THE BEST:

ANNIE HALL (1977)



I was downright horrified when Woody Allen’s brainy romantic comedy swiped the Best Picture Oscar away from Star Wars on the night of the Academy Awards’ golden anniversary edition. And considering the innovation and impact of George “the Neck” Lucas’ classic blockbuster (and the fact that a far inferior popcorn flick like Return of the King was considered worthy of the top prize nearly three decades later), I still have issues with the snub. But the choice is more comprehensible now in my reflective middle age dotage than it was in the midst of my pre-pubescent geekery: America in the ‘70s was far more interested in grit and neuroses than fanboy fantasy, and the wookies and Jedi philosophy must have seemed especially goofy compared to the grim realities of then-recent Best Picture winners like The French Connection, The Godfather and One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. And if somebody had to shoot down Luke Skywalker, then I’m glad it was Annie Hall. For one thing, it was a fair fight, since the Academy tends to hold comedy and science fiction in the same low regard. More importantly, though, for all the great jokes about dead sharks and Kafka, Annie Hall is a touching, highly relatable masterpiece of character and storytelling, in service of a romantic pairing as iconic as Bogie & Bacall: to this day, whenever the film comes on TV, my parents (a small town Yankee version of Alvy & Annie who somehow stayed together) inevitably wind up holding hands and misting up...which is just about as cute as prickly, overeducated white people get. Plus, with its twisty storytelling, animated sequences and meta sight gags, Annie Hall is far more visually and structurally interesting than most Best Picture winners in any genre. And besides, if a romantic comedy had to beat Star Wars in 1977, at least it wasn’t The Goodbye Girl.

THE APARTMENT (1960)



Billy Wilder’s knack for crafting affecting, humane comedy was close to unparalleled, and few of his films showcased that gift better than 1960’s The Apartment, an effervescent rollercoaster spiked with grown-up melancholy. Jack Lemmon spends his days as one of corporate America’s nondescript suits, and his nights loaning out his apartment to superiors so they can have a place to covertly screw their mistresses. Lemmon’s everyman pines for Shirley MacLaine’s elevator girl, who’s involved with Lemmon’s boss (Fred MacMurray), a thorny love triangle laced with workplace pecking-order tensions, and one given verve by Wilder’s deft satirical hand. Yet for all its bubbly wit, The Apartment’s lasting relevance is partially due to the muted sorrow that lurks around the busy frame’s corners – a nagging sadness wrought from its protagonists’ stubborn willingness to define themselves via their vocations, and which consequently makes Lemmon and MacLaine’s ultimate leap into love feel not fairy-tale preordained, but hard-earned.

FROM HERE TO ETERNITY (1953)



If Brando's dockworker Terry Malloy represented one definitive take on the '50s prole rebel hero, Montgomery Clift's Pvt. Robert E. Lee Pruitt is the alienated '50s hero who thinks he's found a place for himself in the ultimate conformist culture, the army. Clift was on his way to being Brando's equal as a great new kind of movie actor when the car accident that shattered his face also crushed his confidence and derailed his career, and here he's as gentle and sure of the path he should be on as Brando's heroes tended to be instinctively assertive yet lost. But as much as he loves the army and welcomes the chance to be given rules to follow, some part of him can't help bucking when he's given orders that he knows are wrong. He won't box for the company because he's afraid of killing somebody in the ring, and then he kills somebody in retaliation for the murder of his best friend because he knows that the system will simply absorb the injustice. In the end, the system he turned to for a home kills him off, almost as an afterthought. If the Best Picture winners are anything to go by, the 1950s must have been an especially schizoid time in American culture: the list swings back and forth between movies like this one and On the Waterfront, which seemed to be bursting with news and awareness about the state of the country, and such spectacles as The Greatest Show on Earth, Around the World in 80 Days, and Ben-Hur, which seemed like kaleidoscopes imported from a different solar system.

THE WORST:

RAIN MAN (1988)



It's a well-established Hollywood joke that actors can court Oscar by playing someone with a mental or physical disability, but most of these roles still require the actor to try to fit into some kind of narrative context and connect to the other performers while replicating some carefully studied tics or mannerisms. Dustin Hoffman fought for years to get the script of Rain Man filmed, and it's easy to see why: the role of the autistic Raymond gives him an excuse to shut himself off from everything and everyone going on around him, and to be praised for how thoroughly he could ignore everything while concentrating on his little acting exercises. He must have thought that all his Christmases were coming at once. As for his co-star, Tom Cruise, Rain Man dates from the beginning of that unfortunate period where, his box-office appeal being a given, he was concentrating on proving he could "act" by denying the audience his gleaming smile and acting like an obnoxious ass. (Oh, he was "acting." We're certain of it.) The movie itself is nothing but a tear-stained pedestal for two movie stars stuck in self-parody mode.

MILLION DOLLAR BABY (2006)



This rigged, underlit, depressive wallow marks the nadir of Clint Eastwood's serious, craggy old thing period. The quality of the performances, especially Morgan Freeman's and Hilary Swank's, can't disguise the thinness of the stock characters that populate Paul Haggis's screenplay; in particular, Swank's grasping white-trash relations would be judged as vile, condescending stereotypes by a Jerry Springer audience. The best thing about the movie is that it inspired a hilarious public outcry among disability rights groups and assorted loons who thought that by having Swank's character opt to die rather than live out her life as a quadriplegic, it would start a trend and that impressionable disabled people would start offing themselves in droves. But even that was compromised when Eastwood, trying to address the controversy, announced that "I've gone around in movies blowing people away with a .44 magnum. But that doesn't mean I think that's a proper thing to do."  He doesn't?  Dude, you've earned the right to keep making boring movies for the rest of your life, but you don't have to disillusion us too.

Click Here For Part One, Two, Three, Four, Five & Seven

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent