Bloodless Coup

I was wondering, how many of those films you had seen. My count is just under 1/3. Lame.

Best Picture winners? I've seen I think just more than half of them if you mean the whole film - though I've probably also watched at least parts of maybe 15 more of them. Of course the ones I know best are from the 1970's forward.

i maybe haven't even seen a third. my favorite posters, skimming through, are All Quiet on the Western Front (which strikes me as way ahead of its time, one-sheet-wise), Casablanca, All About Eve, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Cuckoo's Nest, Rocky, Ordinary People, Silence of the Lambs, Unforgiven, and American Beauty, with probably Midnight Cowboy or American Beauty as my favorite.

I liked The Godfather and American Beauty too. In fact I almost listed American Beauty above - the only reason I didn't being that something about the turn of the belly button was, for me, a little off-putting.

it strikes me as well that there really are two questions here -- one is stand-alone merit, and another is capturing something essential about the movie itself. silence of the lambs, for example, hits on both. but the godfather, contrarily, just works as a piece of graphic art; it says very little about the film. naturally, those sheets that tend to have provocative or expository language or reviews all but cannot succeed as stand alone pieces, hence unforgiven is evaluated, for better or worse, as a stand-alone piece, while american beauty is not. to me, though, american beauty hits a real sweet spot between the two, where its content absolutely informs and is informed by the movie, but its text is so diminishing and gnomic that it also almost succeeds as a stand alone piece. and i think it's that balance, from a design point of view, that so pleases me.

Stylistically I really like Gigi, and Lawrence of Arabia. I am also struck at the run of complete and total crap movies that took best picture starting in the late 80s.

Ah, I get what you are saying Moon, and I agree with you that American Beauty hits that spot - though I'd say posters for The Sting and Gone With the Wind do too.

I liking for All About Eve's poster is all about its style. Though of course I like the movie too, which might play into my positive thoughts for it.

And Binky - what years qualify as the "crap" era for you? Just wondering as there were 3 winners in the late 80s and early 90s that I definitely liked - though yeah, the period featured some most unfortunate winners.

Kind of Crap (meaning, I can see some good things here, but that they don't bowl me over with awesomeness) aka the warm up to the deluge that comes in about five years:

Rain Man, Driving Miss Daisy

Full on Crap:

Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, English Patient, Titanic

Maybe I am being too hard on the late 80s. It might just be my loathing of Tom Cruise's "one grimace" technique of acting and my boredom with the slow pace of Miss Daisy. The rest are, in fact, crap.

Ah, well you didn't hit the ones I had in mind (The Last Emperor, Silence of the Lambs and Schindler's List). And as to the ones you mention - yeah, there was some lame-ass stuff that one in that era.

Though I actually liked The English Patient.

You mean those three were on your crap list? I think there were things about them that would put them on my kind of crap list, like, the Last Empero was beautiful but parts were boring as hell (but I forgive Bertolucci for, in his Oscar acceptance speech, saying "if NY is the big apple, LA is the big nipple"). I never saw Schindler, so I can't say. And yeah, I didn't think Silence was fully Oscar, but Hopkins was great and I just adore Jodie Foster.

Oh no, I meant out of that era, late 80s/early 90s those were the 3 I liked (non-crap). I think Silence and Schindler were both very good, and Last Emperor had lots of pluses, though yeah, it was too long.

hey! i think rain man deserves more credit. a lot of fantastic movies, including plenty that have won best pic, are not so much elevated as they are not destroyed by various key performances. hence, while i grant for argument's sake that cruise's performance could have been better in that film, the film in some was quite lovely, and very well executed, and of course carried by hoffman's positively incandescent performance . . . all in all, deserving of its oscar in my view.

Crap. All the more so given the "play MR/DD" thing.

When you look at the history of Oscar-winning performances, Hollywood's new enthusiasm for embracing minorities seems less than profound. Notoriously, the easiest way to win an Oscar is to play somebody bravely fighting against a physical condition or a mental handicap. The easiest route of all, in fact, is to play a gifted artist suddenly struck down by disability - the early years of the Academy awards are littered with long-forgotten tales of deaf sopranos and ballerinas with gout. As the "Kate Winslet" character in Ricky Gervais's series Extras scabrously observed, "Daniel Day-Lewis in My Left Foot? Oscar. Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man? Oscar. Seriously, you are guaranteed an Oscar if you play a mental."