We love to argue over the all the times the Oscars have gotten it wrong. For every memorable, iconic Best Picture winner, there are two trophy-winning movies that have either been forgotten or just seem a little embarrassing in retrospect (Crash being the enduring recent example).
But sometimes, the Academy voters get it exactly right They’ve been at it for 95 years after all; they’ve had plenty of time to make enduring choices, if only by chance. As fun as it is to slag their bad choices, we’re here today to recognize awards that truly hold up, and remind ourselves us of great movies we might actually want to, you know, actually watch again.
The screenplay so good, the movie about the screenplay (Mank) earned 10 Oscar nominations itself. Mankiewicz and Welles took a much-deserved prize, which was impossibly Citizen Kane’s sole Oscar win. We can keep debating who deserves the credit for the script without casting doubt on its significance.
Joan Crawford won exactly one Oscar in her long career. By 1945, she was already in comeback mode, and Mildred Pierce was the reinvention that proved that she wasn’t going to just fade away. It’s likely her best, and probably most iconic performance, at least until Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?
It might have felt like stunt casting, which is rarely a good idea, but non-actor Harold Russell gives an impressively understated performance in The Best Years of Our Lives as Homer Parish, a returning WWII veteran struggling following the amputation of both of his hands—just as Russell himself had. His win was entirely deserved, and also deeply meaningful.
Whenever someone mimics the cackling, cantankerous old prospector-type character, they’re paying homage to Walter Huston. The actor had very little interest in this role (seeing himself as more of a leading-man type), but his son John (the director) had some pull in bringing him onboard. Unlike those later parodies, Huston invests his character with heart and humanity, even while doing an entirely unhinged little jig.
The expressionist photography, in beautiful black and white; those weird and disorienting Dutch angles…The Third Man is a visual feast, and that’s all down to Krasker, who never did better work than he did here. Few Cinematographers ever have.
West Side Story is a great musical with elements that don’t hold up terribly well today. (Natalie Wood is great in other movies, but a convincing Puerto Rican immigrant she is not). Rita Moreno’s performance is not one of them—she steals every single scene she’s in. What’s less great is that it took 60 years for another Latina actress to take home an Oscar (and for the same role no less).
The Academy has always struggled with horror movies, rarely rewarding anything that smells like a genre picture. Ruth Gordon’s performance in Rosemary’s Baby is an exception; her Minnie Castavet starts off as a tease—a stock nosy neighbor character—only offering hints of more sinister intentions that will soon come horrifically to the fore. She’s funny and deeply creepy by turns.
I love a cornball ballad as much as the next middle-aged white person, but the history of Oscar’s Best Original Song category up to the modern day is positively lousy with ‘em: “The Morning After,” “The Way We Were,” “You Light Up My Life,” “Up Where We Belong,” “My Heart Will Go On,” etc. Here, we get a thoroughly non-generic bit of Blaxploitation-era funk from Isaac Hayes that’s also entirely inseparable from the film to which it’s attached. Just try thinking of Shaft the movie without humming it.
I’m not sure it’s his absolute best performance (that’s probably in The Conversation), but Popeye Doyle is certainly the most memorable character brought to life by one of our most accomplished (and still living!) actors.
The Godfather looms large in the pantheon of 1970s cinema, and it’s one of our finest films full stop. The sequel is better, using everything we learned about these characters in the first installment to pull them deeper into the American tragedy of the wildly successful but rarely happy Corleone family. One of only two sequels to have ever won Best Picture, The Godfather, Part II might have been passed over on that basis, but the Academy was smarter than that—at least this time. Some would argue that the way to play a villain is to invest them with humanity and empathy, which is all well and good, but Louise Fletcher earned an Oscar for investing Nurse Ratched with believability: We believe she is one of the worst villains in film history, and we love to hate her for it.
The movie that catapulted Barbara Kopple to the top ranks of American documentary filmmakers is also a gritty, inspiring, and harrowing look at the stakes (up to, and including murder) involved when workers stand up for their rights. It’s also a portrait of righteous ferocity in a bygone era, when blue-collar workers, united, stood and fought for their rights rather than merely begging for scraps.
Longtime Scorsese collaborator Schoonmaker isn’t quite the household name the iconic director is, but, without her work editing his films, it’s entirely possible we wouldn’t be that familiar with his name, either. Her early-career win for Raging Bull cemented her place in the pantheon and still represents some of her most visceral, impressive work.
Sometimes the lines get blurred, but here, Joe Pesci is practically the platonic ideal of a Best Supporting Actor. He’s clearly not the main character, but a memorable, quotable presence, providing unlikely comic relief and just a few hints of pathos.
Try to imagine modern pop culture without Marge Gunderson’s impressions. Though sometimes painted as a caricature, Frances McDormand plays Marge as a human being with a recognizable, if heightened, mode of speaking and acting. In the world of the Coen brothers, she’s the most reasonable person you’ll find.
Perhaps the best film from a truly great director, the only problem with Pedro Almodóvar’s film’s win is that it should have been up for an overall Best Picture. Certainly it holds up better than the 1999 winner, American Beauty.
It’s…interesting that the only Black Best Actress in the history of the Oscars, past or present (including this year, when there are no Black women among the nominees) is a portrait of a woman grief-stricken, harried, and victimized. None of that detracts from the triumph of Berry’s performance; she plays the character as a raw nerve, even as she begins to demand something more of a life that’s been needlessly cruel to her at every turn.
A gorgeous, poetic movie that felt like it kicked off a new era for the Academy, Moonlight only gets better with age (which can’t be said about many an Oscar-winning film). It’s worth remembering as much more than just the movie that almost didn’t get awarded its rightful Oscar.
Get Out does absolutely everything a movie should do, and it’s all right there on the page: it’s funny and thrilling, with well-drawn characters and an incredibly sharp and well-earned sense of satire. It should have won Best Picture (no sleight to Guillermo del Toro’s The Shape of Water, also quite good)—but one of the most important cultural touchstones of the past decade more than deserved this award, at least.
Is Parasite a satire? A social drama? A horror movie?
Yes? Bong Joon-ho’s story of the members of a poor family who wheedle their ways into the household of some rich people is both wildly entertaining and as sharp as they come, and probably one of Oscar’s smartest Best Picture choices ever. It’s a film that proves that, even as American cinema sags under the pressures of our four-quadrant blockbuster era, there are still movies with bite to be found if you don’t mind subtitles.