The Oscar for Best Picture: The Envelope Please!

Description

12 Best Pictures over 12 Decades in 12 Weeks!  On May 16, 1929 the first Academy Awards were presented at a banquet held in the Blossom Room of the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel. Did they get it right?  A film classic or a clinker?  You be the judge!  Join us each week as we re-view those films awarded Best Picture by the Academy. Our ushers-tutors will assist you in your evaluation of the criteria upon which critical judgement of the Academy is purportedly based.  

We will first look at the origins of the Academy and examine its early role in shaping American film and popular culture. We will examine Best Pictures from the Depression-era, considering the impact of new sound technologies on the Hollywood studio style and the subsequent enforcement of the Motion Picture Production Code, a set of moral guidelines that were enforced from the mid-1930s to the 1960s. In our next section, we will move on to wartime cinema and the consolidation of star culture and the Classical Hollywood Style, considering the way in which celebrated Best Pictures such as Casablanca reflected underlying tensions in cultural and national identity. Turning to the 1950s, we will address McCarthyism, blacklisting, and the advent of television as the perfect storm that effectively swept grand dramatic spectacle and ramped-up Minnelli art-house musicals into their place of prominence in the Academy Awards ceremonies.

In the third section, we will examine the cultural revolution of the 1960s and the return of socially conscious cinema with the Academy’s acknowledgement of those films that focused on social and racial tensions. We will then move to the New Hollywood of the 1970s and the heyday of the American film school auteur. The final section will be devoted to subsequent decades and those genre films dedicated to social concerns, such as the anti-war war movie Hurt Locker (BP 2009), the first and only film directed by a woman to have been awarded an Oscar for Best Picture. Finally, we come full circle, closing with the romantic comedy The Artist (BP 2011), a film whose black-and-white silent style pays tribute to early Hollywood cinema—which is where we began.