Home Viewing with Peter #871

Now that the 2023 Oscars are over, this is a good time to look back at previous Oscars to get a perspective on how the year’s best film might fare over time.

Looking back at the Oscars of the years 2003, 1983, 1963, and 1943 gives us a snapshot of those Oscar nominated and winning films of Oscars of 20, 40, 60, and 80 years ago have stood the test of time, and those that haven’t.

Let’s start with 1943, the last year until 2009 in which there would be more than five nominees for Best Picture.

Casablanca, which won Best Picture and just two other Oscars out of eight nominations, has grown in popularity over the years. Today, in addition to winning for Best Director (Michael Curtiz) and Screenplay (Julius and Philip Epstein and Howard Koch), it might win any or all five it lost – Best Actor (Humphrey Bogart), Supporting Actor (Claude Rains), Cinematography, Film Editing, and Score (Max Steiner). It might even win Best Actress for Ingrid Bergman, nominated for the first time that year for Sam Wood’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, a film that hasn’t aged nearly as well.

Of the other 1943 nominees, William A. Wellman’s The Ox-Bow Incident and Ernst Lubitsch’s Heaven Can Wait are more highly regarded now than Henry King’s The Song of Bernadette for which Jennifer Jones won Best Actress and Herman Shumlin’s Watch on the Rhine for which Paul Lukas won Best Actor.

George Stevens’ The More the Merrier and Clarence Brown’s The Human Comedy are still highly regarded but Noel Coward and David Lean’s In Which We Serve and Mervyn LeRoy’s Madame Curie are no longer as popular as they once were. Still, all ten films have stood the test of time to some degree.

1963 tells a different story.

Tom Jones, which won Best Picture and three other Oscars including Best Director (Tony Richardson), Adapted Screenplay, and Score, was very much a film of its time. Based on Henry Fielding’s 18th century novel, its bawdy humor, shocking in its day, was soon outdone by even more scandalous films heralding the end of film censorship as we knew it. Still, the Oscar-nominated performances of Albert Finney, Hugh Griffith, Diane Cilento, Edith Evans, and Joyce Redman are a revelation to those newly discovering them.

The year’s other nominees, Ralph Nelson’s Lilies of the Field is remembered mostly for Sidney Poitier’s Oscar winning lead performance and Elia Kazan’s immigration sage, America America, is best remembered as the director’s last good film.

The all-star cast of How the West Was Won, codirected by John Ford, Henry Hathaway, and George Marshall, is seldom mentioned while Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s Cleopatra was regarded as a failure even in its initial release.

Three film that are better remembered than most, if not all, of the nominees are Martin Ritt’s modern western Hud, Otto Preminger’s epic The Cardinal, and Federico Fellini’s semi-autobiographical 8 1/2.

1983 gave us four strong nominees and one that probably wouldn’t even get made today.

James L. Brooks’ Terms of Endearment, which won five out the eleven Oscars it was nominated for, is that rare tearjerker that everyone likes. Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson won for their performances over fellow nominees Debra Winger and John Lithgow. Acting wins over nominees in the same film are rare, two such wins from the same film has never happened before or since.

The equally nostalgic tearjerker The Big Chill; the soaring tribute to the first American astronauts The Right Stuff; and Tender Mercies, the little film that could, still hold up. The one that doesn’t is Peter Yates’ film of The Dresser, a backstage drama about a touring English Shakespearean company led by a vain, maniacal actor (Albert Finney) who is cared for by his long-time dresser (Tom Courtenay), is nothing much beyond the two lead performances. That it was nominated in place of Ingmar Bergman’s Fanny & Alexander, which won four Oscars, seems sillier every year.

2003 was the year in which the third film in the Lord of the Rings trilogy was destined to win.

In literary circles, J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series was a worldwide phenomenon, but on screen, J.R.R. Tolkien’s decades old Lord of the Rings was deemed more award worthy. The first two films in Australian director Peter Jackson’s drawn-out trilogy, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring and The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, were nominated for Best Picture, the former winning four Oscars, and the latter two. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was nominated for 11 Oscars, winning them all, tying the record previously set by 1959’s Ben-Hur and equaled by 1997’s Titanic.

Its competition was comprised of Peter Weir’s Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation , and Gary Ross’ quickly forgotten Seabiscuit, none of which have really stood the test of time.

So, which of the Oscar nominees of 2023 will best stand the test of time?

I suspect that Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest will continue to be revered but will not be viewed over and over. Past Lives, Anatomy of a Fall, The Holdovers, American Fiction, and Barbie will continue to be popular even if over time they only have niche followings. Maestro, already more despised than liked, will probably not survive, but Poor Things, which is also dividing audiences, will grow in respectability. In fifty years or so, it could well be as revered as The Bride of Frankenstein, which it will be paired with in repertoire in whatever form that takes then. That is the one that I think will best stand the test of time.