Best & Worst Winners

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Hustler
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Post by Hustler »

Best: (in no particular order)
Casablanca
Midnight Cowboy
Gone with the Wind
The Godfather/The Godfather II
The Apartment
The silence of the Lambs
The Unforgiven
Annie Hall
One Flew over the Cuckoo´s Nest
Platoon
Amadeus
Rebecca

Worst:
A Beautiful Mind
Braveheart
Rocky
Forrest Gump
Terms of Endearment
Out of Africa
Crash
The French Connection
The Great Ziegfield
The Broadway Melody
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Precious Doll
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Post by Precious Doll »

Best

Silence of the Lambs
Midnight Cowboy
All About Eve
The Sound of Music
Annie Hall
Gone with the Wind
From Here to Eternity
Million Dollar Baby
Rebecca
How Green Was My Valley

Worst

Braveheart
Around the World in 80 Days
Rocky
The English Patient
The Great Ziegfeld
My Fair Lady
Cimarron
The Sting
A Beautiful Mind
The French Connection
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Booster Gold
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Post by Booster Gold »

The Films I Adore The Most (In Order Of Love):

All About Eve
Casablanca
West Side Story
All Quiet On The Western Front
Gone With The Wind
Million Dollar Baby
The Godfather Part II
Lawrence Of Arabia
Shakespeare In Love
The English Patient


The Crap I Despise The Most (In Order Of Hate):

The Silence Of The Lambs
Braveheart
Crash
The Broadway Melody
Rain Man
A Beautiful Mind
Forrest Gump
The Sound Of Music
The Greatest Show On Earth
Around The World In 80 Days
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Heksagon
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Post by Heksagon »

Here’s my lists (very conservative, actually):

The Best Eleven:

Gone with the Wind
Casablanca
The Best Years of Our Lives
All Albout Eve
On the Waterfront
The Apartment
Lawrence of Arabia
The Godfather
The Godfather, Part II
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
The Silence of the Lambs

The Worst Ten:

Cimarron
Grand Hotel
The Great Ziegfeld
The Greatest Show on Earth
Around the World in 80 Days
In the Heat of the Night
Gandhi
Driving Miss Daisy
Shakespeare in Love
A Beautiful Mind


I still have several best picture winners waiting to be seen, including Broadway Melody, Cavalcade, Life of Emile Zola, Going My Way, A Gentleman’s Agreement, Hamlet, Marty, Tom Jones and Oliver!
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Post by Uri »

This reflects on my sentiments on a given, boring day, and it’s more about how I like and respect the film and not necessarily about my evaluation of them as winners – I would go for Sunset Boulevard over All About Eve, I might pick Tom Jones as a winner on that particularly weak year, certainly among the nominies.

1. Casablanca
2. All Quit on the Western Front
3. Laurence of Arabia
4. Gone with the Wind
5. The Godfather, Part II
6. Unforgiven
7. The Godfather
8. The Best Years of Our Lives
9. All about Eve
10. The Bridge on the River Kwai
11. The Apartment
12. Annie Hall
13. Million Dollar Baby
14. A Man for All Seasons
15. It Happened One Night
16. Rebecca
17. The Dear Hunter
18. From Here to Eternity
19. Midnight Cowboy
20. West Side Story
21. The Sound of Music
22. Mutiny on the Bounty
23. The Silence of the Lambs
24. On the Waterfront
25. Out of Africa
26. The English Patient
27. How Green Was My Valley
28. One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest
29. Forrest Gump
30. Platoon
31. Patton
32. Ordinary People
33. The Lost Weekend
34. Kramer Vs. Kramer
35. The French Connection
36. Schindler's List
37. All the King’s Men
38. Hamlet
39. Dances with Wolves
40. Gigi
41. An American in Paris
42. Terms of Endearment
43. In the Heat of the Night
44. American Beauty
45. Driving Miss Daisy
46. Chariots of Fire
47. The Sting
48. Grand Hotel
49. Tom Jones
50. Chicago
51. Amadeus
52. The Last Emperor
53. Beautiful Mind
54. Ben Hur
55. Titanic
56. Oliver!
57. Shakespeare in Love
58. Rain Man
59. Marty
60. Crash
61. Rocky
62. My Fair Lady
63. Going My Way
64. Gandhi
65. Gladiator
66. The Life of Emile Zola
67. Mrs. Miniver
68. Gentleman's Agreement
69. Lord of the Ring: The Return of the King
70. Around the World in 80 Days
71. Braveheart
72. The Great Ziegfeld
73. The Greatest Show on Earth

Haven’t seen: Wings, Broadway Melody, Cimarron, Cavalcade
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Post by OscarGuy »

Here we go:

Best (chrono)
It Happened One Night
Gone With the Wind
Rebecca
All About Eve
The Godfather
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest
Driving Miss Daisy
Schindler's List
Titanic
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Worst (chrono)
The Broadway Melody
Cimarron
Ben-Hur
Patton
Out of Africa
Dances with Wolves
Forrest Gump
Braveheart
Gladiator
Crash
Wesley Lovell
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Post by Big Magilla »

HarryGoldfarb wrote:Magilla, as usual, love your writings, but I noticed that from the 80's you only mentioned two films: Ordinary People (in the good list) and Out of Africa as a film that doesn't hold up well with time... do you think that Rain Man, Chariots of Fire and Terms of Endearment hold up better than Out of Africa, which, with all its flaws, is still a "big period film" with an epic approach, a formula that will always smell like Best Picture Material...?
I like Rain Man, Chariots of Fire and Terms of Endearment. I think Reds is a better film than Chariots, but Terms of Endearment and Rain Man deserved their Oscars.

Dustin Hoffman gets a lot of criticism for his portrayal of the autistic man in Rain Man, but I have an autistic nephew whose behavior is uncannily similar to Hoffman's portrayal.

I also happen to like The Color Purple, which with all its flaws, I consider a better film than Out of Africa. I always found Robert Redford's performance in that film to be out of whack with the rest of it.

Terms of Endearment may not be a great film, but the competition in 1983 was less than stellar.

80s picks I disagree with include Amadeus, which may be splashier than A Passage to India but not as all-around well-acted; The Last Emperor, which doesn't hold a candle to either Broadcast News or The Dead and Driving Miss Daisy, which I did not find to be as engrossing as either My Left Foot or Born on the Fourth of July.
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Post by Penelope »

The 10 Best (chronologically):

All Quiet on the Western Front

It Happened One Night

Rebecca

Casablanca

All About Eve

The Apartment

West Side Story

Oliver!

Midnight Cowboy

Annie Hall

----

The 10 Worst (Chronologically):

The Broadway Melody

Cimarron

Cavalcade

The Great Ziegfeld

The Greatest Show on Earth

Rocky

Rain Man

Braveheart

American Beauty

Crash
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HarryGoldfarb
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Post by HarryGoldfarb »

Magilla, as usual, love your writings, but I noticed that from the 80's you only mentioned two films: Ordinary People (in the good list) and Out of Africa as a film that doesn't hold up well with time... do you think that Rain Man, Chariots of Fire and Terms of Endearment hold up better than Out of Africa, which, with all its flaws, is still a "big period film" with an epic approach, a formula that will always smell like Best Picture Material...?
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Post by Big Magilla »

Ten Best Oscar Winning Films (in chronological order):

1. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - Remarkably prescient anti-war film that still holds up today.

2. Gone With the Wind (1939) - it isn't often that the year's biggest film is also the best, but few "big" films contain so many memorable characters and scenes.

3. How Green Was My Valley (1941) - After losing with the previous year's mix of sentiment and message, The Grapes of Wrath, about the plight of migrant workers, Fox won for this one about the plight of coal miners, which sadly hasn't changed much in the 65 years since.

4. Casablanca (1943) - Never so many golden cliches, and all of them wonderful.

5. The Best Years of Our Lives (1946) - Still the best film ever made about soldiers returning to civilian life after war.

6. All About Eve (1950) - Nobody talks in real life the way they do in this film, but what fun it would be if they did.

7. The Apartment (1960) - The perfect blend of comedy and drama.

8. A Man for All Seasons (1966) - The thinking man's epic that is both timely and timeless in its message of following one's conscious no matter what the circumstances may be.

9. Midnight Cowboy (1969) - It took an Englishman to really see New York the way we denizens did. Dated in many ways, but still sizzles at its core.

10. Million Dollar Baby (2004) - Proved the little character driven film is alive and well.

Personal favorites besides these: From Here to Eternity; On the Waterfront; My Fair Lady; The Sound of Music and Ordinary People.

Ten Worst Oscar Winning Films in chronological order:

1. The Broadway Melody (1929) - Because of the cut-off period, the better musicals of just a few months later (Applause; The Love Parade; Hallelujah) were shut out in the Academy's rush to honor a musical. They would have been better off for posterity's sake in voting for the last of the great silent films (The Passion of Joan of Arc; The Wind) but alas, silents were poison at the box office and to be relevant the Academy had to pick a talkie. Sigh.

2. Cimarron (1931) - Until 1990 the only "western" to win, but it is more of a soap opera than a western, with a truly bad lead performacne by Richard Dix who somehow managed a best actor nod for his atrocious over-the-top acting. Shameful considering they failed to even nominate Little Caesar and The Public Enemy, which were seen at the time as glorifying gangsters, and City Lights, which had the curse of being a silent film.

3. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) - This behemoth a musical won becuase of its grandeur, even though there were better musical choices in Show Boat, Swing Time and the semi-musical San Francisco as well as drama (Dodsworth) and comedy (Mr. Deeds Goes to Town; My Man Godfrey).

4. An American in Paris (1951) - Not a bad film, but a curious choice over A Streetcar Named Desire, A Place in the Sun and The African Queen, the latter which wasn't even nominated.

5. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) - The year's box-office champ has a ludicorous toy train disaster set piece and some terrible acting by Conrel Wilde and the usually reliable Betty Hutton. Yet they voted for it rather than give the Oscar to High Noon, a thinly disguised attack on Communist witch hunts, The Quiet Man, which was from (God forbid!) a "small" studio and Singin' in the Rain which they failed to nominate presumably because they didn't want another American in Paris type upset.

6. Around the World in 80 Days (1956) - A phenomenon in its day, and quite stunning in Todd-A-O, but rather pedestrian when seen on a regular screen let alone a TV screen which is where most people alive today have seen it, if at all. Sadly, it beat The King and I, Giant and such non-nominated masterworks as The Searchers, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, All That Heaven Allows, The Seven Samurai and La Strada.

7. Braveheart (1995) Arguably the single worst Oscar winner of all time., a teenage boy's wet dream built around a concept of freedom that didn't exist at the time, with the preposterous conceit that its hero fathered the next king of England by a queen he had never met. Adding to the pain, the year's best film, Dead Man Walking wasn't even nominated.

8. Gladiator (2000) is a throwback to all those Grade B sword and sandal pics of the 30s that were resurrected in the 50s and early 60s, none of them particularly good, but many of them better than this. I vividly remember my grandmother referring to Demetrius and the Gladiators with derision by calling it Demetrius and the Gladiolas. I wonder what she would have called this piece of crap.

9. A Beautiful Mind (2001) - A dumb, gimmicky film that purports to be a true reflection of the man it is about. That one of the worst screenplays ever nominated for an Oscar actaully won is more egregious to me than the film's best picture win over the audacious but imperfect Mulholland Drive, Gosford Park and In the Bedroom.

10. Crash (2995) - Its supporters see something in it that simply isn't there - it is not a plea for racial harmony, but rather a digging up of all the nasty little things that keep us apart in today's society. If holding up a mirror to life as it is lived on the mean streets and freeways of L.A. was a catalyst for change, it would be a masterpiece, but people are not going to change their evil ways so easily. That this film was used by mean spirited homophobes to trump Brokeback Mountain, a film that won practiacally every other award this year, only adds to its infamy. I have more respect to the 20% of the Academy who refused to vote for anything.

Other winners that don't hold up particualry well: Grand Hotel; Gentleman's Agreement; Hamlet; Out of Africa and Dances With Wolves.
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