by Chris Marshall:
It is so, so strange not having any more Oscar winners to
watch. I mean, I guess I could go back and watch all the nominees, but there’s a limit to my masochism. Besides, there are
no existing prints of one of the early nominees, so I would always feel like
there’s something missing. On the other hand, I am very much looking forward to
watching movies that are more fun, more offbeat, and more interesting than the
standard Oscar fare.
Most Best Picture winners are obviously high-caliber films,
but the Academy virtually never picks anything that comes out of left field. I
complained in my last post about people who called The Artist a safe pick. I stand by what I said, simply because by
Best Picture standards, it was actually quite a bold choice. But compared to
what exists out there in the wide world of cinema, it’s pretty tame.
I haven’t decided yet in what order I’ll do my upcoming
series. I’m seriously considering just doing it on a week by week basis, rather
than scheduling everything in advance. That way I can remain flexible and watch
things I’m in the mood for. It’ll keep me from having to watch 17 musicals in a
row like I did during the 1950s and 1960s in The Oscar Project.
I’m also not sure how often I’ll post or what format those
posts will take. I might write short posts about each film, or I might write
about the entire week as a whole. I’m going to have to reflect on that for a
while. For my seven or eight regular readers, I promise it'll be worth your
while, no matter which direction I go.
***
Today’s post has two main orders of business. First, there
will be the traditional ranking of my favorite movies from the past decade (+2
years, in this case), but there is a little something extra as well. Last
night, at the expense of sleeping, I went ahead and ranked all 84 winners from
least favorite to favorite. I spent a lot of time mulling over my choices, so I
think it’ll be as close to accurate as possible. Anyway, I’ll reveal those
rankings over the next three days, but after I had the list completed, I came
up with a formula to rank the decades from best to worst, which I’ll get to
after my top 12 for this decade.
The 2000s were somewhat difficult to rank—will I see that
written in every interlude post if I go back and look?—mainly because most of
the films were quite good. I much prefer that to the alternative, of course,
but as with the 1970s, I feel bad for having to rank some pretty good movies so
low. That being said, let’s get into it. My top 12 for 2000-2011:
- No Country for Old Men (2007)
- Million Dollar Baby (2004)
- The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003)
- The Departed (2006)
- The Artist (2011)
- A Beautiful Mind (2001)
- The Hurt Locker (2009)
- The King’s Speech (2010)
- Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
- Gladiator (2000)
- Chicago (2002)
- Crash (2005)
Ok, so the bottom two were pretty easy choices for me. But
after that, things got really dicey. Numbers 10 through 6 could have really
gone in any order. There were three distinct levels of films. The first five
were all very good. The second five were pretty good. And the bottom two were,
well, you know how I feel about them.
Within the top five was No
Country for Old Men, however, and it was a clear pick for my top spot.
Again, it’s not even my favorite Coen Brothers film—probably not even in my top
three—which is a testament to the quality of work they’ve produced over the
last three decades.
***
So I mentioned that there is another order of business this
week. I wanted to come up with a quantitative (I use the word loosely here)
method of ranking the Oscar decades from best to worst. What can I say? I like
rankings. After making my Top 84 list, I came up with a method inspired by the
top 25 polls in college sports.
I divided the list into seven sections of
twelve films each, and then I awarded each decade seven points for every movie
in the top 12, six for every movie in the second 12, and so on, all the way
down to the bottom tier, where movies were only worth one point each. I know
this is an imperfect system and that I could have been much more precise, but
there’s only so much time I’m willing to spend on this[1].
In any case, I divided the total number of points for each decade by the number
of movies from that decade to account for the 20s/30s and 00s/10s having 12
films each.
The results were somewhat surprising. I fully expected the
1970s to be the top decade, but it was actually second behind the 1990s,
despite the 70s having more top tier films. Bringing up the rear was the 1940s,
not because there were a lot of bad movies that decade, but because there were
relatively few great ones. The full list is below.
- The 1990s (5.6 points): 2 top tier films, 0 bottom
tier films
- The 1970s (5.1 points): 3 top tier films, 0 bottom
tier films
- The 2000s (4.4 points): 1 top tier film, 1 bottom tier
film
- The 1950s (4.1 points): 2 top tier films, 2 bottom
tier films
- The 1960s (3.7 points): 0 top tier films, 3 bottom
tier films
- The 1930s (3.67 points): 2 top tier films, 4 bottom
tier films
- The 1980s (3.3 points): 0 top tier films, 1 bottom
tier film
- The 1940s (3.1 points): 2 top tier films, 1 bottom
tier film
I know the amount of top tier and bottom tier films don’t
always seem to justify their rankings, but they would make more sense if I had
room to include the rankings for all seven tiers. While it’s not perfect, I
feel like this list is a pretty accurate assessment of how much I enjoyed each
decade. At first, I remembered liking the 1940s a lot more than that, but I
realized that opinion was somewhat skewed by the presence of two absolute
classics in the decade. Everything else was just sort of fair to middling.
If you’re really into lists, be sure to check back in the
next three days. I’ll reveal my worst-to-best list of all the winners over that
period, at a rate of 28 films per day, along with a short justification of each
ranking. I spent a lot of time and had a lot of fun working on that list. I’m
sure I’ll look back on it in a few months and wonder what I was thinking for
some of it, but for right now, it’s as accurate as humanly possible.
[1] That
must be pretty hard to believe at this point.
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