightly less affection than this, but I stand by the ranking.

38. From Here to Eternity (1953, Fred Zinnemman) - 738 (83%)

Really solid wartime romance. I visited the beach in Hawaii where "the scene" was filmed. Good on Fred Zinnemann -- he directed two best picture winners (also A Man for All Seasons).

37. Ben-Hur (1959, William Wyler) - 731 (83%)

I watched Ben-Hur over four nights a couple years ago ... but the cumulative effect of it was still pretty powerful. One of the classic grandiose epics, with amazing chariot scenes. Will be really curious to see Timur Bekmambetov's remake this year. At the very least it should be visually audacious. (Good on William Wyler for directing three best picture winners -- also The Best Years of Our Lives and Mrs. Miniver).

36. American Beauty (1999, Sam Mendes) - 703 (84%)

As discussed in last week's post ranking movies with "American" in the title, this made my top ten of 1999, but I haven't been eager to get back to it. Suspect it dated pretty quickly. But still retain very positive memories from that one viewing.

35. Patton (1970, Franklin J. Schaffner) - 688 (84%)

My favorite of Audient Auscars. Thorough and enthralling biopic that rarely went where I thought it would go.

34. Grand Hotel (1932, Edmund Goulding) - 669 (84%)

I don't know why but Grand Hotel really stuck with me. Love the conceit of following the different stories within the day-to-day life of an ornate and bustling hotel. There isn't an older best picture winner I've ranked higher.

33. The Artist (2011, Michel Hazanavicius) - 643 (85%)

I thought The Artist was delightful, but it does seem like it could have been a bit tighter. There are lower ranked movies on this list I like better.

32. The Deer Hunter (1978, Michael Cimino) - 623 (85%)

Really unsettling and memorable, but I think I have always been ranking this a bit higher than my true feelings about it. Unconvincing ending.

31. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935, Frank Lloyd) - 613 (86%)

I got a little carried away with ranking this one, which I watched during my Decades series in a month devoted to the 1930s. It's really good, but probably not this really good. Good on Frank Lloyd, he also directed Cavalcade.

30. The Godfather Part II (1974, Francis Ford Coppola) - 543 (87%)

I don't know how to rank The Godfather Part II because the only time I watched it I watched the discs out of sequence. Yes, this is actually a thing that happened. Embarrassing as hell, but at least my wife was a co-sponsor of this egregious error. I will watch it again soon.

29. The Apartment (1960, Billy Wilder) - 523 (88%)

This is a great film, one of Wilder's best. Feels like it should be higher than 29th. Manages to balance tones perfectly, as it alternates between funny and sad, and ends up just being profound.

28. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003, Peter Jackson) - 472 (89%)

A rousing conclusion to Jackson's trilogy, and a fitting way to reward his three-film achievement. I still like The Two Towers better though.

27. Driving Miss Daisy (1989, Bruce Beresford) - 466 (89%)

This does not seem like it should be this high, but every time I think about it I think about how much it surprised me -- how much more I liked it than I expected to like it, especially since it beat out the movie I was supporting, Born on the Fourth of July. I still have that ranked higher on Flickchart, but not a lot higher.

26. On the Waterfront (1954, Elia Kazan) - 455 (89%)

Classic Elia Kazan film with a classic Marlon Brando performance. Maybe not a personal favorite, but a damn good film that came along at the perfect time for me -- just as I was becoming a cinephile. (We watched it in my Art of the Film class senior year in high school.)

25. Slumdog Millionaire (2008, Danny Boyle) - 454 (89%)

This film would probably go even higher on this list -- it was my #3 film of the 2008 -- but for the fact that there's been enough backlash about it that I have caused myself to reconsider it slightly. I've only seen it that once, and probably won't be in a hurry to change that, but come on, it's a really good film. This and On the Waterfront mark the first of three sets of best picture winners ranked consecutively.

24. The Sound of Music (1965, Robert Wise) - 450 (90%)

Just watched this again last year, and if I made a practice of reranking movies after I see them, this would almost certainly shoot into my top ten. Love this movie. Love it.

23. Gone With the Wind (1939, Victor Fleming) - 438 (90%)

This is a deliriously ambitious and incredibly long epic that I will probably never watch again, though I may. It's a stunning achievement and I think I have been rewarding it for that more than for a strong personal affection for it.

22. Argo (2012, Ben Affleck) - 418 (90%)

My #5 of 2012 is a really solid and satisfying movie. Have not revisited it and not sure how well it stands up to scrutiny, but I'm still a big fan.

21. Hamlet (1948, Laurence Olivier) - 414 (90%)

This is probably a little high for this movie, especially since I don't think it really sticks the landing -- the climax is kind of a disappointment compared to other stagings I've seen of Hamlet. My ranking just goes to show how great the rest of it is.

20. A Beautiful Mind (2001, Ron Howard) - 374 (91%)

Sort of like Driving Miss Daisy in that I never expected to like it as much as I did. The ending really gets me. What can I say? The movie works.

19. The Godfather (1972, Francis Ford Coppola) - 370 (91%)

I have now seen The Godfather twice. It still has not made a full convert of me. There are parts of it I love, but overall, it doesn't work for me as well as a number of the more recent gangster movies that are certainly indebted to it. This is a very high ranking for me, given these feelings, but a shockingly low one to most readers. I guess we're meeting somewhere in the middle.

18. The English Patient (1996, Anthony Minghella) - 369 (91%)

The second of two best pictures ranked consecutively (with The Godfather). Another case of expectations exceeded. Not only is this epic, but it's incredibly romantic. It's the second one that's harder to do, in my opinion.

17. Braveheart (1995, Mel Gibson) - 314 (93%)

I'd say that now we are getting into the absolute personal favorites. There are good reasons to nitpick at Braveheart, I'm sure, but at the time it came along, it was just what I needed. Intensely satisfying, and again, incredibly romantic. Felt like an unlikely winner at the time, but is one of my favorite winners -- and I even continue to think fondly of it despite knowing what a shithead Mel Gibson is.

16. Rebecca (1940, Alfred Hitchcock) - 297 (93%)

Another discovery from Art of the Film, my senior year class, this persists as one of my favorite Hitchocks. I think I've only seen it that one time, but formally and thematically, it had a huge impact on me. Need to get a rewatch of this on the docket ASAP.

15. Lawrence of Arabia (1962, David Lean) - 296 (93%)

This is probably my highest ranked film on sheer spectacle. In the sense that it probably doesn't totally qualify as a personal favorite -- despite what I said a couple films ago about entering that territory of my list -- it has definitely encroached farther in my rankings than I thought it might. But that spectacle ... my is it impressive. The third of two best pictures ranked consecutively (with Rebecca).

14. Rocky (1976, John G. Avildsen) - 280 (93%)

I may not be able to articulate what I loved so much about Rocky when I first saw it a few years ago, but I gave it five stars on Letterboxd without hesitation. Something about this movie just rises above.

13. Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (2014, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu) - 215 (95%)

An unusually high ranking for such a recent best picture winner, but it was also one of only two best picture winners to be my #1 movie of the year (since I started keeping lists in 1996), which certainly played into my ranking enthusiasm. I'm just a tad cooler on the film after a second viewing, but it's still a stunning achievement that I love.

12. One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975, Milos Forman) - 199 (95%)

I may have a slightly romanticized notion of how great this movie is, but I rank it as one of the greats, and until I see it again to be convinced otherwise, will continue to do so. Good on Milos Forman, he also directed Amadeus.

11. Annie Hall (1977, Woody Allen) - 193 (96%)

A rewatch of this left me a bit wanting a few years ago, but only relative to how I had previously ranked it, which was probably 50 spots higher on Flickchart. Still my favorite Allen, and with the kind of career he's had -- making enough movies so that the good ones overwhelm the bad ones -- that's saying something.

10. Rain Man (1988, Barry Levinson) - 142 (97%)

Perhaps the greatest discrepancy among best picture winners between how good I thought something was going to be, based on its advertising, and how good it actually was. I still think I've only seen this once, but man is it good.

9. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957, David Lean) - 124 (97%)

Good on David Lean. As good as Lawrence of Arabia is, this is even better. A flat-out masterpiece.

8. The Departed (2006, Martin Scorsese) - 122 (97%)

Has one of the worst final shots of any film I've ever seen. That just tells you how good the rest of The Departed is. My #2 of 2006.

7. Chicago (2002, Rob Marshall) - 105 (98%)

I would never have guessed how bananas I'd go over Chicago. Nothing in my history would have really predicted it. But bananas I went. It was my #2 of 2002.

6. The Silence of the Lambs (1991, Jonathan Demme) - 93 (98%)

Say hello to the 1990s for most of the rest of the list. It was a great decade for film, and also a formative decade for me within film. The Silence of the Lambs is one of the unlikeliest best picture winners of all time in terms of subject matter, which just shows you how great it is -- even a conventionally inclined voting body could not deny it. My wife often names this as her favorite movie of all time.

5. Dances With Wolves (1990, Kevin Costner) - 85 (98%)

I still remember grumbling about this beating out the other stalwart contenders from 1990 (Goodfellas, Ghost and Awakenings) as the awards were going on ... and then I finally saw it. An emotional powerhouse of a movie. Simply unforgettable.

4. Titanic (1997, James Cameron) - 73 (98%)

Spectacle, romance ... few best picture winners combine them as well as Titantc does. I was obsessed with this film for a good year or two after it came out, and vestiges of that clearly still remain. I won't apologize for it. My #1 movie of 1997 is a unique cinematic achievement, and rightly considered a masterpiece by some.

3. All About Eve (1950, Joseph L, Mankiewicz) - 61 (99%)

The movie I always think of when I occasionally doubt whether older movies can have the same impact on me as contemporary ones. This is a note-perfect movie and I love every goddamn second of it.

2. Schindler's List (1993, Steven Spielberg) - 10 (100%)

I've still only seen this once, but it is in my top ten of all time. It jumped there by winning a duel against a movie that was starting to fall for me, so perhaps it should be a tad lower, but it's an astounding document of the darkest chapter in human history, made with superlative artistic vision and a gut-punching level of emotional resonance. I should see it again, of course ... I just don't know if I can bare it.

1. Unforgiven - (1992, Clint Eastwood) - 6 (100%)

And numbers 1 and 2 come in consecutive years. What else can a person say about Clint Eastwood's revisionist western masterpiece? It's got everything, but perhaps the best proof of its absolute artistic dominance is that it is my favorite best picture winner despite the fact that westerns are one of my less favorite genres. A perfect movie.

Could I have done this differently? Could I have used my Flickchart rankings as a jumping off point, and made the necessary tweaks to get the films in an order that feels like it more genuinely reflects my feelings about them?

Probably. But it has taken ages just to write this up, and barely squeeze it into the month of May (as I promised I'd do, but otherwise have no real reason for the deadline). I'm comfortable with it existing as is ... and moving on to the next thing.

Happy Memorial Day!

Audient Auscars Concluded: The Last Emperor

Hey everyone. Welcome to the final installment of the series I started at the beginning of 2015.

I have now done something that always seemed like a distant goal on the horizon. I have now seen every best picture winner, all 89 of 'em.

The final entry, Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, was a fitting way to conclude in any number of ways. Not only does it have the word "last" in the title, but it was also the last best picture winner before the beginning of my own personal "modern era" as a cinephile.

Before 1987 I think I already considered myself a budding movie fan. I think even at that time, I tried to see a few movies that weren't just the most obvious things offered up to my age group. But soon afterward a definitive change took hold, and that change was this: I started seeing all the best picture winners. Not just seeing them, but seeing them within a year or two of their release, or more likely, within a month or two. Rain Man was the first and then it went on from there. So not only was The Last Emperor the final best picture winner I hadn't seen, but it has always been the final picture winner I hadn't seen. Even things like Driving Miss Daisy were neglected by me for no more than a year or two -- I didn't have to finally watch it in 2007 or something like that. And by the beginning of the 1990s, Oscar fever had such a hold on me that it was unlikely I even missed any of the nominees for very long. In fact, there are only eight movies that have even been nominated for best picture since 1990 that I haven't seen, and no more than one in any given year.

Even at that time there seemed something mythic about The Last Emperor, and it's fair to say that has only grown over the years. I think it remains the only best picture winner to have won every award for which it was nominated, though I'd have to check on that. But at the time, in March of 1988, that impressed me to no end. It suggested that this movie must be of an unimaginably high level of quality, and it became daunting in that respect. Was I ever really ready to see a movie that was so great?

The length surely had something to do with me not seeing it before now as well. This is one of the first movies I remember seeing the runtime and actually registering how long that was. "165 minutes? That's like two hours and 45 minutes!" So not only was it grand, not only was it epic, not only was it really good, but you'd also have to really settle in for the long haul if you ever wanted to watch it.

To add to that, I imagined the subject matter being impenetrable. It was probably one of the first movies on my radar that wasn't set in America, or at least in an English-speaking country. So it seemed exotic, unlikely to speak to me in a way I could fully comprehend. I didn't know at the time -- and in fact, didn't know until I watched it this week -- that the movie was actually filmed in English.

So all this baggage was still with me when I was scheduling a time to sit down with The Last Emperor. I had first planned to watch it on Tuesday or Wednesday afternoon during my younger son's nap. But since he was waking up around 5 a.m. those days -- an annoying habit he has yet to fully abandon, four days later -- I needed to spend his afternoon naps in my own state of slumber. Or at the very least, doing things that did not require the purportedly immense levels of concentration demanded by something like The Last Emperor.

I toyed with watching it in chunks, just to make sure I got it in before the end of April. But if it was great as I was led to believe, I didn't want to do it that disservice. I should also mention that I'm relatively fresh off seeing another Bertolucci film I loved, The Conformist, which made it seem all the more important to give this one its just due.

Ultimately I lucked into a perfect scenario. My wife was going out on Thursday night and wouldn't be home until late. So even once she got home, if I weren't finished, there would be no pressure to watch something else with her. If I started it with my dinner, I could be done before 11, even with expected breaks. Of course, as it turned out, it was an especially rough day characterized by a rain storm that almost prevented me from picking up my kids on time, and their behavior after getting home ranged from moaning to whining to crying. So even with my best laid plans, I ended up having three glasses of wine with dinner and threatening not to complete the movie in one sitting anyway.

But I did finish it before midnight. And was indeed glad that I'd not only seen it all at once, but at night, where it deserves to be seen, on the biggest screen available in my house. Of course, now that I've expended so many words on preamble, I'll probably feel compelled to race through the qualitative portion of this post, just so I don't lose you. Oh well.

First and foremost I was glad to see how easy it was to follow. So, strike that impenetrability fear off the list. The Last Emperor manages the nimble feat of giving us plenty of exposition without making it feel like that's what it's doing. The screenplay is structured very helpfully in that regard, starting with the 1950 imprisonment of Puyi (played by John Lone as an adult) and then flashing back into his childhood at different ages as it checks back in regularly with 1950. It's always easy to tell where the story is going, I guess because this is a pretty standard biopic structure. And the story is a particularly interesting one, as it shows the clash between the traditional method of bequeathing leadership from generation to generation that had characterized China for thousands of years, and its 20th century transformation into a republic. It reminded me a bit of Downtown Abbey in that regard, and takes place at about the same time. The old ways were dying all across the world.

In terms of themes, The Last Emperor profoundly explores the paradox that a figure as apparently all-powerful as an emperor ultimately has little say about his own freedom and agency. Early in the film, someone tells Puyi he can do anything he wants. At the time, he indulges that freedom by splashing water in the faces of various servants, who must only laugh and accept this mild abuse. But it becomes clear over the course of the movie that his power is basically an illusion. He's really imprisoned inside his responsibility and his status as a figure of worship to his people. Part of this is a function of the age at which he gains the increasingly meaningless title of emperor, which is just three years old. He really does need adults to tell him what he really can and can't do. But this mentality toward him exists on into his adulthood. He is always being protected from himself. He has no real freedom, as for many years he isn't even allowed to leave the Forbidden City. (Which is actually where the movie was filmed, the first Western film allowed to do so.) We see this idea of a privileged monarch trying to escape the narrow constraints of his/her imprisonment in numerous other films, and it's conveyed powerfully here.

We can't go much longer without talking about the sumptuous set design. I suspect it did not have quite the impact on me as it might have had on a 1987 audience, as we have since been privy to numerous sweeping Hong Kong epics that have given us a sense of the grandeur of Chinese pageantry. I don't think audiences had that familiarity back then, so this must indeed have seemed like an odyssey of color and spectacle. DP Vittorio Storaro has a really keen sense of that color, giving the scenes set between 1910 and 1930 breathtaking blasts of color, while contrasting them with the drab grays and greens of the 1950s, when Communism was getting its foothold. It's easy to tell the difference in time periods by the age of the actors and their circumstances, of course, but the color scheme also smart delineates things.

I wondered whether the performances would be much good. Another thing I had also always known about The Last Emperor was that its Oscar sweep did not include any acting awards, since none of the actors were nominated. It would be easy to suggest that the acting is one of the least important aspects of this production, but Lone and others (particularly Joan Chen) indeed do quite good work. I can see why their work wouldn't have risen to the level of being nominated, but I also wonder if it reflects a bias against Asian actors by the Academy. They didn't give Peter O'Toole a best supporting actor nomination either, though. He didn't really deserve one, but at least there's no Sylvester Stallone in Creed thing going on here.

Regarding the ethnicity of the actors and the language chosen to tell this story, I was just a little distracted by the whole thing being in English, even though that was a very common convention at the time, especially in movies with awards ambitions. We live in a time now where something like the Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon sequel gets heavily criticized for being filmed in English, so that mentality couldn't help be in my thoughts a little bit.  But given my circumstances (wine), I was happy enough not to read subtitles.

Overall I was surprised how well the narrative moved along and how little it felt like a full 165 minutes. (Though I'm glad I didn't tackle the director's cut, which is an hour longer and was available on a second disc in my library rental.) I was really into it, and only the chemical influences of my wine forced me to take a quick nap or two near the end. But they were only quick naps and as I said, I finished before midnight, really touched by this story and where it concludes. I don't think it's actually the same level of achievement by Bertolucci as The Conformist -- probably no true cinephile would argue that -- but neither is it the totally Oscar-approved, sanitized version of a great filmmaker's vision. It's somewhere in between, and undeniably approaching the level of a masterpiece.

The Last Emperor was also fortuitously timed in that without rearranging my viewing schedule very much -- I may have foregone watching something on Wednesday night, but nothing more than that -- I was able to schedule it as the 4,500th movie I've ever seen. Seems an appropriate epic way to honor the occasion of seeing my final best picture winner.

Okay! That series is over, and now I can focus only on the current year's monthly series, No Audio Audient.

But I do have one more piece of business related to Audient Auscars. Join me in May as I wrap up the series with a complete ranking of all 89 best picture winners, completed with the aid of my Flickchart. This is a list I've been waiting my whole list-making career to compile, so I'm pretty excited about it.

Audient Auscars Extended: Platoon

This is the penultimate of my viewings of all the best picture winners. Eighty-eight down, one to go.

Platoon is a prime example of a film that surely would have impacted me differently if I'd seen it the year it came out -- 30 years ago -- than seeing it now.

I was 13 when Platoon won best picture, and I think it was the first Oscars where I was really conscious of the timing of the ceremony, though I can't recall if I actually watched it. I was aware of past winners, but Platoon had the most real-time immediacy of any Oscar winner to that point. For example, I remember looking at the headline in The Boston Globe the next morning that pronounced Platoon the winner. (And I guess they put the newspaper to bed particularly late on Oscar night, since the ceremony would have finished after midnight -- another likely indicator that I did not actually watch it.)

Over the years I think I built up some rather mythic notions of how violent, bloody, and overall disturbing Platoon must have been. I'm not going to say that was the reason I've avoided it until now, because I've been willing to wade knee deep into blood in my subsequent viewing experiences. I just haven't gotten around to it, and the likelihood that Platoon is a really strong movie seemed to decrease with me over the years as I no longer heard it talked about much. It was one of those best picture winners people just seemed to have moved on from.

Having watched it now, I get why.

In many ways, Platoon does not feel very remarkable -- technically, emotionally, thematically or dramatically. Aside from a couple gory looking injuries, it wasn't as graphic as I expected it to be either. It was hardly the first movie about Vietnam -- in fact, films such as The Deer Hunter and Apocalypse Now had delved into it almost a decade earlier, and those are only the classics. But it did kick off a string of other mainstream Vietnam movies, from really good movies like Good Morning Vietnam, Full Metal Jacket and Born on the Fourth of July (also directed by Platoon director Oliver Stone) to more forgettable entries like Hamburger Hill and Casualties of War (neither of which I've seen in order to forget them). And that was just the remaining three years of the 1980s. The cinematic obsession with Vietnam carried on into the first half of the 1990s. Platoon was a trendsetter for sure.

But it's not a great movie. It's a pretty good movie and I'm glad I've seen it, but nothing about it stands out as particularly strong or memorable. At the time, it was enough that Platoon was a document containing broad strokes about The Way Things Were in Vietnam. With Platoon out of the way, other films could concentrate on more specific elements of the war. Platoon had been our primer, and now we were ready for those more specific elements -- you know, like boot camp (Full Metal Jacket), the experience of civilians tangential to the war (Good Morning Vietnam) or the return of wounded veterans (Born on the Fourth of July).

Part of its lack of technical distinctiveness can be tied to the fact that it was one of Stone's very first films. I guess I didn't realize at the time that Stone had essentially burst on the scene with Platoon, which made his second Oscar win for directing Born on the Fourth three years later all the more striking. I had thought these awards were a culmination of years of Stone gracing us with his cinematic skill, and apparently, even becoming more sophisticated about film history over the years, I had still not realized that Stone's filmography basically started with Platoon.

Wait, Vance. It sounds like you're still not very familiar with Stone's filmography. He directed his first feature in 1974, a full 12 years before Platoon.

That's true. But had you heard of the film Seizure? Neither had I. Or for that matter, had you heard of the film The Hand, his second feature he directed in 1981? Neither had I. Given the anonymity of his first two films and the crazy 1986 he had -- in which his other film, Salvador, received two Oscar nominations, including James Woods for best actor -- then saying he burst on the scene in 1986 seems to be pretty accurate.

But this movie just doesn't look as sharp, as polished, even as Wall Street would look a year later. I've always thought of Stone as a technical director, but his technique is pretty raw in Platoon. Some of it looks downright shoddy. Then again, I do have to remember that it was the 1980s, and the standards for what looked good are not necessarily comparable to today's standards. I'd like to think I'm saying it looks shoddy even within the context of 1986, but I should note that potential biasing factor in my assessment.

I was also surprised to learn that both Tom Berenger and Willem Defoe were nominated in the best supporting actor category. Much as I love him in Major League, Berenger has always struck me as a pretty limited actor, and I wouldn't say Platoon goes a long way toward disabusing that notion. Defoe is definitely better, but his [SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT SPOILER ALERT] death scene is pretty much a parody of a war death scene, especially when viewed through a modern lens. If you didn't know, it's him with those iconic outstretched arms that adorn every piece of publicity related to Platoon. The funny thing about that death is that he reasonably would have been dead already, as he was shot -- twice, I think, and in the chest -- by Berenger's Sgt. Barnes just ten minutes earlier. And here he is running away dramatically from VC, going down a couple times before his final face plant in the mud. It's as histrionic a death as you are likely to see on film.

It's also very Christian in its obvious symbolism. Earlier in the film, someone (Barnes?) says of Defoe's Sgt. Elias, "Guy's been here three years and he thinks he's Jesus Fucking Christ." What's especially funny about that is that Defoe was actually cast as Jesus two years later in The Last Temptation of Christ. It's possible the filmmakers already knew about that casting when making Platoon. But it's clear within the context of this particular film that Defoe is supposed to be the savior taking on others' sins. He's the one always fighting to treat the Vietnamese civilians fairly rather than brutally, as seems to be the default position of his platoon mates. Those outstretched arms remind you of Jesus on the cross for a reason. Again, though, what I would see as cliche now would not necessarily have been cliche 30 years ago. So again I point to the different impact Platoon would have had on me if I'd seen it in 1986 rather than 2016.

I do feel like I should have been more emotionally invested, though, no matter when I saw it. I expected the various grunts to have more sway over my feelings, but with a very few exceptions, they did not. Charlie Sheen's Chris Taylor is a pretty unlikable protagonist, especially since his character arc is handled in a really funny way -- he loses it on a civilian in a way that makes no emotional sense given what we've seen of him so far in the movie. A descent into apparent madness is just not very believable in the hands of Charlie Sheen, who was also living down his father's similar (but much better) performance in Apocalypse Now. (It's funny, now that I think of it, that they both seem like younger actors in their respective Vietnam movies, even though Apocalypse Now was only six years earlier.) His narration also seems particularly leaden.

I did really like Keith David, as I always do. When his tour ends, I felt sure he'd step on that helicopter and it would immediately blow up, but thankfully, good old Keith gets to return home to the good old U.S. of A. I was glad for that. I guess the movie had already used up its really cliche death earlier, when an anonymous grunt shows Chris the picture of his girlfriend in his wallet, indicating beyond a shadow of a doubt that he will be dead within ten minutes of screen time.

Among the other supporting characters I was really surprised to see were Johnny Depp and Kevin Dillon, both of whom seemed like they would be too young to appear in Platoon in 1986. Depp was 22/23 during filming and Dillon 20/21 -- no wonder they both have such baby faces. I wasn't surprised to see Living Colour lead singer Corey Glover, since one of the things I'd always known about him was that he had appeared in Platoon. He does a good job -- not sure why he didn't appear in more movies, even though he was busy with the music career after that.

Platoon also allowed me to finally learn the name of that guy I always mistake for Charles Grodin: Mark Moses.

For a movie I only thought was pretty good, I do seem to be going on and on. But I'll try to wrap up now. One thing I found interesting was how much Berenger reminded me of Tom Hardy in The Revenant, both in terms of appearance and in terms of his character's function in the movie. Not only do the two sort of look alike, but they are both a "good guy" who kills someone good for selfish reasons before finally getting theirs in the end. The climate is different, but the character is the same -- and both got Oscar nominated for their efforts.

Okay, this is it! We're at the finish line. The last best picture winner I need to watch, which I'll watch in April, also has the word "last" in the title. It's Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor, which won every award it was nominated for in 1987. I've always been interested in seeing this, but am even more so in the wake of having seen and loved Bertolucci's The Conformist last year.

Audient Auscars Extended: Gandhi

When I announced in December that I was extending my Audient Auscars series for three more months to get in the last three best picture winners I hadn't seen, I fully expected I would watch Gandhi in January.

And I did start to watch it. I watched 25 minutes of it, in fact.

The other 158 did not come until yesterday.

What can I say -- it was a busy month.

And though I'm usually pretty anal about sticking to the schedules I establish on my blog, we're a bit outside the box here, extending a series by just three months. So I let the other priorities of my life dictate when I could get back to watching this three-hour movie. (In fact, I probably would have put it off even longer if it weren't due back at the library today.) I often skip January in my movie series anyway, just because it's so busy with other viewing priorities (like wrapping up the previous viewing year) that I don't have the time. I suppose that was more true when my viewing series used to involve multiple movies a month.

Anyway.

The 1982 best picture winner was what I expected in a lot of ways. It was not what I expected in some other, smaller ways. Like, who would have thought John Ratzenberger -- Cliff from Cheers, and the guy who has loaned his voice to nearly every Pixar film -- would show up here? (And that he wouldn't use his own voice for some reason? Martin Sheen, who also appears in the movie, dubbed Ratzenberger's voice.)

What was legitimately unexpected was learning about the key events in Mohandas Gandhi's fight to kick the British out of India -- though I use the word "fight" very loosely. Gandhi was of course opposed to violence in any form (even philosophically debating whether violence would work against Hitler), and believed that civil resistance was most effective when it provoked using persistence and public displays, not guns and swords. One of my favorite moments in the movie comes near the beginning, when some South African troops charge a group of Gandhi's protesters on horseback. They're seeking not to be treated like third-class citizens, including needing to be fingerprinted and the like. Instead of standing their ground, where they'll be beaten and cut down, or scattering to the winds, where they'll also be beaten and cut down, the protesters simply lie down on the ground, at Gandhi's behest. It's a brilliant tactic, as the horses are unwilling to trample the supine protesters, even if their riders show no such reluctance. So the horses rear up and the troops are forced to retreat. What's most brilliant is that Gandhi seems to have gotten this idea in the moment -- a reflection of his nearly preternatural ability to imagine the most productive method of effecting change in any given scenario.

Productive? How about convincing his followers who had strayed from his principles to abandon violence by going on hunger strikes? Not once, but twice? The people came to love him so much that they would rather eschew their violent impulses -- in other words, to calm a nearly unquenchable rage -- in order not to see him die for their human frailties. As frail as he was in stature, in all other aspects Gandhi seems to have been one of the strongest men who walked the earth in the 20th century.

That was a big takeaway as I was watching this -- that we don't seem to get great human beings like Gandhi anymore. Or at least, great human beings don't capture the imagination of the whole world like Gandhi did. Paradoxically, in a world where worldwide communication has become all the easier through the internet, we are perhaps all the more pushed into our own little corners of that world, seeing only the things that most directly pertain to us. Maybe there's a Gandhi out there today -- maybe there are plenty of them. Surely there are. But we're not hearing about them to the same extent, and that's a shame.

Although the casting of a non-Indian actor to play the title role would have been too controversial today, it's hard to imagine anyone playing Gandhi other than Ben Kingsley. He's pretty phenomenal. It's not a showy performance, as you might imagine, as Gandhi was a fairly understated person. But its every detail feels true. I think especially of Kingsley's physicality as the Mahatma, particularly the positioning of his legs as he sits on the ground, sewing his own clothing (another thing I didn't know about Gandhi). Kingsley was not yet 40 when he played the role, yet his fragility as the older Gandhi is something that makes us easily forget that.

I also didn't know anything about the Amritsar massacre in Punjab, in which British soldiers opened fire on a massive gathering of peaceful demonstrators and kept firing until hundreds, possibly more than a thousand, Indians were killed. I was hoping to learn that the colonel who ordered the strike -- "They've already been warned," he told an underling -- was hanged for this callous display of might and disregard for life. But Reginald Dyer was only removed from duty, and in fact became a celebrated hero in certain sections of England. Any time you need a reminder of how awful men can be, this is a good example. At least Dyer only lived eight more years before a series of strokes felled him.

For a movie this long, Gandhi is actually fairly lean -- starvation pun intended. There weren't any sections that I thought begged to be removed, and Sir Richard Attenborough keeps the pace moving pretty quickly all told. In fact, Gandhi's first hunger strike -- being one of the events for which he is most famous -- seemed to be over in a flash. I guess this is just a sign of what a full life of consequence and wisdom he had, so much of which was worth telling us about.

Okay, only two left! I've got Platoon in March before finishing up with The Last Emperor in April.

Assuming I don't get too busy, of course.

Audient Auscars: Patton

This is the 12th in my 2015 series Audient Auscars, in which I'm making quick work of all remaining best picture winners I haven't seen.

We're into the decade I was born now with Patton, the 1970 best picture winner. Which is the only best picture winner from the seventies I hadn't seen.

Patton does not, however, fully feel like a seventies movie -- which may not be surprising, given that the sixties only just ended. It does show progressive signs of moving to the next level in terms of structure and presentation, and it ended up being one of my favorite movies in this challenge so far.

Patton is old-school in the sense that it has an intermission, and that -- on the surface -- it appears to glorify the exploits of a heroic general in World War II. Not too many years before this, a movie like this would have starred John Wayne and it would have been a straight-up jingoistic lovefest for a Great American Soldier. (Or maybe it wouldn't have -- I haven't seen a single John Wayne war movie, so I am only making assumptions about those movies that may not be supported by the evidence.) It also has a lot of mid-level shots of characters in closed shooting environments that were popular throughout the middle decades of last century.

But George Patton, as portrayed in this movie, is not portrayed just as a hero or just as a Great American Soldier -- though he may be both of those things. He's also presented as an irascible bastard whose ability to lead effectively may not be merely a function of his tactical strategies and how much he can motivate and intimidate his soldiers. Truly old-school ideas of military courage and leadership have it that you get the most out of your men by driving them hard and reminding them of the sacredness of their duty. Patton, on the other hand, anticipates the era of greater sensitivity and political correctness in which we now find ourselves, where the psychologies of soldiers must be coddled if you want to get them to perform -- and where fragile psychologies may alone excuse them from performing. It's interesting how many of Patton's fortunes turned on an incident in which he slapped a soldier in front of a room full of people, calling him a coward when the soldier said his nerves were frazzled from the explosions and other combat-related emotional trauma. I fully expected Patton to be the kind of movie in which Patton is considered to be in the right for this reaction, not punished for it.

In fact, I suppose part of me was expecting the same kind of over-the-top portrayal we saw from George C. Scott in Dr. Strangelove six years earlier. The famous opening sequence, in which he gives a rousing speech in front of a backdrop consisting entirely of an American flag, certainly prepared me for that kind of over-the-top performance. (And also let me know the origins of that part in Homer's "Forget it Marge, it's Chinatown" speech that talks about the pile of goo that was your friend's face.) Surely, his casting in that movie was the type of thing that made him a candidate to play Patton in the first place. But while Kubrick's film is a comedy -- a very black comedy -- this is more a tragedy, as the very human-scaled Patton suffers from his failings to understand that he is not fighting battles in the centuries of antiquity, but in today's world, where soldiers' frazzled nerves are something he must contend with. He's a self-stylized man from another time, and says as much on numerous occasions. Oddly, this does not affect his success rate in the field almost at all, but it severely damages his knack for public relations, which end up being a more important factor in his ability to rise, or fail to rise, within a military structure governed as much by politics as battlefield results. And his social failings are ultimately one of the things that most characterize his legacy.

Scott is really good. He's actually understated more often than he is loud and manly, which gives texture to the kind of tragedy we see here. I mean, it's a happy tragedy -- we won World War II, and George Patton was a big part of that. But something is lost on a personal level, and Scott really makes us feel that. Interestingly, in the course of reading up on Patton I learned that Scott refused his Oscar win for this performance, which was apparently a protest of the dog-and-pony show that is the Oscars rather than any kind of response to this particular movie or its content.

I was surprised also by two other things: 1) the amount of time this film spends with the Nazis, showing us their perspective on the events unfolding, and 2) how funny it is at times -- often in scenes involving the internal discussions of the Nazis. Two more things I didn't expect from a movie that was frequently unexpected.

And it's a nice way to end this series. Or is it?

Yes, it's a nice way to end it ... but I don't think I'll end it after all. I've only got three best picture winners I haven't seen left -- that is, until they crown a new winner in late February. So I hereby intend to extend Audient Auscars into the first three months of 2016, after which I can then finish this series off properly by ranking all of the best picture winners in order -- all 89 of them, at that point.

But that won't stop me from starting a new monthly series in 2016. Stay tuned to The Audient for my reveal of my 2016 monthly series, sometime before Christmas. It'll leave you speechless. (That's a bit of a hint.)

Audient Auscars: My Fair Lady

This is the 11th in my 2015 series in which I'm watching all the best picture winners I have yet to see. 

My Fair Lady represents a first in my Audient Auscars series in the following two ways:

1) It was the first movie I had to watch over two sittings that were separated by a very large chunk of time. Due to an insanely busy schedule, I watched the first half of the 1964 best picture winner on Tuesday the 17th, and the second half on Tuesday the 24th.

2) It was not the first movie in this series I thought could have been an hour shorter, but it was the first I thought could have been an hour shorter that I liked quite well even with an hour's worth of flab.

There's so little actual story in My Fair Lady that a 2015 version might require only 90 minutes -- even with the songs -- as opposed to the two hours and 52 minutes of the 1964 version. Different eras, different general levels of appreciation for the musical genre, different standards for faithfully including every last little moment of a stage production.

But if you did extract an hour from My Fair Lady, some of what's so lovely about it would be lost -- the in-between moments, the funny asides, the details that give it personality and texture. Suffice it to say that I would not have felt the weight of its formidable length had my schedule just not been so jam-packed.

This is probably the movie I've seen this year that least requires a plot synopsis. Almost everyone is familiar with the story of Henry Higgins and his outre speech pupil Eliza Doolittle, whom he refers to dismissively as a "gutter snipe" more times than I care to count. (Was that a term of harmless fun back in the 1960s, or is this movie just that misogynistic?) Possible sexism and definite classism aside, there's something sort of wonderful about the relationship between Henry and Eliza, in part because it is never really characterized as a romance, nor does it ever actually become one. His position of power over her would be all the more problematic if he had romantic designs on her, but refreshingly, he does not. More than anything he really just wants to win a bet with his equally effete academic friend, that he can polish this street person with a Cockney accent into the belle of the ball. (Which I suppose makes the movie not unlike Around the World in 80 Days, which also centers on a bet, but is in all other ways completely unlike this movie. That's one of the aforementioned movies that should have been an hour shorter, really.)

Audrey Hepburn is -- surprise surprise -- simply wonderful. There's a reason she's considered one of the most charismatic icons in cinematic history. Not that she was ever just a pretty face, but no role I've seen her in challenges her range more than this one. This consummately elegant person is actually completely believable as an unrefined flower girl. Unlike the "ugly" girls made "pretty" in movies in decades to come (She's All That and its ilk), Hepburn really does convince us she may be totally common. Of course, she's just as charming in her pre-makeover days as she is after (some would argue more so, which is ultimately kind of the point), and I continued to marvel over how much she threw herself into this role.

One thing I will say is that her transformation is a bit sudden, and feels all the more abrupt by virtue of the fact that she makes almost no progress during what seems like weeks of speech training. She demonstrates, in fact, almost zero ability to mimic a sound that someone else is making to her. When asked repeatedly to pronounce an A in the proper way, she just says "Oy" over and over again, as though her ears are broken in addition to her mouth. Most humans have an inborn ability to imitate other people's accents or voices, at least a little bit; Eliza Doolittle apparently does not. However, it certainly is fun to watch her involved in all manner of goofy speech therapies involving marbles in her mouth and a contraption that stokes a flame every time she successfully expels a properly pronounced H.

Then one day -- from one moment to the next, actually -- she can pronounce "The rain in Spain falls mainly in the plain" as though she'd been born with a silver spoon in her mouth. That's the moment of no turning back, and only her instincts for social grace need a polish after that point. I suppose it's a narrative convenience to have that breakthrough moment, and of course it allows the singing of the wonderful corresponding song. But it is sort of funny that a movie of such seemingly unnecessarily length can't spare the time to have her improve gradually over time. That would be no fun, I guess.

The songs are of course great, if falling a bit short of the embarrassment of classics in my most recent best picture-winning musical, West Side Story. There are no duds here, and most of the songs are a lot of fun. I can tell you that some of them completely lift out, however, which would be the easiest way to shorten this film's running time. "Get Me to the Church on Time," for example, is pretty much entirely superfluous, as it makes for the last appearance of Eliza's ne'er do well father, trying for once to do well by marrying his common law wife. Although Stanley Holloway is terrific as the loveable scoundrel Alfred Doolittle, we don't even see him again after this -- we don't even know if he actually got to the church on time. In fact, a modern version of this movie would probably do away with his character entirely, as he exists mostly for comic relief -- though we do get to see exactly what Eliza has been up against in trying to achieve respectability in her life, something she never even realized she probably wanted.

Oh, and I liked Rex Harrison a lot, too. He probably deserves more eloquent praise than that, especially since his business is eloquence, but I'll just toss him in here at the end.

Join me in December when I conclude (?) Audient Auscars with Patton, the 1970 best picture winner. (Conclude? I guess we'll see about that ...)

Audient Auscars: Tom Jones

This is the tenth entry in my 2015 project to clean up as many of my unseen best picture winners as I can, one per month.

I spent much of the first half of Tom Jones aghast that this movie won best picture. I was wondering what kind of terrible year 1963 must have been for the movies.

I spent much of the second half thinking, "Well, it's not Tom Jones' fault that it won best picture. The people who made it were probably just as surprised that it won as I was." I feel pretty certain that the people who made Tom Jones never had anything like the Oscars on their minds.

What Tom Jones has going for it in terms of traditional Oscar credentials is a period piece setting and its status as an adaptation of a work by a major author (Henry Fielding). What it has going against it are many things, most notably a ribald tone and an anachronistic filmmaking style that makes it more resemble an episode of Benny Hill than the staid Merchant-Ivory style that shaped the notion of cinematic period pieces for someone like me, who came of age cinematically in the 1990s.

The poster I've chosen here says all you need to know about how cheeky this movie is -- and I don't just say that because there's a giant lipstick print planted on Tom's cheek. Everything in Tom Jones is broad, much of it very intentionally so. One of the first ways I became familiar with Albert Finney was in his 1980 movie Scrooge, in which he plays the title character. Although I kind of liked that movie as a kid, there was always something garish about it in general, and Finney's performance in particular, that never sat well with me. I now see the roots of that garishness, though I'd say that Finney is hardly the one we should blame for this film's problems.

It's basically the story of an 18th century bastard who is raised among a rich family, falls in love with a rich girl (Susannah York), but can't have her because of his status as a bastard. Ah, if it were only a bit more like Wuthering Heights than that. The girl is of course engaged to a suitor of an equivalent station (David Warner, in his film debut) who has supposed aristocratic virtues, but little in the way of kindness or warmth. The suitor schemes against the bastard and has him sent away, where he encounters numerous adventures on the road to personal redemption and the unveiling of a secret related to his actual parentage.

It all sounds like pretty standard stuff, really, but it plays as anything but. Again bringing in a very modern reference, Tom Jones seems to have more the tone of something like Tristram Shandy: A Cock and Bull Story than it does the tone of Howards End. Many if not most of the characters are extreme exaggerations, either overly wicked or overly buffoonish, and sometimes both. Many skirts are chased and much liquor is consumed, and one sequence even involves a sexual seduction executed via slabs of meat eaten at a dinner.

I might have gotten more of the intended sense of fun from this movie if everything didn't look so dreary and grainy. Now granted, I was watching an old version that may have been ripped from a VHS tape for all I know, which was kindly uploaded to the web by a friend of mine and shared to me in her Google Docs. So I was not expecting a pristine copy of the print. But even adjusting for the expected degradation of the image, I could still tell that Tom Jones looked like garbage, especially compared to some of the truly handsome-looking pictures that were honored with Oscars around the same time. At its best it looks like a shoddy version of something made on the BBC; at its worst, far worse than that.

And the filmmaking style of director Tony Richardson is truly puzzling. Richardson made this in between a serious movie, The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner, and a bit of a bizarre movie, The Loved One. It's not as good as either of those, though it does share a bit of the spirit of the latter. I made that reference to Benny Hill in part because there are, actually, several scenes in which the action plays at double speed to underscore the goofy hijinx of characters running after each other, much like Mr. Hill regularly did on his show. There are also some very fast edits and some very grotesque close-ups of characters, giving the whole production a truly warped sense. I guess the people who like this movie like that about it. I don't, and I didn't.

But I can't say that I hate the movie either, though I was expecting to after 30 minutes. I sort of fell in step with its mood as it went along, but only sort of. I appreciate it as an odd curiosity and something truly different, perhaps something ahead of its time -- to the extent that I appreciate it at all. I suppose I also have to appreciate just how unlikely it was that this movie would even receive positive reviews, let alone be bestowed with a golden statue by a body of voters widely known for being humorless. It very definitely stands as one of the most unusual best picture winners of all time.

One of the strangest things about it, though, is how little it seems to care whether we like its characters or not. Even the characters we're supposed to like are frequently involved in wretched behavior, or are portrayed as dolts. I think we're supposed to like Tom, but he's the one most guilty of skirt chasing in the whole movie, even though his feelings for Susannah York's character are supposed to be pure. No modern movie would have a guy sleep around on his way into the arms of his beloved.

Also: Only after watching for more than an hour did I realize that York played Superman's mother.

Okay, in November, on to something I expect to be a bit more traditional: My Fair Lady.

Audient Auscars: West Side Story

This is the ninth in my 2015 series in which I try to catch up with the remaining best picture winners I haven't seen, one per month.

Of the two musicals I've seen so far in this series -- I don't count The Broadway Melody as a musical, though I guess it probably is -- West Side Story was the one with which I already had some familiarity.

The first one, Gigi, was new to me. The songs were one of the only things I appreciated about that movie, and I didn't appreciate them all that much. West Side Story, on the other hand, I've "known" for ages, in the sense that I saw it performed at the high school in my town when I was still in junior high. I was so enthralled by that production, by the melodrama of those songs and the earnestness of their performance, that I think watching West Side Story at the age of 12 or 13 was a big contributing factor in my decision to participate in musicals once I got to high school. An important show in my maturation, to be sure -- especially if you extrapolate from that a love for musicals as a movie genre, which causes me to seek out most new musicals even if I'm not completely versed in the classics.

Classics like West Side Story. It seems logical that I should have picked up the 1961 best picture winner somewhere along the way, but I never did. If either of my parents had been into musicals, they might have exposed me to it, but neither of my parents exposed me to much of anything cinematically, even though they would both probably describe themselves as movie fans. (My mom much more so than my dad.)

Anyway, fast forward to September of 2015 and I am only just now seeing it. But because of my history with the show, it's easily the previously neglected best picture winner I've been looking forward to the most.

And it didn't disappoint. I don't know that I consider West Side Story a masterpiece, but it's almost definitely the best movie I've watched so far in this series ... even if it has not aged particularly well. However, in considering the issue of how it has aged, one has to be mindful of the fact that this was never considered a "realistic" depiction of gang behavior on the upper west side of Manhattan. It was always highly stylized, even at the time it was created -- which may be a rather obvious comment to make about a movie where people "dance fight." It seems worth stating, though, because it would be easy to imagine someone raised on either modern gang movies or modern musicals just to laugh this one off from the start.

If you did that, you'd be missing some really enthusiastic performances of some truly terrific songs. West Side Story is one of those musicals with so many hit songs, each one you hear you say, "Wait, I didn't realize that was from West Side Story." In fact, the only song I retained from my early teen viewing was "Maria," which stuck in my brain because of the impassioned performance of the high school actor who sung it. If pressed, I might have also told you that "America" was from the show. But would I have ever provided "Tonight," "I Feel Pretty," "One Hand, One Heart" or "Somewhere"? Definitely not. I probably would have told you that "I Feel Pretty" was from My Fair Lady (which I'll be watching in November) and that the others were from ... I don't know, other shows I guess. It would have seemed unlikely that a single show could be so overloaded with memorable songs, but West Side Story is that show. Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents were just that talented. In fact, so good are the hits in this show that it tends to draw extra attention to the weaknesses of the "filler" songs. "Cool" struck me as particularly lame, a way to beef up the second half running time.

The stylized dancing and choreography put me a bit in mind of my favorite musical, both in its cinematic form and otherwise, which is Jesus Christ Superstar. Although that movie winks very openly at its audience, this movie kind of does that too, more covertly. In both movies there is the specific notion that we are taking a big, dense text (the Bible and Romeo & Juliet) and treating it in a way that is knowingly modernized, in the hopes of better communicating its core themes to today's audiences. That certainly explains the more stagy aspects of West Side Story, like the fact that few of the extras that would typically clog the New York City streets appear here. Some of the sets are starker and more basic than they would otherwise be, as this is not one of those shows that seeks to paint on a much larger canvas just because it's going up on the big screen. The fire escape set represented so minimally in the poster above is indeed just about that minimal here, which seems to further underscore the epic, timeless love story that is being explored. That it should bear such a resemblance to the stage version is probably no surprise, given that the main visionary behind the stage show (Jerome Robbins) is credited as co-director here -- even though he feuded extensively with fellow co-director Robert Wise, and was actually kicked off the set near the start of filming.

Some of the ways it hasn't aged particularly well, though, are worth commenting on. One of those is that whitebread Natalie Wood was cast as the film's Puerto Rican female lead, Maria. Even though she gives a very committed performance and is as darling as ever (I unashamedly crush on Wood), the mere fact of her playing a role outside her race leaves a person a tad uncomfortable, and makes her reasonably attempted Puerto Rican accent seem racially insensitive. That would not have been how the audience at the time perceived it, but I can't help perceive it that way. Of course, merely the idea of having gangs of two different races fighting it out would make West Side Story a political correctness hot potato if anyone were considering a remake today. Which may be one of the reasons nobody is. (Actually, IMDB does have a West Side Story entry that's listed as "in development," but as it has not a single creative person attached to it, we should be pretty skeptical of its status as anything more than an idea at this point.)

Of the many Oscars that this movie won, a whopping ten, one of the second-tier ones that seems most deserving is Thomas Stanford's win for editing. I don't always notice editing in movies -- in fact, it's usually better if you don't -- but here I specifically noted how tight the transitions were, how expertly the dance scenes were cut together. I was a bit more surprised by the supporting acting wins for Rita Moreno and George Chakiris, both of whom seemed fine but unremarkable.

I'll get a one-month break from musicals next month when I watch Tom Jones, the 1963 winner, thanks to the efforts of my Flickcharter friend Jandy, who has sourced this difficult-to-find movie and is sharing it with me. Then back to musicals with My Fair Lady in November, before finishing off the series in December with -- well, I'll keep that as a surprise for now.

Audient Auscars: Gigi

This is the eighth monthly entry in my year-long quest to see the remaining best picture winners I haven't seen, in chronological order.

So this series has definitely run itself into a bit of a rut.

My worst entry came with last month's Around the World in 80 Days, and I can't say that Gigi, the 1958 best picture winner, is a significant amount better. I think the 1950s was just a shitty decade for movies.

In this case I had reason to be wary, as Gigi is actually the only best picture winner I ever started and didn't finish. I started to watch it maybe five years ago, but it being due back at the library (if memory serves) prevented me from finishing. (I probably started watching it too late at night or something.) I watched about 30 minutes at that time, and knew that I wasn't going to love the rest of it when I did eventually get around to watching it.

And I carried in some additional baggage from hearing it discussed recently in my Flickcharters group on Facebook. When I opined last month that Around the World in 80 Days was the worst best picture winner ever -- a claim that may have been exaggerated by the immediate loathing I felt for it, which may subside a little bit over time -- they came back with Gigi as another nominee for that honor. At the time I thought, "Hmm, it doesn't seem particularly distinctive, but I don't think it will probably be horrible either." And then I learned their primary objection to it, which I hadn't realized was even an aspect of the movie when I watched those first 30 minutes: It documents, and perhaps even romanticizes, a Parisian lifestyle in which wealthy men pair up with courtesans who receive all sorts of tutelage in how to be sophisticated society ladies.

What Gigi is about is fairly oblique, but once you know what it's about you can't stop seeing it -- and can't stop being grossed out by it. The film's high "ick" factor is not derived merely from its subject matter, which is obscured by a lot of subtle innuendo and dressed up by some very catchy Lerner and Lowe songs. (In fact, I'm still singing some of them in my head, three days later.) It's derived even more from the fact that the titular courtesan-in-training -- at least I hope she's still in training -- is supposed to be 15 years old.

Leslie Caron is absolutely delightful in the title role, and reminds me a bit of Audrey Hepburn in her spunk and general appearance. But boy does she deserve a better movie than this one, not to mention a movie that will be better to her character than this one.

What may be more shocking than the subject matter of the movie, though, is how little dramatic conflict there is in it. In fact, I can't imagine a movie having lower stakes than these. Narrated by an incurable, incorrigible, extremely self-satisfied old product of the system named Honore Lachaille (Maurice Chevalier), the story is actually about his nephew, Gaston (Louis Jordan). Gaston's big problem is that he's bored. He has every creature comfort a man could want, but life bores him. If hash tags existed then, critics could have dismissed this one with a big #firstworldproblems and been done with it.

So what is the remarkable insight he has to cure his boredom? "I know, I'll try paedophilia!"

It's not quite as simple as that. In fact, the entire first hour of this movie gets squandered away on not much -- and criminally, features very little of Leslie Caron at all. Gaston is miffed that his current courtesan has taken a shine to an ice skating instructor, so much time is spent on how to publicly humiliate her and then keep up public appearances so it does not seem like Gaston is sulking over the rejection.

Stopped caring yet? Yeah, I did ages ago.

So eventually during some card game with Gigi -- with whom Gaston has an avuncular relationship to this point -- he loses a bet to her and is forced to take her on a seaside holiday. Here he falls for her, though we see very little of that. Instead, we spend time on the older Lachaille failing to remember the particulars of his relationship with Gigi's grandmother. (The charming song "I Remember It Well," in which the two swap memories, but his are pretty much the exact opposite of the true details of their first date.)

If it weren't for Gigi's songs, it would truly be nothing at all. But the songs are pretty good, even when they are creepy and pervy ("Thank Heaven for Little Girls").

By the second half, some form of narrative conventionality takes over, sort of, but we're still asked to root for Gigi getting together with a man who intends to rob her of her innocence even while he parades her around in society like a show pony. Somehow, audiences of the time found this appealing.

If I had recognized going in that Gigi was directed by Vincente Minnelli, my warning flags would have gone up a lot earlier. I know this man is revered as a directing treasure and is kind of Hollywood royalty (he was married to Judy Garland, and they gave birth to Liza Minnelli), but I haven't really liked any of his three films I've seen. Those included another best picture winner (An American in Paris) and Meet Me in St. Louis. Each was curiously inert to me in some essential way, and curiously lacking in story. The third time with Minnelli wasn't the charm; in fact, I think it may have been strike three.

One thing I'll say for it, though: As the lead character is named Gaston, it did put that great song from Beauty in the Beast in my head for a couple days. And I was pleased to have a song in my head that reminded me of a movie that was actually good.

We keep the musical theme going with my September best picture winner, 1961's West Side Story. I feel like -- I hope that -- I'll like this one a lot better.