Mark Klavan critiques Best Picture Oscar winners, praising Gone with the Wind (1939) and Casablanca (1943) for enduring appeal while dismissing later classics like The Deer Hunter (1978) as overrated. He blames modern winners—such as Moonlight—for catering to niche audiences, mocks All the President’s Men (1976) as "nonsense" due to Nixon’s alleged setup, and slams Polanski’s personal conduct. The Oscars, he argues, now reward political correctness over timeless entertainment, rendering them irrelevant despite TV’s occasional quality. [Automatically generated summary]
The Oscar nominations are going to come out very soon, and it's the award seasons.
And so we're going to take a look at Oscar winners of the past and talk about why these films are or are not worthy of the award.
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So one of the things about the Oscars is when the movie business was at its absolute peak, the best-selling movies and the best movies and the Oscar winners were all the same films.
Very, very important to understand.
That's how art works.
In the peak of an art form, Shakespeare is not just the best playwright around, he's also the most popular playwright around.
And then later on, the greatest writers are oftentimes very obscure and very small and appeal to intellectuals while the stuff that is being given to the masses is tripe.
And in 1939, which was the peak of the movie business in this country, I know it's a long time ago, but it was, the Oscar nominees were not just the biggest box office films, but they were also classics, films that you could watch today with entertainment.
Gone with the Wind, Dark Victory, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington to Notchka, Mice and Men's Stagecoach, The Wizard of Oz, Wuthering Heights.
These are films that if you watch them today, you would think they were just great, great movies.
So the difference now is they give films to, what was it called, Moonlight?
Was that the name of that film?
That is just like, it's fine.
It's well acted.
It's well written.
It's kind of interesting, but it's like a film for like a sliver of tiny group of people who would care about it.
And that is the thing that is killing the movie industry, that they cannot make great entertaining films anymore.
So let's take a look in the past.
1940, right after the peak is Rebecca by Alfred Hitchcock, which beat out John Ford's Grapes of Wrath and the Philadelphia Story, one of my favorite films of all time.
Grapes of Wrath, a great film with a performance by Henriette F. Ponda.
I would have given it to the Philadelphia story over Rebecca, but Rebecca is Alfred Hitchcock's first really hitchcocky film.
That's a little unfair, but it's based on the novel by Daphne De Maurier and just full of intrigue, great performances by Lawrence Olivier for one, and just a wonderful movie that you, again, you can still watch it today.
And again, it beat out Grapes of Wrath, which is terrific, and Philadelphia Story, one of the greatest movies ever made.
1943, Casablanca, as you know or should know, that is the greatest film ever made.
There is nothing like it.
Anybody who tells you it is Citizen Kane is lying to you and probably stole your watch.
It's Casablanca, Humphrey Bogart, and Ingrid Bergman in just a great, great film, which now, by the way, when you look at it, is kind of cheap looking because they didn't have really great sets, but it'll still make you weep and actually make you feel your life is too small.
1945, The Lost Weekend by the great director Billy Wilder with Ray Milan.
Kind of a socially important film, but still very good.
Very famous depiction of alcoholism.
A great scene, I remember, where he goes out to pawn something so he can buy booze, but all the pawn shops are closed because it's a Jewish holiday.
And that was a very famous scene.
And so, yeah, it's good.
It's a little bit stodgy now because we deal with those things, but at the time it was shocking and innovative.
Best Year of Our Lives by another fantastic director, William Wyler.
Another film that just still holds up.
And it really is a good film about the trauma of World War II on people.
And I think that what's so interesting about that is we who grew up with the people who fought World War II, like my father was in World War II, we didn't really realize that our entire generation was being raised by traumatized fathers.
And The Best Years of Our Lives is a great movie about that.
So these are films that not only deserved to win, but are still watchable today and were admired at the time.
1948, Lawrence Olivier's Hamlet, still, I have to say, the best Olivier Shakespeare and the best Hamlet.
I don't think, oh no, well, I think Mel Gibson's very, very short 90-minute version of it is quite good as well.
But I think those are the two best Hamlet performances on film that I can think of offhand.
Very deserving.
Again, watch it today and you get Hamlet.
It's a direct Hamlet.
1950, All About Eve by Joseph Mankin.
It's with Betty Davis.
A young Marilyn Monroe shows up in it.
Probably the best script, I think, screenplay ever written, all about Eve, about a young woman who wants to connive her way to the top of the theater industry, which is then dominated by Betty Davis.
At one point, I got a call from my agent when I was living in England saying, Jane Fonda wants to remake All About Eve and you're up to write it.
And I said, I'm not going to do it because the script is perfect and I can't change it and they're never going to make it.
And my agent yelled to me, they are going to make it.
They've never made it because you can't beat All About Eve.
1954, On the Waterfront, director Ilya Kazan, another guy, a guy who's now hated because he turned in his fellow communists before the House on American Activities Committee.
And on the waterfront is his film about that.
It's a film about when it's right to become a rat.
You're right about us, Terry.
It's a film about when it is right to stand up against the mob, even if it's going to cost you.
And Ilya Kazan did that against the communists.
And on the waterfront has one of the great performances by Marlon Brando as a dock worker fighting the mob.
A famous, famous scene between him and Rod Steiger, two of the new Method actors, which was new at the time.
Just terrific, terrific acting.
Really good movie.
And again, watch it today.
1957, The Bridge on the River Kwai by another great director, David Lean.
The Bridge on the River Kwai, you know, it has some parts of it that tells two stories, and one story is not as interesting as the other.
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But the performance by Alec Guinness, who many of you only know as Obi-Wan Kenobi, is one of the great screen performances of all time.
It is a great story based on a novel by Pierre Boulet, I think his name was.
A wonderful, wonderful story about doing your duty when maybe the right thing is to not do your duty.
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Ben-Hur: A Classic Film00:06:18
1959, Ben-Hur, another William Wyler film.
Tralton Heston, at the top of his game.
Tralton Heston was an old-fashioned actor.
And as the new acting was coming in, he was an actor who played classic roles in a classic fashion.
And a lot of times people look at him and he looks a little wooden because he's not Marlon Brando.
You don't understand.
I could have had class.
I could have been a contender.
But when it came to playing these epic characters like Ben-Hur, like Moses, there was just nobody like him.
And Ben-Hur is one of those films.
I can count about five of them.
The biggest one is The Godfather, where you're channel surfing and you hit that film and you come to your senses two hours later and you watch the entire movie because you can't turn it off.
It is one of the most watchable films ever made.
Don't watch the remake, which is trash, but the 1959's Ben Hur with Tralton Heston, great.
Look, these are genuinely great films and they hold up.
This is the thing.
You can still watch them.
1960, The Apartment, another Billy Wilder film, which I rewatched pretty recently.
Good film.
It's a good, strong film and kind of shocking at the time for sexual realism.
Yeah, it's a good, solid film.
So as you'll see, as we're getting past the golden age of film, some of these films fall off.
Not so 1962's Lawrence of Arabia, David Lean, and of course Peter O'Toole at the very beginning and top of his game, all these British actors.
British actors are some of the most incredibly good-looking people you'll ever see.
And they all are drunks, every single one of them.
And so like 10 minutes later, they're old and desiccated.
But Lawrence of Arabia, Peter O'Toole is one of the best-looking human beings you've ever seen.
A great film and a revolutionary film in that it's an epic, but it's told not from the classical point of view where you see it as epic.
It's told from the romantic point of view where you see it all from the internal world of Lawrence of Arabia.
That film, if you haven't seen it, go and see it.
1966, A Man for All Seasons, Fred Zinneman, which beat out Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolfe, which is a great film with Richard Burton and Liz Taylor, who actually were playing themselves in the film.
I don't know if you've ever seen Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolf.
It was just a married couple tearing each other apart, which apparently is what they did.
A Man for All Seasons, Paul Schofield, and his greatest performance.
And Robert Shaw's in it, who you know from Jaws.
A very good film based on a good play and a film about doing the right thing, even if it costs you everything.
1969, Midnight Cowboy, John Schlesinger, a great performance by both John Voigt and Dustin Hoffman, two terrific performances.
I would say that's a film that probably dates.
A lot of at-libbing, a lot of posing and everything like that.
But still, this is when the turn happened in the 60s, when the new generation came in and they made some great films, but they also weren't making films for the general audience.
And this was not a film for the general audience.
I think it was rated X at the time.
1970, Patton.
It's a film I like very much.
And then it was written by Francis Ford Coppola.
You know, it's a really good film about what a tough guy Patton was.
And I think Patton was supposed to be a questionable figure in the film.
But like all conservative characters, the audience loved him and he wasn't.
1971, The French Connection, a film I like really a lot, William Friedkin with Gene Hackman in his star-making role and Rorce Scheider.
You know, it's a film that they edit.
They can't play it today because of the racial language in it.
But if you can find the original version of it, it really is a good cop drama and has one of the famous chases in it.
1972, The Godfather, the second best film ever made after Casablanca, and obviously Francis Ford Campolla and that great cast.
Godfather was the pinnacle of new Hollywood.
It was the moment when everything just went right.
I never watch movies more than once, unless they're just that great, but I must have seen The Godfather 100 times because every time I stumble on it, I can't turn it off.
The Sting, 1973, I just rewatched that by George Roy Hill.
That's Paul Newman and Robert Redford.
And it's a good film, and it's very entertaining, and you'll like it.
Almost every film David Mammet makes is an imitation of The Sting.
I always thought he just got caught up in what that was.
Not sure the family can watch that, but if you have grown kids, they can watch it.
1974, The Godfather, Part 2.
Everyone says this is as great a film as The Godfather, Part 1.
I guarantee you it's not, but it is a good film, and it's worth watching.
It beat Chinatown.
Chinatown is an interesting movie because it's kind of cold.
It took me a while to warm up to it, but the second time I saw it, I went back and looked at it again because I thought, that's a film I should have loved.
And I did love it the second time.
And that's Roman Polanski, who, of course, disgraced himself.
1975, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Millis Farm.
Now, I like the book of One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest by Ken Kesey so much better than the film that I never really appreciated it.
But it did have a great performance by Jack Nicholson.
And, you know, it's a good film and it stands up.
76, Rocky.
Now, there's a film, Beat Network, Taxi Driver.
I think Taxi Drivers way overrated.
All the President's Men, which we now know is all nonsense because Nixon was set up.
But Rocky, a great film.
I think it's a great film.
And I think Sylvester Stallone deserves all the credit that he's being given by the Trump administration for just making that film.
It's an iconic movie.
Thank you, Ms. Brady.
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Should I go over here?
Yeah, sounds good.
77, Annie Hall by Woody Allen.
People love that film.
I like it.
I think it's good.
You know, I'm not a big Woody Allen fan, but I thought it was good.
1978, again, The Deer Hunter, Michael Shimino, it's fine.
You know, these are films that are like fine.
You know, they can still watch it.
It's good.
It's not a great film.
1979, Kramer v. Kramer, Robert Benton.
Again, a good film about an interesting issue.
Meryl Streetman Dustin Hoffman get divorced and Hoffman gets the kid.
And so that's what it's about, about a man raising himself.
So all I can say is those films, even as we get into the 70s, when the film industry started to become kind of shut down, where it started to divide between films that the critics liked and films that the people liked, even then, they were giving the award to really great films.
They don't have any great films to give it to this year, and they haven't had in a long time.
I can't remember the last great film that won.
And people don't watch the show because they're tired of having these clowns who can't keep their marriages together tell us who we should vote for.
Oscars have destroyed themselves.
The movie business has destroyed itself.
But there's still good stuff on TV.
So we're not abandoned entirely and the culture goes on.