With the Oscars less than three weeks away, many of this year’s nominees are available on DVD with others either announced for release or soon to be announced.

In decades past, the public, critics and Oscar more or less agreed on each year’s best films. That pretty much changed with the success of blockbusters such Jaws and Star Wars in the mid-1970s. Both films were nominated for Best Picture and won handily in the technical categories, but neither really had a shot at winning the big one. Jaws lost to the popular hospital drama, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Star Wars to Woody Allen’s comedy, Annie Hall.

In the years since when well-regarded smaller films were up against blockbusters, the smaller film almost always won, a clear indication that the Academy was more likely to side with critics than general audiences. There were exceptions, of course, such as Titanic which won over the critically acclaimed L.A. Confidential and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King which won over a field of lackluster nominees. With both the backstory was as important to the film’s win as what was on the screen.

Titanic was a behemoth, a blockbuster of unprecedented proportions that even before its Oscar victory had become the biggest moneymaking film in history. It was seen at the time as a film that was good for the industry. Return of the King was about to set at least three Oscar records, become the first third film in a trilogy to win; the first sequel to win without its original having also won a la The Godfather and the first fantasy film to win. Oscar voters always like to do something that sets a new record. It makes them feel special, part of history in a way.

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Coinciding with last Tuesday’s Oscar nominations announcement, Paramount has finally released 1927/28 Oscar winner Wings on DVD and Blu-ray and MGM/Fox has upgraded seven other films that figured into Oscar races from 1940 to 1979, four of them Best Picture winners, to Blu-ray.

Technically there was no Best Picture winner in Oscar’s first year. There were two awards considered to be of equal merit, Most Outstanding Production, which was won by Wings and Most Artistic Quality of Production which was won by Sunrise. The award was consolidated as Best Production from 1928/29 through 1930/31, after which it was re-named Best Picture. The Academy retroactively concluded that Wings was the equivalent of the new Best Picture award.

Artistically Sunrise and its fellow nominee for Most Artistic Quality of Production, The Crowd, are generally considered to be the better films by critics and historians, but that doesn’t mean that Wings isn’t a film of significant merit of its own.

Magnificently restored by the Technicolor Company, the film belies its 85 year age with its gorgeous cinematography and well-written story line. The film is presented mostly in spia tones, but has sequences of purple, azure and gold befitting its many moods. There are two soundtracks, the organ music available on previous home video releases and a newly recorded version of the orchestral score with sound effects that was used for large venues in roadshow engagements.

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George Clooney’s political drama, The Ides of March, newly released on DVD, is the latest in a long line of films dealing with American political campaigns.

A timely film, it centers on a fictitious campaign in which dirty tricks abound. Ryan Gosling is the idealistic staffer for George Clooney as a sitting Governor seeking his party’s Presidential nomination. Second in command to Clooney’s veteran campaign manager, Philip Seymour Hoffman, he is tempted to join the opposition when made an offer by Hoffman’s counterpart, Paul Giamatti. An untimely death and the threat of a scandal loom large in the resolution of the plot.

Although the film really offers nothing new, it’s well acted and worth seeing for the performance alone. It’s available on both DVD and Blu-ray from Sony.

Among past hits concerning U.S. political campaigns now available on DVD are such films as Abe Lincoln in Illinois; State of the Union; All the King’s Men; The Last Hurrah; Sunrise at Campobello; Advise and Consent; The Best Man; The Candidate; All the President’s Men and Milk.

Raymond Massey was so into his role as Abraham Lincoln in Broadway’s Abe Lincoln in Illinois that he famously signed autographs during the run of the show as the 16th President rather than as himself. No wonder then that he is so authentic in his Oscar nominated performance in the 1940 film that he was asked to play the character in numerous subsequent films and TV presentations.

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One of the pleasures of home video is the discovery of TV shows you may have missed in their initial run and getting to watch not just one episode, but an entire season over the period of a couple of days. Such is my experience with the newly released first season of Boardwalk Empire.

Produced by creator Terence Winter; Oscar winning director Martin Scorsese; Emmy and DGA winning director Tim Van Patten and Oscar nominated actor Mark Wahlberg among others, the show has such a built-in pedigree and an audience appeal that I don’t know what has taken me so long to get around to it.

The series opens on New Year’s Eve of 1920, the day before Prohibition goes into effect. The sets, the costumes, the music which is always playing, are vintage 1920s. The story, which revolves around crooked politicians and gangsters of the era, is authentic. Real life characters and fictional characters based on real life characters abound. If there is one drawback it’s the portrayal of women of the day who are mostly depicted as whores or upstanding women who are jealous of the whores. Most of the whores, however, are portrayed as good-hearted while the men are portrayed as conflicted at best. Everyone is shown to be a flawed human being, which is not necessarily any more realistic than strict portrayals of good and evil. There isn’t, however, a dull moment in any of the first eight of twelve episodes that I’ve watched.

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The first great DVD release of 2012, surprising to me, turns out to be HBO’s Mildred Pierce, the mini-series adapted from from James M. Cain’s 1941 novel previously filmed in 1945.

The 1945 version, directed by Michael Curtiz in the fashion of a film noir, begins with a murder. There is no murder in Todd Haynes’ new version which is said to be more faithful to the source material. All the other elements, though, are there, as both versions follow the rags-to-riches climb out of poverty of the title character played to Oscar winning glory by Joan Crawford and Emmy winning triumph by Kate Winslet. There is the ungrateful daughter (Ann Blyth/Evan Rachel Wood); the gigolo (Zachary Scott/Guy Pearce); the slimy lawyer (Jack Carson/James LeGros); the faithful friend (Eve Arden/Melissa Leo, Mare Winningham sharing duties) and the estranged husband (Bruce Bennett/Brian F. O’Byrne). All acquit themselves well in both versions with Blyth and Arden nominated for Oscars and Wood, Pearce, Leo, Winningham and O’Byrne all nominated for Emmys with Pearce winning. Winslet, Wood and Pearce are also nominated for Golden Globes as is the mini-series itself.

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We can always find parallels to films of the past from films currently in release. This year, however, I am struck by how many of the films in release at year end are reminiscent of films of the past readily available on DVD.

No less than seven of the films that figure large and small in this year’s Oscar race have links to the great and no-so-great films of the past that you can watch in the comfort of your own home. They are The Artist; The Descendants; War Horse; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; My Week with Marilyn and The Iron Lady.

The days of the Hollywood’s transition from silent film to talkies, as depicted in The Artist was explored with great fun and nostalgia in 1952’s beloved Singin’ in the Rain, long a staple of home video which Warner Bros. has scheduled for a Blu-ray upgrade this year.

The film which was co-directed by Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen, features marvelous performances by Kelly, Donald O’Connor and Debbie Reynolds and a great one from Oscar nominated Jean Hagen as the great silent screen star who, typical of many of the day, was unable to make a successful transition to talkies due to her squeaky voice, “New Yawk” accent and terrible diction. Her performance in the film within the film is dubbed by Debbie Reynolds, but one of the film’s great conceits is that it’s Hagen who actually dubs her own voice while Reynolds lip syncs to Hagen’s singing of “I Would, Would You”.

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Christmas is over and the New Year will soon be upon us. It’s time to name the best DVD releases of fast fading 2011.

This year I’m presenting three lists, a top ten list of DVD/Blu-ray releases of films first released theatrically in the U.S. this year; a best list of Blu-ray upgrades of films previously released on standard DVD and a five best list of classic films released on standard DVD only for the first time.

Best New DVD/Blu-ray Releases of 2011

1. Of Gods and Men
2. In a Better World
3. Poetry
4. Win Win
5. Midnight in Paris
6. Margin Call
7. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
8. Certified Copy
9. Beautiful Boy
10. A Better Life

Four of the year’s ten best, including my top three, are foreign language films; two of the Hollywood produced films are comedies; one is a science fiction epic and two are domestic dramas dealing with contemporary issues.

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In a year when most new films have proven to be disappointing if not an outright insult to the intelligence, it’s nice to discover a moving, wholly satisfying science fiction disaster film from an unexpected source.

The 1968 classic Planet of the Apes spawned four sequels and a dreadful 2001 remake. Ten years later relatively unknown director Rupert Wyatt has given us Rise of the Planet of the Apes, which is not only one of the year’s best genre films, but one of the year’s best films overall, a prequel to the original which takes place in the present day.

James Franco is a research scientist who develops a drug meant to cure Alzheimer’s. Tested on laboratory chimps in San Francisco, an increase in dosage hurries the experiment along, but results in disaster when an overly aggressive chimp runs amok. The powers that be order an end to the experiment and the destruction of all the chimps in Franco’s lab. It’s only after they are all euthanized that he discovers the main test chimp had a baby she was protecting which caused her to go crazy in the first place. He sneaks the baby chimp out of the lab and raises him in the home he shares with his father (John Lithgow) in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.

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Not since Steel Magnolias more than twenty years ago has there been a film in which the women are all strong and the men, for the most part, all weak as in The Help. Maybe it’s a Southern thing as both films are set in the Deep South.

Granted, the main thrust of the new film is supposed be about the dignity of the back maids in Jackson, Mississippi in 1963 at the start of the modern civil rights movement, but the white women who employ them, ostensibly the villains, are with one exception not bad people, just a little foolish. The white men on the other hand, again with one exception, are total wimps. The black men are either absent or, yet again with one exception, a wife beater.

It has been said that The Help is not a man’s picture and not a critic’s picture, that it is a chick flick, i.e. a film that appeals mostly to women. Granted the book the film is based on was written by a woman and film written and directed by her best friend, a man she grew up with, but why does it have to be so biased against men?

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One of the most exciting talents to come out of the 1970s was writer/director Terrence Malick who made two stunning films, 1973’s Badlands and 1978’s 1973’s Days of Heaven1973’s and then disappeared from the scene for two decades. His much anticipated return, 1998’s The Thin Red Line, unlike his two earlier film, was a polarizing film. Although many found it profound, others, including me, found it confusing and off-putting. The confusion came from the dropping of characters and their story lines midway through and the voice-over narration that made it difficult to tell which character was talking. The off-putting aspect of the film was the moving away from the action to concentrate on a dying bird and other objects not germane to the narrative. Still, the film was popular enough to garner seven Oscar nominations including two for Malick as both writer and director. His next film, The New World, which came seven years later received just one Oscar nomination for its cinematography. A slow-moving tale of Captain John smith and Pocahontas, the film was more nature shots intertwined with dramatic scenes. This time they made more sense, as the destruction of the environment was a key story element. It didn’t, however, make the going any less ponderous.

Now six years later, Malick’s latest film, The Tree of Life is all about the pretty pictures with little narrative drive. The story of three brothers growing up in the 1950s is muted both in scope and dialogue, but does have that gorgeous cinematography to soothe the eye if not the brain. The performances in a film like this are almost secondary, but Jessica Chastain (New York Film Critics award winner for Best Supporting Actress for this, Take Shelter and The Help) as the mother and Hunter McCracken as the oldest boy deliver fine performances despite the awkward structure of the film. Some have praised Brad Pitt’s portrayal of the father, indeed the New York Film Critics gave him their Best Actor award in conjunction with his performance in Moneyball, but I don’t see it. No one including Sean Penn himself knows what the actor is doing in a poorly written role as McCracken’s character grown up and the film’s bland rendering of the hereafter is poorly handled. I say cut out Sean Penn’s scenes and run it continuously in a museum where it seems better suited.

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My DVD Report for more than a year has been basically about what is and isn’t available on DVD by Oscar year. Although these reports have been sprinkled with my personal opinions here and there, they have mostly been of historical, rather than critical, perspective. Now it’s time to get back to telling you what I really think of the films I write about.

I have had a very tumultuous year revolving around my mid-year move from Northern California to the Jersey Shore. Although the move itself happened rather quickly – a little over a month from my decision to sell my home of just eight years to moving to the place I planned to spend my golden years – settling in has taken a lot longer than I anticipated. From an air conditioner that had to be moved at some expense due to kinked pipes to a garage door that had to be replaced after it came slamming down behind me one fine day to water in the basement, first from a hurricane and then from a burst bladder in a boiler expansion tank on Thanksgiving Eve, and various other issues in-between, it has been anything but an easy transition. Dealing with life’s little problems, some of which are still not quite resolved, have taken up so much time that I have yet to see a film in a theatre since I left California. Not to worry, I have seen several of this year’s theatrical released on DVD. I can report that I haven’t missed much. I have yet to see one that I wished I had seen in the theatre first. It’s been a mostly dismal year for film, although I am excited by a number of year-end releases which I hope to start catching up with beginning this week.

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2010 at the Oscars was the year an old-fashioned tribute to pre-World War II British resolve beat the up-to-the-minute expose of the founding of modern social media to win the Best Picture Oscar.

What happened? Was it that the Academy refused to allow the preponderance of precursors to dictate their own choice or did they simply like the old-fashioned British film, The King’s Speech, better than they did The Social Network? We’ll probably never know. What we do know is that bringing in hot younger stars like James Franco and Anne Hathaway to host the Oscars does not make the show better, and does not bring in more viewers.

We also know the move to ten Best Picture nominees does not help the box office of the nominees. Given more choices to spend their entertainment dollars on, an unimpressed public will simply ignore most of them. Adhering to the adage that less is more, the Academy has scaled back the number of nominations for 2011 to “between five and ten”. In the meantime let’s take a last look at 2010’s top ten.

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2009 was the year the Academy went to a ten nominee best Picture slate, a practice which lasted a mere two years. Beginning this year the new rule is a minimum of five nominees and a maximum of ten with the caveat that each film nominated must receive at least five percent of the total first place ballots. Many pundits are predicting that under the new rule no more than seven films will be nominated. We shall see.

In the meantime, let’s take a look at the ten nominees for Best Picture of 2009.

One can never know for sure, but if I had to guess which five films received the most votes in that year I would have to say The Hurt Locker; Avatar; Inglourious Basterds; Up in the Air and Precious, with Up; District 9; An Education; A Serious Man and The Blind Side benefitting from the additional slots.

Topicality was probably The Hurt Locker’s greatest strength. The best war movies about World War II and the Vietnam War were films made after those wars had ended. Films made while WWII was in progress tended to be highly patriotic and somewhat unrealistic while the only major film made about Vietnam War during its duration was the roundly ridiculed The Green Berets. The Hurt Locker was not only topical in its portrayal the then six year-old war in Iraq but was highly realistic and frightening as well. It also had the advantage of being the first Hollywood war movie directed by a woman. Oscar voters were well aware that no woman had ever won an Oscar before and following in the footsteps of various critics’ groups agreed that this was the year to finally award one. That woman, Kathryn Bigelow, was also aided by the irony that her toughest competitor this year was deemed to be Avatar’s James Cameron, who just happened to be her ex-husband.

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If the Academy Awards have taught us anything over the years it’s that they don’t like to be typecast. They proved that once again with the 2008 winner, as unlikely a Best Picture winner as they have ever given us – a Bollywood-style film called Slumdog Millionaire. Forget the phrase “art imitating life imitating art”, here was “Hollywood imitating Bollywood imitating Hollywood”.

Danny Boyle’s film was a Bollywood film for western audiences who had never seen a Bollywood film. It was done in the style that the Indian film industry had long fostered, deftly mixing high drama, low comedy and music including often exuberant singing and dancing.

The film, which tells the life story of a poor boy from Mumbai who is suspected of cheating when he wins the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, resonated with audiences all over the world, winning more than 100 world-wide awards including eight Oscars.

In addition to wins for Best Picture and director, the film received Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay; Cinematography; Editing; Sound Mixing; Score and Song, “Jai Ho”. It had also been nominated for Best Sound Editing and a second song, “O Saya”.

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The 2007 Academy Awards were rather unusual in that the front-runners for Best Picture were both ultra-violent films, the type that they said could never win a Best Picture Oscar, yet one of them did while the other took home the Best Actor trophy.

The Coen Brothers’ No Country for Old Men has three main characters: a greedy hunter (Josh Brolin); an aging lawman (Tommy Lee Jones) and a psychopathic killer (Javier Bardem), While Brolin and Jones received excellent notices for their performances, it was Bardem who was singled out for awards glory, easily taking most of the year’s Best Supporting Actor awards honors, including the Oscar. The film also won Oscars for Best Picture; Director and Adapted Screenplay. It had also been nominated for Best Cinematography; Editing; Sound Mixing and Sound Editing.

Based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel, Oil!, Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood had as its central character a ruthless oil prospector who hid his greed behind a facade of a caring family man. Daniel Day-Lewis’ brilliant portrayal of the evil man earned him second his Best Actor Oscar. The film also won for Best Cinematography and had been nominated for Best Picture; Director; Adapted Screenplay; Editing; Art Direction and Sound Editing.

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