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.

Clara Bow, Paramount’s biggest star of the day, is given top billing, but her role is secondary to that of Charles “Buddy” Rogers and Richard Arlen who are excellent as the World War I flyers. Gary Cooper has a major supporting role. The film’s aerial photography was used in numerous films for some time afterward.

Three documentaries including one on the film’s restoration are included as extras.

Alfred Hitchcock’s only Best Picture winner, Rebecca as well as the suspense master’s other two greatest 1940s classics, Spellbound and Notorious, are among the Fox/MGM upgrades. All three films come with the extras from their most recent DVD incarnations intact. They all, of course, look great in the higher resolution.

The extras on Rebecca include a featurette on author Daphne Du Maurier as well the screen tests for Joan Fontaine and several other actresses. The extras on Spellbound include a featurette on Salvador Dali whose art figures prominently into the Ingrid Bergman-Gregory Peck starrer. An excerpt from Hitchcock’s AFI awards dinner with Bergman as presenter is included among extras from Notorious in which she starred with Cary Grant and Claude Rains.

All three contain audio commentaries.

Film producer and historian Bruce Block provides the commentary on 1960’s Oscar-winning The Apartment, Billy Wilder’s acerbic and least cynical comedy with Jack Lemmon, Shirley MacLaine and Fred MacMurray all at the top of their game.

Available for several months as a Best Buy exclusive, John Schlesinger’s 1969 Oscar winner, Midnight Cowboy with Dustin Hoffman and Jon Voight giving what still may be given their greatest performances contains an I-was-there commentary from producer Jerome Hillman. Among his recollections are having to obtain Paul Newman’s permission to show a poster of the actor from Hud and that the film’s screenwriter Waldo Salt was the voice of Sylvia Miles’ husband on the phone.

Neither of the two Woody Allen upgrades, Annie Hall nor Manhattan come with extras, but does anyone really expect Allen to do a commentary or allow someone else to do one on his films? Both films look considerably better than they did in their previous standard DVD incarnations.

More of Oscar’s favorite films get a Blu-ray upgrade this week. Among them are To Kill a Mockingbird; Adaptation; The English Patient; Frida; Malcolm X; The Piano; Shakespeare in Love and A Soldier’s Story.

This week’s new DVD releases also include the 2011 smash hit, Drive.