THE RANKING

A Best Picture winners bumper pack!

Chris: So, Best Picture Oscar-winners. The best place to start is with an incontrovertible statement: these are the best pictures of the years in which they were eligible.

Olly: No question. The best movies ever. That’s how it works.

Dan: That’s why Citizen Kane’s not on this list. Or Pulp Fiction.

Chris: Or The Shawshank Redemption. Or Paddington 2. Or Ant-man And The Wasp.

Olly: Are any of those as good as Green Book? No. No, they’re not.

Chris: They do get it wrong. And sometimes for an entire decade at a time.

Helen: Hello, the ’80s.

Chris: Forrest Gump is a fine film, well-made… Dan: If Forrest Gump were a person, I’d kick it in the balls.

Chris: Forrest Gump is a person, Dan. Yes, Forrest Gump won Best Picture that year. Yet Shawshank and Pulp Fiction are the all-time classics from that category and they didn’t win. Dan: In 2002, The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship Of The Ring was up.

Helen: Should have won.

Dan: A Beautiful Mind won. In 2003, The Two Towers was up. Chicago won.

Olly: Its musical numbers were better.

Dan: But in 2004, The Return Of The King got everything.

Helen: Which is great, but it’s not the best of the three. So in retrospect, you would have reversed that and given it for Fellowship, and then freed up Master And Commander [to win in 2004]. And then we might have had more Master And Commander movies, and the world would be a better place.

Olly: I’m surprised that when we’re talking about which film might have been robbed at the 2004 Oscars, it’s Master And Commander and not Lost In Translation.

Helen: I don’t like Lost In Translation.

Olly: You’re an idiot.

Chris: Lost In Translation is very boring. Having said that, so is Master And Commander.

Helen: Where the Oscars goes wrong is in trying to reward films that are self-consciously important. That’s the stuff that doesn’t tend to stand up very well.

Chris: This is a ranking of Best Picture winners.

We’re moaning about the losers. But before we change that, I want to go through the horror show that was the 1980s. You’re talking about some of the best films of all time being overlooked in favour of straight-down-themiddle schlock. In 1981, Ordinary People, decent film, beat not only The Elephant Man but a little film called Raging Bull.

Helen: Who’s going to remember that?

Chris: Start as you mean to go on. 1982 — Chariots Of fucking Fire...

Dan: “The British are coming! The British are coming!”’

Chris: Beat Raiders Of The Lost Ark. Spielberg at this point must have thought the Academy had it in for him. And they probably did. Because the next year E.T. The Extra-terrestrial lost out to Gandhi.

Helen: You can see where they’re coming from just in terms of the scale of the filmmaking. You can see why they’d be awed by it.

Chris: And it ends with Driving Miss Daisy, for the love of God. That was the decade where there was a type of film that Oscar loved. Gandhi is one of those movies. Out Of Africa is one of those movies. Very milquetoast.

Dan: Although the winner for 1984 was Amadeus.

Helen: I love Amadeus.

Dan: That’s not such a bad one.

Chris: That was the year Police Academy came out. What the fuck is going on? But let’s talk about some of the big films in contention for this list. One of the films uppermost in my thoughts was It Happened One Night.

Helen: I love that movie. The first to win the Big Five. Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable, on the run. They have a whole series of misadventures and it’s delightful, and so not Oscar-y.

Chris: It’s really fun. Really sparky. Gone With The Wind won Best Picture for 1939. Gone With The Wind is not the best picture of that year.

Helen: It’s a wee bit racist.

Olly: Just a teeny bit. I’ve never been a fan of Gone With The Wind. It’s a very, very expensive, well-constructed melodrama.

Chris: Frankly, my dear, you don’t give a damn?

Olly: I give kind of a damn. But it’s never been one of my favourites.

Helen: It’s Oscar rewarding the biggest film in terms of production and hype. It was a huge deal. It’s the Avatar of that year.

Chris: 1943 was Casablanca.

Dan: It’s so snappy and witty. Claude Rains in that movie, I could watch him all day.

Olly: It’s funny all the way through. I remember thinking the first time I watched it, “I must watch this as an important film with a notebook,” and then I saw it again at an outdoor screening and thought, “Fuck me, this is hilarious!” So many good gags in that.

Chris: In 1960, we get the first of the big Oscar botherers — Ben-hur hoovers up 11 Oscars, a feat that would be unmatched until Dan’s beloved Titanic.

Dan: I’m not massively fond of Ben-hur.

Chris: I don’t think anyone is.

Dan: It’s not a very good story. It’s got an amazing set-piece, the chariot race, but that comes roughly halfway through the film. It’s one of those pretentious, weighty films.

Helen: It loses points for Some Like It Hot also being out in 1959 and not being nominated.

Chris: Nobody’s perfect. But Billy Wilder had his day the next year with The Apartment.

Olly: It’s incredible. And you could make that film today and it would still be very modern. It’s

also a comedy that’s about suicide and depression.

Helen: And sexual exploitation.

Olly: All you’d have to do is change the outfits. You could just release it today.

Chris: It’s really, really dark and then it has this beautiful uplift of an ending.

Olly: You’re pulled through that darkness by Jack Lemmon, who is a delight. And Shirley Maclaine as well. Jack’s my favourite of all time.

Helen: I don’t think there’s been a better performance in cinema history than Jack Lemmon in The Apartment.

Chris: I think the ’70s are when Oscar really gets going.

Olly: The ’70s are generally very good.

Chris: And then it gets to Kramer Vs. Kramer at the very end and shits the bed. And that sets up the epic bed-shitting of the 1980s. But I’ll start with The French Connection for 1971. For me, this is one of the all-time greats.

Dan: It is. It’s fantastic.

Helen: I never really loved it. I’ll come out and say that a lot of these great movies of the ’70s, I appreciate but don’t like.

Dan: But Friedkin was doing something new. People hadn’t seen cops done like this before, in a gritty, almost documentarian way.

Chris: But the car chase, Helen. The car chase!

Helen: The car chase is great. I don’t have any response to the movie. I saw it and thought it was well done. That’s it.

Olly: Is there a famous car chase in The French Connection?

Chris: They don’t like to talk about it. Then we had a little film called The Godfather in 1972.

Olly: It’s as big as filmmaking gets.

Helen: I appreciate that it’s great. I have no emotional response to it.

Chris: At the Oscars in 1975, Francis Ford Coppola had a hell of a year. He was nominated for The Conversation but won for The Godfather Part II.

Dan: I know a lot of people say it’s better, but I prefer the focus of The Godfather. The device of cutting between the two timelines is interesting, but I don’t find it as engaging.

Chris: Isn’t it more complex than the original?

Dan: Yes. But it doesn’t engage me as much. Olly: It’s an Alien/aliens conversation. There’s no winner really in that competition.

Helen: Whoever wins, we win?

Chris: The winner for 1977, Annie Hall, which is a great film for some people — I’m not a fan of it.

Dan: I’m not, either.

Chris: But it beat a little film called Star Wars. Helen: My problems with Annie Hall are not about Annie Hall at all, but the kind of man who says, “I don’t like romcoms except Annie Hall,” which makes me dislike Annie Hall.

Chris: Should Star Wars have won?

Olly: No. It’s a terrible thing to say, but I have not that much affection for Star Wars as a series. It’s not that close to my heart.

Helen: I’m pressing the security button, but it’s not working.

Dan: It’s just people sitting around on a spaceship, isn’t it?

Chris: We’ve talked about the ’80s, so let’s move swiftly into the ’90s. Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas and, more shockingly, Ghost in 1991. Helen: If it takes Goodfellas losing for Ghost not to win, surely that’s a score draw.

Dan: I love Dances With Wolves. But it wouldn’t have been my first choice from 1990.

Chris: It’s a great film. I think people forget what sort of film it is and what sort of a risk it was. The winner for 1991 was The Silence Of The Lambs, another one of the films to win all Big Five.

Dan: Amazing. Probably the Oscar-winning film I’ve seen the most times. Is it a horror? Isn’t it a horror? It’s the closest we’ve come to a horror winning.

Olly: What I love most about it is that it could so easily be a cheapo thriller, but it’s treated with maximum respect.

Chris: 1994 finally sees Steven Spielberg get a Best Picture winner under his belt, for Schindler’s List.

Helen: It absolutely burns itself into your memory. The delicacy and yet force with which it handles the subject matter is unbelievable.

Chris: It’s nobody’s idea of an easy watch, of course. But the maturity of Spielberg’s approach to it was like nothing we had ever seen from him at that point.

Olly: You can feel in every second what that film means to him. It’s devastating. But for all the horrendous subject matter, it’s a very hopeful film. It says, evil is not innate.

Chris: Braveheart, which won in 1996, kicked off a series of very Oscar-y movies winning.

The English Patient next, and then Titanic. Helen: Over L.A. Confidential?

Dan: I wouldn’t have chosen it over L.A. Confidential, but I still bloody love Titanic.

Olly: If it hadn’t won the Oscar, it would have felt wrong. It’s a monumental moment in film history, whether you like it or not.

Dan: And a colossal technical achievement.

Olly: James Cameron is just a man who wants to do the impossible. That was the impossible.

Chris: In 2007, Martin Scorsese gets a longawaited Oscar for a film that is cinema. The Departed won Best Picture that year.

Dan: I never really got into The Departed that much, having seen Infernal Affairs. I’m not keen on Nicholson in that film.

Olly: I like over-the-top Nicholson.

Chris: When was he under-the-top? Is there a theme that runs through this where sometimes filmmakers will get an Oscar and it’s maybe not for the film they deserve?

Helen: It tends to happen more with actors rather than in Best Picture, but I think we saw it with The Departed.

Chris: In 2010, The Hurt Locker won and beat Avatar, which at that point was the biggest film of all time. But has The Hurt Locker held up? Olly: Has Avatar? The Hurt Locker is a very good drama. I was never head-over-heels about it. It was a very strong four-star drama.

Helen: I did love it at the time and there’s always something fun in seeing the underdog beat the biggest dog that has ever dogged.

Chris: When we hit the 2010s, there are films that, in hindsight, people pooh-pooh. Like The Artist, a film I loved unreservedly when I saw it in Cannes.

Helen: You wanted to marry The Artist.

Chris: Then there’s Moonlight.

Olly: Absolutely love that film. Barry Jenkins is a filmmaker who directs stuff straight from his heart. The beach scene is incredible.

Helen: It has so much emotion and so much power. Moonlight is astonishing.

Chris: You were happy or not happy when the La La Land snafu happened?

Olly: I loved both films for very different reasons. They’re not rival films. I’m glad that Moonlight won, but La La Land winning would not have been a travesty.

Helen: I was upset for Moonlight that the whole thing overshadowed its win in many ways.

Olly: Which is not La La Land’s fault.

Helen: La La Land is La La Land’s fault.

Chris: It’s another day of sun, Helen. Let’s talk about the most recent winner, Parasite.

Helen: Nobody has a bad word to say about it.

Olly: You have to give films time to percolate. But I had no qualms about choosing it. To a certain degree, what wins the Oscar for that year should reflect the times. Parasite is such a now film. It’s so very much about class and poverty and the world as it is now. It’s thoroughly deserving and exquisitely directed.

Helen: So well made.

Chris: Right, enough squabbling. Let’s vote!