The Oscar Project Interlude #1: Best of the 1920s/1930s

Photo from the 1937 Academy Awards Ceremony

by Chris Marshall:

I have now finished a full decade of Best Picture winners (plus a couple from the 1920s), and at the conclusion of each decade, I will rank the films based on which ones I most enjoyed watching. This is not a statement about technical merit or historical significance; it’s about what I like the most. At the beginning of the project, I decided against assigning ratings to individual movies because I fall into the trap of thinking about the film in terms of stars or point systems rather than simply focusing on the movie itself. With 12 years under my belt, however, I feel like I need to somehow quantify what I’ve seen.

My favorite of the decade.

Top 12 of 1927-1939
1. It Happened One Night (1934)
2. Gone with the Wind (1939)
3. The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
4. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935)
5. You Can’t Take It with You (1938)
6. Grand Hotel (1932)
7. All Quiet on the Western Front(1930)
8. Wings (1927)
9. The Broadway Melody (1928)
10. Cimarron (1931)
11. Cavalcade (1933)
12. The Great Ziegfeld (1936)

I don’t think it’s a coincidence that most of the top spots come from the second half of the 1930s (#1 being the exception). The first few winners were produced during the infancy of talkies, and it was obvious that nobody was really comfortable with the new technological capabilities. Starting in 1934, though, the craftsmanship and visual appeal started to improve drastically. Even The Great Ziegfeld, which was one of my more excruciating cinematic experiences, looked pretty good.

I’m excited about the 1940s. I have only previously seen one of the winners from the decade (1943’s Casablanca), so once again almost everything will be new to me. Although it didn’t win, Citizen Kane, released in 1941, is widely considered to have revolutionized the film industry, so I’m interested to see how the Wellesian influence manifests itself in the later years of the decade, if at all.

It’s somewhat amazing to me that I have actually been able to keep up my pace even for this short of time. I don’t exactly spend a ton of time writing each post, but it is a daily commitment of about an hour when you combine both writing and posting time. Some people have asked how I manage to do this and my grad school work, which is a fair question; the implicit suggestion is that maybe I’m not taking my schoolwork seriously enough. That’s probably true, but at least so far, the average running length for each movie is about two hours. If a person can’t find two hours in a day to do something fun, then I’d suggest maybe they’re the one doing something wrong.

And the word “fun” really is the key component. This has been a very enjoyable experience. Even with the films I’ve hated (and there haven’t been many of those), I find that they are the most fun to write about. It’s easy to pump out 500 words on The Great Ziegfeld when there’s so much to complain about. Then there are movies like Gone with the Wind. It was difficult to come up with anything original to say about it, but it gave me a reason to watch it, and I’m so glad that I did. Not only did it live up to all the hype, but now I never have to say “I’ve never seen Gone with the Wind” again!

Chariots of Fire won instead of Raiders...

This may not always be the case, of course. The 1950s and the 1980s in particular aren’t full of movies I’m all that excited about, but as I’ve learned so far, my expectations don’t always match up with reality. Maybe I’ll love Terms of Endearment. Maybe I’ll be enraptured by Around the World in 80 Days. But I will know for sure one way or the other.

That’s always been a weakness of mine as a movie watcher. I should know better than to assume that what a movie is about matters all that much when assessing its quality. Plot matters, no doubt, but it’s not of primary importance. This is jumping ahead a little bit, but based on plot alone, I likely never would have watched Rebecca (which I will write about in depth tomorrow). And that would have been a shame, because it’s magnificent.

My point is that I don’t know what the future of this project will hold, but I plan on continuing as diligently as I have since I began in earnest three weeks ago. I’m the first to admit that readership is low, but first and foremost, this journey is for myself. I already feel such a sense of accomplishment. I think that will only increase as I continue to finish off more and more decades.

Counting this post, I have now written 8,577 words for The Oscar Project. When I finish in a couple of months, I will have written the equivalent of 130 pages, and that’s quite a conservative estimate, as it assumes only 500 words per post, which I’ve exceeded every time. If I keep up my current average of 659.7 words per post, then I’ll have written about 170 pages. That will make this by far the longest work (or series of works) in my entire life, so that’s exciting.

As always, thanks for visiting, Dear Reader.