Forget Christmas: for movie geeks, the period from New Year’s Eve to the third week in February is truly the most wonderful time of the year, from the endless Best of Lists and Golden Globes straight through the Saggies and Spirit Awards to the reddest carpet of all...Mama Oscar.

As per recently made-up tradition, the Screengrab will be live-blogging the Academy Awards this coming Sunday...and while we’re on the subject, can we please call a moratorium on bitching about the length of the show?  Do sports fans cry every year about the length of the Super Bowl?  Do they squeeze all the punt returns into a 65-second medley to streamline the running time? NO!  If you’re a sports fan, you want the Super Bowl to last all day. And if you’re NOT a sports fan, then why the hell are you even watching?  Just check out the highlights on the news and leave the rest of us in peace, ferchrissakes!

Sorry...just had to vent. And, if you think about it, strong opinions about trivial nonsense is pretty much the lifeblood of Oscar season. Arguments about who deserved to win and who got robbed have livened up the annual ceremony ever since Sunrise totally stole Best Unique and Artistic Production from Chang in 1928.

Sadly, our recent calls to reinstate the Best Unique and Artistic Production category have fallen on deaf ears (sorry, Synechdoche, New York), but there’s plenty more Oscar opining ahead as we here at the Screengrab salute (and condemn) THE BEST (AND WORST) BEST PICTURES OF ALL TIME!

THE BEST:

NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN (2007)



This wasn't supposed to happen. While they might win the occasional token screenplay award (as they did for Fargo), the Coen Brothers were never going to be respectable and mainstream enough to take home the top Oscar honors. Perhaps emboldened by their belated coronation of Martin Scorsese, however, the Academy saw fit to award this dark, ultra-violent neo-noir with the coveted Best Picture prize. Maybe the literary pedigree helped – after all, even Oprah had given her seal of approval to Cormac McCarthy, author of the novel No Country for Old Men. The film is certainly the most faithful adaptation of the book imaginable, and yet it couldn't be anything other than a Coen Brothers movie. Much of McCarthy's story unfolds through the sort of sardonic, deadpan dialogue that's always been right in the Coens' wheelhouse, and the more action-oriented scenes are rendered with such an uncanny grasp of McCarthy's evocative and precise geography, readers of the book may experience severe déjà vu. Javier Bardem, himself an Oscar winner for Best Supporting Actor, is a uniquely malevolent presence as the killing machine Chigurh. While there are several suspense sequences destined for the Coens greatest hits reel (notably an attack dog's pursuit of Josh Brolin's doomed Marlboro Man into the Rio Grande, and a deadly game of 'musical rooms' at a rundown motel), in its final lyrical moments, No Country for Old Men transcends genre and lays waste to any notion of the Coens as the sniggering egghead pranksters of cinema.

THE LAST EMPEROR (1987)



In truth, The Last Emperor is kind of a silly movie: its take on China's 20th century political landscape is kind of vacuous and unenlightening, and it centers around an appropriately blank protagonist played by a totally undistinguished actor who seems to have been cast only because his last name, almost too conveniently, was "Lone." But it's also an apex of Bernardo Bertolucci's unhinged formalism (or, more accurately, of Vittorio Storaro's insane but effective color schemes), and as a lush, consistently gorgeous aesthetic exercise, it's pretty untoppable. If the Academy wanted pretty and inoffensively political, at least they got one out of two.

THE DEER HUNTER (1978)



Michael Cimino’s reputation was so tarnished by the epic financial and critical failure of 1980’s (unjustly vilified) Heaven’s Gate that it’s almost impossible to watch his preceding film, 1978’s The Deer Hunter, without thinking about the once-promising director’s impending fall from grace. Purely on its own merits, however, Cimino’s Best Picture winner holds up remarkably well as a marriage of New Hollywood authenticity and Old Hollywood scope, and as a portrait of not only the Vietnam War’s toll on those who fought it, but of war’s careless misuse of human life, the latter point epitomized by the iconic Russian Roulette finale involving Christopher Walken’s battle-scarred vet. Shot by Vilmos Zsigmond with a haunting, melancholic loveliness that’s at odds with much of the material’s harrowing grimness, Cimino’s film (partially indebted to the work of Visconti) plays like a messy, sprawling novel, intimately evoking its characters’ Russian heritage and Pennsylvania steel town roots, poignantly utilizing rituals and ceremonies to express their bonds of love and friendship, and ably casting its tale as emblematic of America’s post-Vietnam moral and emotional disarray.

OLIVER! (1968)



This adaptation of Lionel Bart's stage musical version of Oliver Twist is one of those Oscar winners that isn't especially well-remembered these days and may be regarded as a fluky choice at best, which is unfair. It represents a late show of mastery by the great British director Carol Reed, who had suffered through a lousy decade since his last successful production, the 1959 Our Man in Havana. Working with a first-rate cast that includes Ron Moody as Fagin, Shani Wallis as Nancy, and non-singing (thank God) Oliver Reed as Bill Sikes, Carol Reed managed to use the rather undistinguished musical as a way to create a stylized version of the Dickens story, utilizing the energy and wit of the performers and his own cinematic brio to compensate for the limitations of Bart's songs. The movie also has its place in history for marking the last moment when Hollywood felt comfortable declaring that an all-ages movie was the best of the year; the next year, the Best Picture award would go to the adults-only Midnight Cowboy.

THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (1957)



There’s a case to be made that David Lean’s early, more modestly sized efforts were superior to his later epics, though if the legendary auteur ultimately sacrificed emotional and dramatic tautness in favor of marathon distension, it occurred at some point after 1957’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, a peerless example of larger-than-life filmmaking. As the British military commander who, in a Japanese POW camp during WWII, spearheads the construction of a bridge that his British compatriots plan on destroying, Alec Guinness brilliantly personifies the destructive folly of pride. His army officer, determined to complete the bridge as a means of proving British cultural/political supremacy, is opposed by Sessue Hayakawa’s Japanese colonel, driven to break his Western prisoners’ spirits and terrified that the British will humiliate his own men (and nation) by successfully completing their bridge-building task. Their one-on-one conflict is enlivened, rather than dwarfed, by Lean’s grand direction, culminating in a finale that’s memorable not just for its scale, but for the unforgettable look of sudden awareness, and regret, on Guinness’ face.

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

Contributors: Andrew Osborne, Scott Von Doviak, Vadim Rizov, Nick Schager, Phil Nugent