Now that the 82nd Academy Awards have come and gone, it’s time to take a look back at previous Oscar years and the nominated and award winning films of each year available on DVD.

We begin with the Oscar year 1927/28 honoring films released in Los Angeles between August 1, 1927 and July 31, 1928.

The most successful film released in the first year was The Jazz Singer, but because it was the first sound film, the Academy’s award committee thinking it would have an unfair advantage over silent films decided to give it a Special Award out of competition.

The five films nominated for Best Picture in the first year of eligibility were The Last Command; The Racket; 7th Heaven; The Way of All Flesh and Wings. A second award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture was also given this year. The nominees for this award were Chang; The Crowd and Sunrise. The winners were Wings and Sunrise.

An epic war film, William A. Wellman’s Wings set the standard for aviation epics for years to come. In fact, stock footage of its numerous aerial battles was used in numerous subsequent films.

The love triangle between stars Clara Bow, Richard Arlen and Charles “Buddy” Rogers may have been old hat even then, but numerous other plot details that have since become clichés were quite fresh at the time. One of the film’s most moving sequences, in which a homecoming soldier visits the father of a man he killed, was echoed sixty-two years later by Oliver Stone in Born on the Fourth of July.

Sadly there still hasn’t been a DVD release of Wings in the U.S., but the film is available on a fairly decent Hong Kong import that plays on U.S. equipment.

F. W. Murnau’s Sunrise, which is still regarded as one of the most exquisitely photographed films of all time, also won Oscars for its cinematography and for Janet Gaynor’s performance as the naïve farm wife whose husband plans to drown her and run off with another woman. It was one of three performances for which Gaynor won the first Best Actress award. Frank Borzage’s 7th Heaven and Street Angel were the others. All three are available as part of the Murnau, Borzage and Fox Box Set.

Borzage, whose style on those two films was heavily influenced by Murnau, won the award for Best Director for 7th Heaven. Murnau, ironically, wasn’t even nominated.

German actor Emil Jannings won the award for Best Actor for two films, The Last Command and The Way of All Flesh. Josef von Sternberg’s The Last Command, in which he plays a formerRussian General reduced to playing one in a Hollywood movie, had been available on VHS but is not yet on DVD. The Way of All Flesh is a lost film but a 1940 remake of the heated melodrama with Akim Tamiroff exists. Alas, it had never been released on commercial home video.

One of the first major gangster films, Lewis Milestone’s The Racket has fallen into obscurity mainly because it has been eclipsed by so many films of the genre beginning with several the following year of eligibility. It has never been released on commercial home video.

A cinematic masterpiece long held in the same high regard as Wings and Sunrise, King Vidor’s The Crowd about the life of an ordinary man and is beloved wife played by James Murray and Eleanor Boardman (Vidor’s real life wife) who become disillusioned when their reality falls just short of their expectations.

The scene in which Murray is seen in a sea of desks was famously later used to for comic effect by Billy Wilder and Jack Lemmon in The Apartment.

The Crowd, like Wings, still hasn’t had a DVD release in the U.S., but is available on a fairly decent Hong Kong import that plays on U.S. equipment. However, even that is rare that the starting price at Amazon.com is a prohibitive $89.00.

Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schodesack, who would later become immortalized with King Kong, proved to be masters of action films with Chang. Called a dramatic documentary, the scenes of attacking leopards, elephants tearing down houses and stampeding were obviously staged, though not quite in the way the directors had envisioned.

The Thai native responsible for handling the attacking leopard released the animal before Cooper’s signal, causing it to run for the two kids resulting in Cooper shooting and killing the leopard within an inch of his life. The elephant mother of the baby taken as a pet by the family was supposed to rescue her offspring but not tear the house down in doing so. The well orchestrated stampede was filmed in part by Schoedsack, who also doubled as cameraman, concealed under heavy logs which the elephants were expected to step around but actually walked over nearly causing him to be crushed to death.

Many elements of the exciting film can be seen as primers not only for King Kong, but for most of the MGM Johnny Weismuller Tarzan films of the 1930s and 40s.

Chang is available in an excellent DVD from Image Entertainment with a vibrant new score by Bangkok composer Bruce Gaston, performed by Thailand’s world famous Fong Naam orchestra. Rudy Behlmer’s informative commentary includes excerpts from a 1965 interview he conducted with Merian C. Cooper.

Though it was given an honorary award to keep it out of Best Picture competition, The Jazz Singer was eligible for other awards and was, in fact, nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay which it lost to 7th Heaven.

Though the story of the cantor’s son who becomes a show business phenomenon in defiance of his father’s wishes may seem to be something that had whiskers even then, it was nevertheless remade successfully twice, with Danny Thomas essaying Al Jolson’s role in 1952 and Neil Diamond taking it on in 1980.

Fox’s Three-Disc Deluxe Edition includes commentary by film historians Ron Hutchinson and Vince Giordano, a documentary on the early sound era and a collection of vintage shorts with Jolson.

Charlie Chaplin was a triple nominee for writing, directing and starring in The Circus, but as they did with The Jazz Singer, the awards committee felt all those nominations gave him an unfair advantage so they were withdrawn and he too, was presented with a Special Oscar for his latest incarnation of the Little Tramp.

A two disc Special Edition of The Circus was released by Warner Bros. in 2003 along with Chaplin’s other masterworks, but has since been discontinued.

Among the films Oscar overlooked in its first year were Ernst Lubitsch’s The Student Prince in Old Heidelberg (on VHS, but not DVD); John Ford’s Four Sons (included in the great Ford at Fox Box Set) and Fritz Lang’s Metropolis available on DVD in several versions.

New DVD releases worth checking out include the Oscar winning Precious (Best Supporting Actress, Best Screenplay); Up in the Air; The Stoning of Soraya M. and The Private Lives of Pippa Lee.