Why Winning Best Picture Often Feels Like Losing

There are some Oscar Best Picture winners that are beyond question. Their win is expected, noted and ultimately accepted because no other film can beat them in the season. Somehow, though, just by being a frontrunner a film is often the object of scorn from those who follow and write about the race. The rest of the population don’t really care. There is something in human nature, however, that just stops believing in something once it wins — the Presidency, Best Picture, or the Pulitzer. Very rarely will people bow their heads and say yes, that was the right choice.  More often than not, the response is always “it’s good but it not THAT good.”

This is why even films that withstand the “frontrunner’s dilemma” will often be thought poorly of as we look back on them from present day.

Just think of how nicely Birdman might have sat in our collective consciousness had it not won. It would not have the stink of the consensus on it. It would not have beaten Boyhood, the deserving winner to many.  It would be the quirky underdog as originally intended and not the bloated frontrunner that suddenly was co-opted by “the man.”  Boyhood, instead, gets that honor. It gets to sit with the best films that never won, many of which do not have anything to live down, no win to defend.

By now it seems that no one really wants to criticize John Ford’s How Green was My Valley but it took a while for that stigma to die out. Citizen Kane has now become a tad resented by the critics for usurping the “Greatest Film Ever Made” title every ten years by Sight & Sound, a position that was recently claimed by Hitchcock’s Vertigo.

Going by their ten year check-in, here is how the Sight & Sound film critics see things:

1. Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock) – nominated for just two Oscars, Sound and Art Direction
2. Citizen Kane (dir. Orson Welles) – won Screenplay, nominated for 9 Oscars including Pic and Director.
3. Tokyo Story (dir. Yasujiro Ozu)  – Zero Oscar noms. 
4. La Regle du jeu (dir. Jean Renoir) – Zero Oscar noms. 
5. Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (dir. FW Murnau) – won “Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production” and Actress and Cinematography
6. 2001: A Space Odyssey (dir. Stanley Kubrick) – won Visual Effects, plus nomination for Directing, Writing and Art Direction.
7. The Searchers (dir. John Ford) – Zero Oscar noms. 
8. Man with a Movie Camera (dir. Dziga Vertov) – Zero Oscar noms. 
9. The Passion of Joan of Arc (dir. Carl Dreyer) – Zero Oscar noms. 
10. 8 1/2 (dir. Federico Fellini) – won Foreign Film, Costumes, nominated for Directing, Writing, Art Direction.And the rest:
11. Battleship Potemkin (dir. Sergei Eisenstein)
12. L’Atalante (dir. Jean Vigo)
13. Breathless (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
14. Apocalypse Now (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
15. Late Spring (dir. Ozu Yasujiro)
16. Au hasard Balthazar (dir. Robert Bresson)
17. Seven Samurai (dir. Akira Kurosawa)
17. Persona (dir. Ingmar Bergman)
19. Mirror (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
20. Singin’ in the Rain (dir. Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly)
21. L’avventura (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni)
21. Le Mepris (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
21. The Godfather (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
24. Ordet (dir. Carl Dreyer)
24. In the Mood for Love (dir. Wong Kar-Wai)
26. Rashomon (dir. Akira Kurosawa)
26. Andrei Rublev (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
28. Mulholland Dr. (dir. David Lynch)
29. Stalker (dir. Andrei Tarkovsky)
29. Shoah (dir. Claude Lanzmann)
31. The Godfather Part II (dir. Francis Ford Coppola)
31. Taxi Driver (dir. Martin Scorsese)
33. Bicycle Thieves (dir. Vittoria De Sica)
34. The General (dir. Buster Keaton and Clyde Bruckman)
35. Metropolis (dir. Fritz Lang)
35. Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock)
35. Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce 1080 Bruxelles (dir. Chantal Akerman)
35. Satantango (dir. Bela Tarr)
39. The 400 Blows (dir. Francois Truffaut)
39. La dolce vita (dir. Federico Fellini)
41. Journey to Italy (dir. Roberto Rossellini)
42. Pather Panchali (dir. Satyajit Ray)
42. Some Like It Hot (dir. Billy Wilder)
42. Gertrud (dir. Carl Dreyer)
42. Pierrot le fou (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
42. Play Time (dir. Jacques Tati)
42. Close-Up (dir. Abbas Kiarostami)
48. The Battle of Algiers (dir. Gillo Pontecorvo)
48. Histoire(s) du cinema (dir. Jean-Luc Godard)
50. City Lights (dir. Charlie Chaplin)
50. Ugetsu monogatari (dir. Mizoguchi Kenji)
50. La Jetee (dir. Chris Marker)

I stopped tracking their Oscar nominations after ten but as you can see, only two films that have ever won Best Picture are on their top 50, both Godfather films. Only one film (unless you count Sunrise’s unique Best Picture award) was even nominated for Best Picture and that was Citizen Kane.

I don’t really agree with this list, just as I don’t agree with the last 87 years of Best Picture winners but what is important to note is how very few Oscar winners stand the test of time with critics.

As far as film fans go, many more stand the test of time because many of the Oscar winners for Best Picture — up to about the time the Oscars changed their date back, 2003 or so — were also the people’s choice to win. Thus, those films will continue to resonate with audiences, movies like Braveheart, Forrest Gump and Gladiator.  Back then, the Best Picture winner was not what the critics thought most of the time but the reward for studios making movies that ticket buyers LOVED.

Now we are in a strange sort of in-between where the Best Picture winners tend to reflect a very insular bubble. That bubble rarely has much to do with “the people” anymore and can kind of be more in line with critics since the definition of “critic” has changed so dramatically in the past ten years.

The public kind of shrugs when films win. Some of them break through, like The King’s Speech kind of did. Birdman is trying to break through with an appearance on Saturday Night Live. But really, it’s nothing like what movies used to be. It’s nothing like, say, Gladiator’s win where everyone knew about the movie and everyone felt they had a stake in its winning.

That is why, I think, winners have such a hard time now. They are almost devalued the second they win. It is as though the drama of their being in the race at all is what matters. The “story” of how they got there. After they win they mostly disappear. It isn’t that the films are bad. It’s just that they were part of an “award season narrative” that is now over. This film won and the story ends there.

The films that have lost seem to have their stories continue because they never won. While I personally feel as though The Hurt Locker and Shakespeare in Love were the right winners, there is no question that Avatar and Saving Private Ryan are the films that have endured much longer in the film discussion outside the awards race.  Films that win and win and win and never stop winning, like Slumdog Millionaire or The Artist also kind of evaporate. Both The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Hugo have more or less seeped into the public consciousness more.

Evaporating is one thing, but being instantly devalued is another. Ask yourself if you hated Argo more once it started winning. That is an easy one for me to answer because you readers are always calling me out for having called it a perfect movie in Telluride. I thought it was when I first saw it but there is simply no comparing that movie to its competitors that came along later – Zero Dark Thirty, Lincoln and Life of Pi. It’s an absurd thing to even say out loud. Argo was entertaining but come on. That it won the Scripter and the WGA over Lincoln is equally absurd and unacceptable. So how then does one continue to love a movie that doesn’t deserve those accolades?

Why doesn’t it deserve those accolades if so many people liked it?  Because, I think, it has to be based on something bigger than that. It can’t just be that people liked it. It has to “deserve” its win whether people liked it or not. That’s sort of my own twisted thinking on the matter.  Simply liking something means it’s far too ephemeral and subject to not being liked sometime down the road. A great film, though, that made shitloads of money and received wildly great reviews (like Lincoln) that doesn’t win? That’s never pretty to watch go down.

I’ve been reading many articles and comments about Birdman’s fate now that the Oscars are over, whether it will be considered a deserving winner or not. I personally feel that, as much as I enjoyed it, it is far too Hollywood-specific to have staying power. But I could be wrong. It could end up being like All About Eve, a delicious cultural marker that will age well.  I felt that the word “extraordinary” applied to a few of the Best Picture nominees and that their win would have felt justified to me. Boyhood and Selma are two of those.  While I get why Birdman was to the people voting the most exciting film to vote for, I also understand why the British Film Industry only gave Birdman Cinematography.  They also did not respond to The Departed in 2006, which was my favorite film that year. Martin Scorsese was so overdue that no one would begrudge his win, even if all of these years later people trash The Departed as not being his best film. Well, he should have more than one Oscar by now so awarding him for The Departed was beyond the right thing to do.

Something’s gotta give, however, if the Oscars are going to survive. There needs to be more of a communal experience between Big Hollywood, the ticket buyers and the Academy. Hollywood keeps moving in one direction and the Oscars in another. It was never really meant to be that way. One or the other has to yield.

Either way, it’s difficult to see beyond the Oscar race as a game with winners and losers. And curious how winners can ultimately be losers and losers can be winners. Time sorts it all out. All we have to do is wait and see.