BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "Gladiator" (2000)

"Swords and sandals" was a term that developed in the 1950's and 1960's in relation to Hollywood films that tackled Ancient Rome and Greece.  Those movies had common elements such as chariots and the feudal system and, of course, gladiators.  Those types of movies died out a long time ago, even becoming a punchline (a Leslie Neilsen quote in the movie Airplane actually makes you laugh about pedophilia and then subsequently hate yourself for it).  It seemed quite a ballsy task for director Ridley Scott to attempt to resurrect that style of movie, but he did so with Gladiator.  The film is loosely based on historical events, and Scott wanted to portray the Roman culture more accurately than past films had done.  For example, no one's eating grapes and drinking wine and having raucous orgies.  Maybe the porn parody of this movie went there, but Scott didn't.  Several historians were hired as advisors for the film, although obviously some dramatic license still took place, causing at least one of those historians to refuse an on-screen credit.  The actual Marcus Aurelius was not murdered, he died of the plague.  Commodus was not reviled from the start, he actually was a popular emperor at first.  Such details can always be nitpicked.  What ultimately matters here is that Gladiator tells a pliable story.  Let's take a look at the first Best Picture of the 21st century.

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "Going My Way" (1944)

Bing Crosby is probably best remembered for his crooning musical style, but he was also a very accomplished actor.  Most of his early acting roles were for musical comedy or just comedy in general, such as the Road to... series with Bob Hope.  When producer/director Leo McCarey told Paramount that he wanted Crosby to play the lead role in his upcoming film, Paramount wasn't sold on the idea, as Crosby had never previously shown any dramatic acting chops.  However, McCarey got his wish, and Going My Way wound up the biggest box-office draw of the year, garnering much acclaim for its star as well, who wound up thriving for many years to follow in films of all genres.  Watching the film as I did for the first time recently, 70 years after its initial release, I found it a nice movie but rather slow at times, especially for a musical.  (For instance, it's much less grandiose in comparison to the MGM musicals of later years.)  Sizing this up with several other Best Picture nominees that year, I was actually quite flabbergasted as to how this one took home the top prize in addition to many other Oscars.  Maybe we'll learn how that happened in the synopsis.

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "West Side Story" (1961)

William Shakespeare lived from the years 1564 to 1616.  The Oscars have existed from 1929 to present day in 2014.  Four hundred years apart, yet they've intertwined on many occasions.  There have been plenty of nominations for films that were directly or indirectly adapted from The Bard's works.  One film, 1948's Hamlet, was a straightforward adaptation starring Laurence Olivier.  Both he and the film won top honors.  1998 saw Shakespeare in Love take home Best Picture.  This was a fictional story set in his era where the character of William Shakespeare fell in love with a beautiful woman, and this influenced him to write the story of Romeo & Juliet.  One other film exists on the list of Shakespeare stories resulting in Best Picture wins, and that is West Side Story.  Based off the stage play of the same name, West Side Story is a modern-day (at the time...1950's New York City) retelling of the Romeo & Juliet story, with the two feuding families replaced by two feuding street gangs of young men.  Our "Romeo" is Tony.  Our "Juliet" is Maria.  Thanks to the talents of co-directors Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins, screenwriter Ernest Lehman, composer/songwriter Leonard Bernstein and a large acting ensemble, West Side Story remains today one of the most successful movie musicals of all-time.  This will wind up being a rather brief synopsis as the story within the 152-minute film pretty much tells itself alongside a great deal of singing and dancing, and I'll never be able to do it proper justice of just how good that story is, but here goes.

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "Titanic" (1997)

I'm 41 years of age.  This means I've lived through what is unofficially one full generation (about 35 years) and am into my second one.  I've seen major movie events, I've seen smash successes, I've seen crazes and fads and the occasional billion-with-a-B-grossing blockbuster.  But I've only seen one true phenomenon the likes of Titanic.  The success this film enjoyed was incredible, but what was even more incredible was that for months, even over a year if you count when it was released on VHS, people went absolutely apeshit over this movie.  People were going to see it in theaters more than once, more than twice, more than four times...I remember one news report of a woman who would go to see it every Wednesday night for as long as it ran in her theater, and she'd always bring someone new each week (no, she wasn't playing the field, she was bringing her female friends.  Her husband went the first week and decided once was enough), and by the time it left her theater she had seen it 33 times.  THIRTY-THREE TIMES!  I even took an informal poll on Facebook a week or so ago and most of the answers I got were that people had seen it at least twice in the theater during its run.  And what a run it was!  It topped the box office for 15 straight weeks, a record that will probably never be broken.  It was making over a million dollars a week every single week, even months after it peaked.  It brought in over $13M on a Saturday over two months after it first was released, as that particular Saturday was Valentine's Day.  Oh, but it wasn't even just the movie.  The soundtrack is the biggest-selling primarily-orchestral (i.e., the score) soundtrack of all time, and by far.  That's not why most people bought it though.  They bought it for Celine Dion's "My Heart Will Go On", which itself won a zillion awards, topped the Billboard Hot 100 for two weeks (a short duration only because the cassette single was a limited release) and helped the soundtrack top the Billboard 200 Album Chart for four months.  How many soundtracks sell over 11 million copies?  Not many, but this one did.  Indeed, Titanic was a Happening, and I capitalized that word on purpose to stress the magnitude of it.  Most of you no doubt remember the mania.  I truly have never seen anything like it, and I doubt I ever will again.  Let us board...

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "All About Eve" (1950)

If you've been following this blog series throughout the year, you've probably deciphered by now that I'm a movie hound.  I'm sure my Oscars obsession on my Facebook page probably was another clue.  It is to me the ultimate form of entertainment, and I love seeing talent shine through on every level of the movies.  I love a good story.  I love great performances.  I even love beautiful visuals (i.e., cinematography).  I love it all.

But when one asks me what my favorite movie of all time is, I don't have an answer.  The reason is, I just can't pick ONE favorite.  I have favorites, plural.  I have 5-10 films that I would say are the greatest films I've ever seen for varying reasons.  However, only one of those films actually won Best Picture.  That would be All About Eve, written for the screen and directed by Joseph L. Mankiewicz, and based on a 1946 short story by Mary Orr called The Wisdom of Eve that was (for whatever reason) not given a title credit.  The movie set many Oscars records, some of which remain unmatched today.  It's one of the finest performance ensembles I've ever laid eyes on, the dialogue is whip-smart and the story is just brilliant.  I could gush about this film all day, but perhaps so I can get this done in less than 12 hours, we'd best start into the synopsis, so fasten your seat belts.

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "Platoon" (1986)

Oliver Stone is considered one of the great writers/directors of this generation by many.  He's vilified by many others.  What makes him so polarizing isn't really something that can be explained in a few sentences, but he's always been quite politically-opinionated, and sometimes his opinions aren't what the majority agree with.  For instance, he was a friend and supporter of the late Venezuelan President Hugo Chávez.  He also supports Wikileaks founder Julian Assange and Wikileaks contributor Bradley/Chelsea Manning.  His films have pulled no punches in such settings and situations as Turkish prisons (Midnight Express), Presidential assassinations (JFK), musical icons (The Doors) and the war in Vietnam, which he personally knew about as Stone was a combat-experienced Vietnam vet himself.  Stone actually wrote and/or directed three films about Vietnam, and the first of those was today's blog subject, Platoon.  This would be the first time a film about Vietnam was written or directed by an actual veteran of that war, and Stone based several plot details on personal experience.  His initial screenplay was actually written way back in 1968 and sat on the proverbial back burner for many years, getting modified here and there along the way by Stone, but he pretty much gave up on this ever getting made when multiple 1970's films about Vietnam such as Apocalypse Now were huge critical and commercial successes.  Finally in the 1980's, a British producer fell in love with this and another Stone vehicle, Salvador, and offered for his production company to finance both.  The seeds were sown for what would wind up 1986's Best Picture.

BEST PICTURE SHOWCASE: "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" (1975)

The Big Five.  That's an Oscar term that exists for what are considered the five most important and coveted Academy Awards: Picture, Director, Actor, Actress and Screenplay (Original or Adapted).  In the 86-year history of the Oscars, 42 films have been nominated in all of these categories, giving them a shot to win The Big Five.  Only 3 films have actually succeeded, however.  1934's It Happened One Night was the first.  1991's The Silence of the Lambs was the last.  In between, the Milos Forman-directed One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest achieved this feat as well.  Based on Ken Kesey's 1962 book of the same name, Nest remains today one of the, if not the, most revered films of Jack Nicholson's career.  It also wound up a great starting point for the careers of many others.  In preparing for their roles, the actors spent weeks in an actual institution to observe patients, and in fact, the Salem, Oregon state hospital is where the movie was filmed.  There's some comedy in this film, but there's no question the movie ultimately tries, and succeeds, to make a dramatic impact on the viewer.  Let's dive in.