Andrew Klavan Ranks Best Picture Oscar Winners: Part 2
Andrew Klavan ranks Best Picture winners from 1981 to 2010, awarding S grades to Unforgiven, Return of the King, and No Country for Old Men while criticizing films like American Beauty and Titanic for dishonest narratives. He praises Schindler's List despite calling it a "great lie" regarding Holocaust heroism and condemns Dances with Wolves for glorifying Native Americans. Ultimately, Klavan argues that modern Hollywood's left-wing takeover produces morally empty movies that lie too much to be trusted. [Automatically generated summary]
All right, the Oscars are coming and I don't care either, but that doesn't mean we can't do a video in which I judge historic Oscar winners.
I did one before when we did them up until I think they were around the 70s.
Now we are moving into the modern world, 1981 to 2010.
I will judge these Oscars films.
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All right, 1981, Ordinary People, which was directed by Robert Redford and starred Mallory Tyler Moore and who else, Donald Sutherland, was in it.
A really good film.
Redford made smart, workmanlike films that I really liked.
Loved him.
What in the hell has happened?
It says a film about a depressed kid who is fighting to not submit to suicide, to fall into suicidal ideation.
I would say that was a good, solid film.
Was it the best film of its year?
I can't remember anymore, but it's worth watching today.
We'll give it a B. B is going to stand for good, solid movie.
1982, Chariots of Fire, also a B, except for the score, one of the greatest scores ever.
Absolutely terrific.
1983, Gandhi, directed by Richard Attenborough, great performance by Ben Kingsley in that as Gandhi.
It's a good movie.
Yeah, I'll give that a B as well.
It's a very worthy, very worthy film.
1984, James Gimmett, a film I've actually never seen.
What a relief.
1985, Amadeus.
That's Ben's favorite film, I think.
That's the one about the jealous composer plotting against Mozart and has a lot to say about talent and how talent is blind and it falls on all kinds of different people.
Some good, some bad, some classy, some not.
That's a really good film.
Yeah, I'm going to give that an A. That's a really terrific movie.
1986, Out of Africa C Movie.
It's by Sidney Pollack.
It's not that good a film.
Meryl Streep is in it.
She gives a good performance with one of her funny accents.
Robert Redford is good in it, but it's just kind of long and doesn't really work.
1987, Platoon, directed by Oliver Stone, maybe a B minus or a C plus.
You know, Oliver Stone has made some good movies.
He definitely has, but he tends to preach.
People tend to make speeches they wouldn't make in real life.
I thought Platoon was good.
I'm going to give it a B. I'm going to upgrade it to a B.
It comes back to me.
It was powerful and it had some good characters, good acting in it.
1988, The Last Emperor, B minus.
That's by Bernardo Bertolucci.
Very Freudian filmmaker.
His kind of classic film is The Last Tango in Paris.
It's so sexual, it's almost pornography, but it is an intelligent work.
But he just was one of these guys who got caught up in Freudianism.
Everything he writes is, every film he makes is about Freudianism.
And this is the Last Emperor of China seen from a Freudian perspective.
I thought it was kind of slow and dreary.
1989, Rainman by Ray Lavinson, Barry Levinson, that's Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman.
Is that a great film?
No, it's not a great film.
Uh-oh.
But it was entertaining and strong.
I'll give that a B plus.
But that was a good, solid film as well.
So I'll give it a B plus.
Really good performances.
Driving Miss Daisy, Bruce Bearsford, Morgan Freeman, right, is the big one.
And Jessica Tanney is a wonderful classic actress.
Really good performances of that.
But two, it was a worthy film.
You know, I think it was also a play.
I'm not sure.
But it was another worthy film.
I give it a B minus.
I found it okay.
1991, Dances with Wolves.
Dances with Wolves is one of these things, a very talented, well-made movie that I hate.
And I hate it because in the theater, I remember people cheering and clapping for the death of the United States cavalry at the hands of the Indians.
And it was basically the same plot as Pocahontas, the Disney movie.
Shares, the same plot as Avatar, which is that the civilized man goes into the savage world and finds out that the savages are more civilized than the civilized people.
And it's just not true.
You know, it's just not true.
I have to give it, I have to give it at least a B for talent.
Well, good direction, good script, good acting.
It's just a well-made film.
I'll give it a B plus, but I can't stand it.
1992, The Silence of the Lambs.
Silence of the Lambs, I have got to give an A plus to.
It's almost a top film, mostly because of the two performances, the performances by Anthony Hopkins.
You know, the performance by Anthony Hopkins is a classic movie villain.
There's just nothing like it.
And Jodi Foster is always very good, and she's good in this.
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1993, Unforgiven by Clint Eastwood, that's an S.
That is a great film.
And it's a great film because it's by a guy whose career was made by Westerns making a movie about the Western.
It is a Western about Westerns and what the meaning of the West is.
And it is a realistic, gritty film, but it somehow manages to keep the romance of the West, even as it debunks the romance of the West.
And that's what the great John Ford Westerns did.
And so it's really a wonderful work of art.
Clint Eastwood, I have to say, you know, not all the films he's directed have been at that level, but he has made a couple of great films.
Mystic River is one, and that's one as well.
1994, Schindler's List.
I don't know how to judge Schindler's List.
I'm going to give it an A-plus.
And I'll tell you why.
It's obviously Spielberg is a great director, and he's a great action director.
He's a child, and he's never grown up.
And all his greatest movies are child movies.
E.T., Close Encounters, the Harrison Ford, Indiana Jones movies.
Those are his great films because he's a child.
And the film is really well made, brilliantly acted.
He got to give it an A-plus for its just for talent.
But it was brought out.
It was made to be the Holocaust film.
And it's a film in which an act of heroism and mercy is at the center of the Holocaust.
That is a great lie, and it's a softening lie.
And it's the same lie Spielberg tells when he produces the band of brothers and has an episode called Why We Fight, and it's about the Holocaust.
We didn't fight because of the Holocaust.
We fought for our own, America's own interests.
And the Holocaust was not about heroism.
It was not about the brave guy.
You're not, you wouldn't have been the brave guy.
You wouldn't have been Schindler if you were there.
You would have been one of the people who cowered and just went along.
We all would have been because the entire country, including its law enforcement, had been taken over by evil.
And that's a terrible, you know, you have to be a major hero to stand up against this.
And Sindh's list has a lie at the heart of it by the way it was made and the way it was presented to us.
So it's kind of being a little bit unfair because it's so brilliantly made.
I'll give it an A plus for being brilliantly made, but it is centered on a lie.
1995, Forrest Gump.
I love Forrest Gump.
Robert Zemeckis, obviously, Tom Hanks, you know, great performance.
I love it.
I think it's a great film.
I think it's an S film.
People hate, there are people who hate it because it's so pro-American, but it is a wonderful picture of America as stupid, but lucky and somehow good.
That's what Forrest Gump is.
Forrest Gump is America.
He's a symbol for America.
Stupid, but lucky and somehow good.
1996, Braveheart, also an S film.
Terrific film.
One of Gibson's great.
He also has made a couple of great films.
Really, that's one of the greats.
1997, The English Patient, a film I detest.
And I don't even think it's that well made.
And it's absolutely without feeling.
A lot of crying and moaning and big romantic moments.
And I found it just dead.
It is the opposite of Casablanca.
The theory of the English patient is that the problems of the world don't amount to a hill of beans compared to the fact that I want to sleep with you.
That's basically the English patient's thesis.
It's the opposite of Casablanca.
It's empty morally.
It's empty romantically.
It didn't move me at all.
I think it's a crummy film.
I give it a C. 1998, Titanic.
I got to give Titanic a B. James Cameron, I think it is one of the best pieces of fluff ever made.
I think it is complete nonsense, but it's very watchable, and women love it.
And the girls love it.
And so I can't knock it, but I'll give it a B as a quality film.
1999, Shakespeare in Love, great film.
It is a great, great film by John Madden, not the football guy, with Gwyneth Paltrow at her most stunningly beautiful and a script that I believe was mostly written by Tom Stoppard, the greatest writer of his generation, recently passed away.
Just a great, great film.
I know Ben hates that film for some reason, but I think it's fantastic.
2000, American Beauty, another dishonest film.
Amazing how many of these films are dishonest.
Sam Mendy's, it's about a gay man, but they won't play it as a gay man.
They play it as a guy who's in love with a younger girl.
It's a disgusting, every frame of it is a lie.
I give it a C. 2001, Gladiator.
People like Gladiator more than I do.
I give it a B.
I think it's really, really entertaining by Ridley Scott.
I don't think it's a great movie, but people do love it.
2004, The Lord of the Rings, Return of the King.
Those are great movies.
That's an S movie.
That's Peter Jackson, S movie.
2007, The Departed by Scorsese.
I really like The Departed.
It's a really good crime film.
I'll give it an A.
It's not, I don't think it's a great movie, but it's a really, really entertaining, well-made crime film.
And all the actors in it, I think Scorsese must have done this on purpose.
They all look alike.
They all look exactly alike, and they betray each other and they're interlinked with each other.
And you could almost not tell one from another.
They look almost exactly alike.
And everybody in it looks alike.
2008, No Country for All Men.
That's an S film.
Kind of surprised to hear you say that.
Cone Brothers, one of their best.
All of the Cone Brothers crime films are just excellent.
2010, The Hurt Locker.
Eh, it's a B. Maybe it's a B.
They gave it to the Hurtlocker because, Catherine Bigelow, because it was the first major war on terror film that didn't depict America as the absolute villain, although it did sort of say we're creating terrorists.
I thought it was an okay film.
It's not that good.
I'll say it's a B.
It's a solidly made film.
Interesting, really interesting, how many of those films are bad because they're lies.
It's not that bad.
Obviously, so much talent in Hollywood.
Nobody is more talented in Hollywood than Steven Spielberg, but those films are lies, so many of them.
That wasn't true about the movies we talked about last time in the old days.
That is the takeover, that is the footprint and the fingerprint, I should say, of the takeover of Hollywood by the left.
They lie too much to make things great.
With all the talent they have, they have all the talent in the world, they still can't make a great film because they lie.
And I love that guy.
He's terrific.
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