The Oscar Project #79: The Departed (2006)

by Chris Marshall:

At this point in The Oscar Project, it’s hard to summon up much excitement about the last few films. It has nothing to do with their quality—all the remaining movies range from good to great—but rather the realization that there’s nothing new left to watch. The true point of this endeavor was to give me motivation to watch all the Best Picture winners I’ve never seen, and now that there are none of those left, it feels like I’m just going through the motions.

That’s not to say I won’t finish; I would have to be a crazy person to quit at this point, something I have no intention of doing. But it is true that I’m more looking forward to the Director/Franchise/Genre of the Week posts than I am the last few Oscar winners, simply because those are all movies I haven’t seen before.

That’s enough navel-gazing for one post, though. Let’s move on to the film. The Departed is a very good movie, both in terms of its technical merit and how enjoyable it is to watch. I don’t, however, believe it achieves the same level of greatness as some of his previous films that were unfairly passed over for Best Picture, such as Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, and Goodfellas.

The Oscar Project #56: Terms of Endearment (1983)

by Chris Marshall:

I’m now halfway through watching the Oscar winners of the 1980s, and as I feared, I haven’t been very impressed by the quality of the movies. I was, however, quite pleased with Terms of Endearment. It’s a typical Oscar bait tearjerker, but at least it was well made.

Like Ordinary People, it could have easily fallen into that dreaded Lifetime movie category if not for the quality of its cast. Debra Winger was still a relative newcomer at the time, but this was Shirley MacLaine’s third appearance in a Best Picture winner[1]. Among the supporting cast, Jack Nicholson, who won Best Supporting Actor for this role, and Danny DeVito (!) were making their second Best Picture appearances.

The story is really quite expansive, though it never feels like it. I don’t know if it’s ever specifically said how much time passes, but it begins right before Debra Winger’s wedding and ends when her oldest kid appears to be in his tweens/early teens. Nevertheless, the plot moves fluidly, and it never feels like the movie is trying to do too much.

The Oscar Project #48: One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest (1975)

by Chris Marshall:

I’ve seen One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest on multiple occasions, perhaps more than any other Best Picture winner except Forrest Gump, but I had somehow forgotten how good—and how powerful—a film it is. Few other movies can elicit this kind of emotional response.

Personally, the primary emotion I feel while watching it is anger. Nurse Ratched (Louise Fletcher) manages, in a decade full of films filled with pretty awful people, to be the most despicable of all. She represents the worst kind of authority figure; it’s as if her entire purpose is to make the patients’ lives as awful as possible.

Or at least that’s the way it seems to Randle P. McMurphy (Jack Nicholson). I’m not entirely convinced that the rest of the patients feel so negatively toward her, despite the cold, unfeeling exterior she displays when talking to them. Of course, the key difference between McMurphy and the others is that the others are actually insane, or at least have real mental issues to deal with. He has taken malingering to the next level, though, feigning mental illness to get off his work farm, assuming that being institutionalized will be a much cushier gig than forced labor.