see all the Academy Award Best Picture winners

Well, I’ve watched three more Best Picture winners. Ratings are 1-5 stars (well circles, really, since 43 Things doesn’t like asterisks).

oo Ben-Hur
ooo Patton
oooo Terms of Endearment

Ben-Hur was a bit overwrought and overacted, but the much-vaunted chariot race was indeed spectacular. Patton was long but George C. Scott did a great job with the main character. And I really enjoyed Terms of Endearment, great characters and acting, I just hate the trick of ”...and then they get cancer and die” to end a movie.

Gee, only 52 more to go!

I went and tallied up where I’m starting at for this goal. 25/80 isn’t many, huh? I guess I have a lot of movies to watch….

I finished up the list with a marathon of five movies in 24 hours.
The last on the list were, How Green Was My Valley, Sunrise, Cavalcade, Wings, and The Best Years of Our Lives

I can’t believe I’ve finally finished this list!

Now I can officially go to the Oscars!

I watched 4 more this weekend, along with seeing 2 of the 2006 best picture nominees.

I’m down to ‘Sunrise’, ‘Wings’, ‘Cavalcade’, ‘The Best years of our lives’, and ‘how green was my valley’

I watched 5 more over the long weekend.

And I’ve figured out how to procure all the remaining ones between Netflix, TiVo/TCM, Amazon.com, and eBay.

I’m down to sixteen left. I’m now counting both ‘Sunrise’ and ‘Wings’ for the first winner since there were two awards for that first ceremony.

these three may only be available on dvd from a foreign distributer:

Wings (1927), Cimarron (1931), Cavalcade (1933)

I got Kramer vs. Kramer (1980) and On the Waterfront (1955) off the list this past weekend. Neither were that outstanding. They had good acting, but I was bored by them both.

On recounting I see that I have 30 movies still to see:

1981 Ordinary People
1980 Kramer vs. Kramer
1979 The Deer Hunter
1971 Patton
1970 Midnight Cowboy
1968 In the Heat of the Night
1967 A Man for All Seasons
1964 Tom Jones
1957 Around the World in 80 Days: Special Edition
1956 Marty
1955 On the Waterfront
1953 The Greatest Show on Earth
1950 All the King’s Men
1949 Laurence Olivier’s Hamlet
1948 Gentleman’s Agreement
1947 The Best Years of Our Lives
1946 The Lost Weekend
1945 Going My Way
1943 Mrs. Miniver
1942 How Green Was My Valley
1939 You Can’t Take It With You
1938 The Life of Emile Zola
1937 The Great Ziegfeld
1936 Mutiny on the Bounty
1934 Cavalcade
1933 Grand Hotel
1932 Cimarron
1931 All Quiet on the Western Front
1930 The Broadway Melody of 1929
1929 Wings

My new goal is to see them all before the 2007 Academy Awards are held. That is 15 weeks away, so the easy math says I need to see two movies per week from now until then. I need to see how many of these movies I have at home (I stored up a lot of them from TCM over the last couple of years) and how many I have to Netflix and how many I may have to scrounge to find if they are completely out of print.

Wish me luck!

I’d like to get through this long-standing goal of watching all the Best Picture winners sooner than later. This weekend I watched One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1976). I don’t know what I was expecting from this one, but it was more low-key than I expected, despite the last third being one over-the-top people-in-the-nuthouse spectacle. Having heard the Nurse Ratchet references in cinema studies and pop culture for years, I thought her character would’ve been a lot more vindictive or evil than she ended up. I guess one could say the role was played in an understated way to contrast the mental patients, but I was just underwhelmed by the role and the character.
While he tends to play the same guy and is more annoying as an older actor, I thought Jack Nicholson was great in this movie and I enjoyed him as the main character. The end was shocking.

Personally, I think I was distracted by all the actors who weren’t very known when the movie was made who went on to be more famous (Danny DeVito, Christopher Lloyd) or who became character actors that I’ve seen in a lot of shows. Brad Dourif was especially distracting, having been in both an episode of the X-Files and in the LOTR movies.