THE BEST:

SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE (1998)



When it comes to second-guessing the Oscars, few Best Pictures raise Hollywood’s hackles like Shakespeare in Love. The legend goes something like this: way back in 1998, Steven Spielberg’s brilliant war movie Saving Private Ryan was a cinch to win the top slot, but sometime between the announcement of nominations and the opening of envelopes, Bob and Harvey Weinstein (the evil geniuses behind Shakespeare’s Oscar campaign) flew the invisible Miramax blimp over Hollywood and fired their diabolical Hypno-Ray at the helpless population, thus forcing all the innocent Who’s Who down in Whoville to vote for the wrong movie. As John Foote posts at InContention.com (reflecting an apparently common consensus), “Is there anyone left out there who truly believes that Shakespeare in Love, a lovely film, was actually better than Saving Private Ryan?” Well...uh, yes, actually. In fact, I’d even go so far as to say that Shakespeare in Love was MUCH better. Ryan, for all the slam-pow-gasp shock & awe chaos of its opening battle scene devolves shortly thereafter into a standard-issue World War II potboiler, circa 1952, complete with “Brooklyn,” “Redneck” and all the rest of the colorfully standard-issue Hollywood band of brothers fussin’ and fightin’ their way across Europe under the command of a tough but secretly tender-hearted father figure (played by a wildly miscast and completely unbelievable Tom Hanks). Shakespeare In Love, meanwhile, presented an Elizabethan world more fully-imagined than fellow Best Picture competitor Elizabeth, thanks to a remarkably literate and inventive screenplay by Marc Norman and Tom Stoppard. And, while it’s easy to mock the GOOP-tastic Gwyneth of today, Paltrow generated palpable chemistry with co-star Joseph Fiennes in a well told, old-school love story, surrounded by a flawless supporting cast, all of them at or near the top of their games. True, movies this smart don’t usually win Oscars...which is probably why so many Academy voters are still baffled by Shakespeare’s victory.

ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST (1975)



So many of Oscar's pronouncements amount to a string of missed calls and concessions to sentimentality that when they get one right square on the nose -- when someone is rewarded for the best work of their career at that point in time as opposed to what they did a few years ago or what they might do if they can be induced not to chuck it all and go back to night school or even, as in the case of something like Ben Kingsley's performance in Gandhi, what the person they're playing did -- it stands out. The Academy has had plenty of opportunities to give Jack Nicholson a thumb's-up these past several years, and plenty of times they've jumped at the chance, even when, as in 1997's As Good As It Gets, the performance in question called to mind Picasso's boast that "I can paint fake Picassos as well as anybody!" But they got it just right with Nicholson's first Oscar, for his Randall Patrick McMurphy, a performance that he gave a year after Chinatown set his movie star status in stone, and one that goes farther than he'd ever gone before, with fewer ingratiating winks and nods to the audience than he'd ever include in a full-length performance again. And since the movie, for all its virtues, rises and falls on the strength of its star, it deserved its Best Picture Oscar...a painful thing for this lifelong Jaws partisan to concede.

THE WORST:

THE LIFE OF EMILE ZOLA (1937)



Today Paul Muni is best remembered for his starring role in Howard Hawks' gangster classic Scarface. It turned out to be a rare occasion when Muni provided movie audiences with entertainment value for their money. After winning an Oscar nomination for his next film, I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang, Muni lost to Charles Laughton for his performance in The Private Life of Henry VIII and must have vowed to never be out-biopic'ed again. In short order, he established himself as the leading advocate of pompous, overbearing movies, winning a Best Actor Oscar for The Life of Louis Pasteur, in which he cured anthrax over the outraged objections of the small-minded, and then starred in Zola, in which he "J'accused" up one side of France and down the other. He also starred in Juarez, as Juarez, and The Good Earth, in which he must have disappointed his diehard fans by not actually portraying the planet. It all made him the Mister Oscar Bait of the 1930s, but by the end of the decade, audiences were sick of the self-righteous sight of him. He tried to get back to where he once belonged, but too much time spent reciting gaseous speeches while buried in historically conscientious makeup jobs had blunted his instincts, and some of his later movie roles, such as his lovable gangster in Angel on My Shoulder (1946), are actually even worse than the Oscar-bait stuff. He died in 1967, the bulk of his filmography fit only to serve as a cautionary example that Meryl Streep failed to heed.

DRIVING MISS DAISY (1989)



It’s not often that a movie dealing with racial issues is so totally (if well-meaningly) clueless that it gets an entire rap song dedicated to its utter boneheadedness, but Driving Miss Daisy is that movie, and Public Enemy’s “Burn Hollywood Burn” is that song. After years of racism, stereotyping, and opportunities denied, Chuck D and his cohorts seemed to be saying, this is what constitutes progress? A movie about a cranky old southern Jewish woman whose black chauffer learns to live and love with her irascible, patronizing demeanor? Not only was it offensive on a number of levels – intentionally and otherwise – but it simply wasn’t a great movie by any reckoning. Its adaptation from a stage play was realized hamhandedly, Bruce Beresford’s direction is perfunctory, and the acting ranges from good but uninspiring to ambitious but dull (Dan Aykroyd ineptly takes the kind of risks that would later rejuvenate Bill Murray’s career). It’s easy to say that its victory came about because of a weak competitive field – other candidates ranged from poor (Dead Poets Society) to good-but-not-great (My Left Foot) – but the thing to remember is that 1989 was also the year that Spike Lee’s wonderful Do the Right Thing, a superior movie in every respect, and one that said far more about racial relations than Driving Miss Daisy could dream, was released. And it didn’t even get a nomination.

DANCES WITH WOLVES (1990)



Hot on the heels of Driving Miss Daisy, you wouldn’t think Oscar would be so quick to embrace another well-meaning racial drama, especially one helmed by someone who’s an even worse director than he is an actor. But sure enough, the voters’ tendency to absurdly overvalue any directorial effort by an actor that rises above total incompetence won out, and Kevin Costner’s bloated, plodding quasi-Western Dances with Wolves took home the Best Picture trophy in 1990. Continuing their history of giving Martin Scorsese the finger, they passed over his tremendous gangster tale GoodFellas in deference to this ridiculously overlong, condescending story of a white man who becomes beloved of the Indians by virtue of his sublime spirituality (heaven forfend the hero of the movie be an actual Indian, because then there wouldn’t be a starring role for director Kevin Costner’s favorite star, actor Kevin Costner). Dances with Wolves isn’t quite horrible enough to be the modern-day equivalent of The Greatest Show On Earth; it does contain some thrilling scenes, some decent acting, and direction that’s proficient if never outstanding. But its grossly overweight running time and heavy-handed message are easily the equal of anything in DeMille’s hokey circus epic. Still, things could have been worse; though no one remembers this anymore, The Godfather Part III was a Best Picture nominee in ’90, too.

BRAVEHEART (1995)



Oh, Oscar, when will you learn? By 1995, a clear theme was emerging: if you’re a well-known actor, and you manage to direct a movie without crushing yourself to death with a SteadiCam or making the entire movie with the lens caps on, you’ve got a pretty strong chance at winning a Best Picture or Best Director award even if your movie is an obvious mediocrity facing competition from much better movies by actual directors. You’d think the Academy would have figured it out: Warren Beatty did nothing worthwhile after Reds. Robert Redford never made a great movie after his Ordinary People win. Kevin Costner’s post-Dances with Wolves work is an utter embarrassment. Clint Eastwood is the most reliable acting director in Hollywood, and even he’s not that great by the standards of legitimate, non-acting directors. And yet, they fell for the exact same trick with Mel Gibson’s second directorial feature, the overheated, self-important William Wallace biopic Braveheart. A few well-staged battle scenes and some fancy speechifying don’t save the sluggish pace of the movie or the overwhelming sensation that Wallace is a bit of a sociopathic bully, and the movie doesn’t bear up to even one repeat viewing. It’s not awful, and Gibson has shown he’s capable of good work as a director since then, but Braveheart didn’t even remotely deserve to win Best Picture, even in a relatively weak year for movies.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Six

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Phil Nugent, Leonard Pierce