Every Best Picture winner. In order. Mostly.
I'm not gonna set a bunch of parameters on this like a deadline or
anything like that, cause there's a damn good chance I'd never hit it. There's a damn good chance I'll never finish this. But I was looking over the list of winners of the past, I realized how few of them I've seen. Of the 81 movies that have received the award, I've seen 23 of them - 28%, which is a relatively acceptable percentage, but I know I can do better. Also, considering only 8 of the ones I've seen were released prior to me being born, I have much more significant coverage in the last 25 years than I do in the first 56 years of the award's existence.
anything like that, cause there's a damn good chance I'd never hit it. There's a damn good chance I'll never finish this. But I was looking over the list of winners of the past, I realized how few of them I've seen. Of the 81 movies that have received the award, I've seen 23 of them - 28%, which is a relatively acceptable percentage, but I know I can do better. Also, considering only 8 of the ones I've seen were released prior to me being born, I have much more significant coverage in the last 25 years than I do in the first 56 years of the award's existence.
This presents some challenges for me. One thing I am committing to doing is watching the ones I've seen again. That'll be great in some cases (On the Waterfront, Schindler's List, Shakespeare in Love), and painfully difficult in others (Crash, Amadeus), but I'm gonna do it as a way to give those movies that I saw a long time ago or that I saw only once another chance with a fresh set of eyes and a different perspective. There's also some movies that I've actively avoided over the years based on poor recommendations (Ben-Hur, The English Patient) that I will buckle down and watch for myself, so we'll see how that turns out.
I can't promise a full review of every movie - I've found the time I spent actively reviewing movies actually made me less enthusiastic about watching movies, because I felt I was always looking at them with a more critical eye, and thus not enjoying them as much. But I will pop on and give a quick update and a general impression after each one. There's also three winners - Wings, Cavalcade and Tom Jones - that Netflix does not have either streaming or on DVD, so I'll try to track those down if I can, but they may appear out of order... especially since Wings was the first-ever recipient.
I know there are likely better lists of better movies I could use, but I still enjoy the Oscars to a point where I see this as an exercise worth my time, no matter how stretched out the experiment might become. I'll definitely be putting things in between the winners from time to time, and there may be stretches without an update - my workload at the office will pick up as we head toward the summer, and I'm also planning my wedding for September - but eventually I'll be able to knock 58 more titles off the "you should see this" list.
Let's see how it goes...
