Learning a Lot Already

When I get into something new, I basically develop some degree of obsession. And this is no exception, I suppose. I realize that I am certainly not the first person to want to watch all the Academy Award winning films, by any means. Clearly, there are way bigger film buffs than I, who have seen them all. However, I do find it disappointing that some of the early ones are so difficult to find. I am learning that many of the early films weren't well preserved, and in fact because early film contained a lot of nitrate, it breaks down relatively quickly and what we have to watch today often has had to be pieced together from multiple copies, sometimes with segments being lost entirely. I'd vaguely known this before, but it still seems a shame that what were deemed the most important films less than a hundred years ago are more or less forgotten by almost everybody nowadays.

At any rate, I've discovered an interesting website, which I've added to the sidebar -- The Greatest Films. It is through this website that I learned that in the first year of the Oscars, there were actually two films that could be considered as the Best Picture winner. This is due to the fact that the categories hadn't really settled into what we have now at that time. In the first years, and also what is shown on the official Academy Award website as the Best Picture, was really the category of Best Production. So the film shown on Netflix and the Academy Award site as the Best Picture film for the years 1927/28 (awarded in 1929), Wings, received the Best Production award, while another film, Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, received the same year's award for Best Unique and Artistic Picture (a.k.a Best Artistic Quality of Production), as far as I can tell, a category that is perhaps more equivalent to the current Best Picture category than the Best Production category. However, this category only existed in the first year of the Oscars, and that's probably why it's being dropped from some of the official annals of Oscar history, although that is a total shame if you ask me.

At any rate, clearly, I need to add Sunrise to my viewing list in my quest to watch all the Best Picture awardees. And, no surprise, it is not readily available. Netflix allows me to save it in my queue, for whenever it is released, which is "unknown." IMDB tells me that it isn't widely available on DVD, but that it will be played on Turner Classic Movies on September 2, 2008 at 10 AM EST, but that's via a commentor. I'll have to see if I can confirm that otherwise and queue it up on the DVR when the time comes, I suppose. Sheesh, you'd think watching these movies would really just be a matter of making the time and sitting down to do so, but in fact, it's much more difficult than that, I guess.

Ah, well, the commentor on IMDB wasn't too far off. The TCM schedule is up on their website for September, and it shows that the movie is playing at 9 AM MST where I am, and it will even e-mail me a reminder. How handy. I've got to say, TCM is fantastic. This makes me believe that eventually, they really do play everything...

To read some really interesting stuff about the first Academy Awards, make sure to vist that Greatest Films website. C'mon, you know you want to geek out with me. Some of the most interesting factoids there include the fellow nominees who did not win (in that year, referred to as Honorable Mentions), some of which film history considers greater films than the winners (hey, we all know that feeling from recent Academy Award ceremonies, which do sometimes feel more like popularity contests...), and also really interesting commentary about snubs, some of which seem worth watching as well. Okay, it just adds more to the ol' to-do list, but it IS interesting. It is also interesting (though likely not entirely coincidental) that the Academy Awards basically occurred at the dawn of sound in the motion picture industry. The first years awardees were almost exclusively in silent film -- the only award to a non-sound film was confined to its own category because it was felt unfair to have the silent films compete with "talkies" -- so it really signals the end of an era. And don't even get me started on the internet research tangent this set me off on about Mary Pickford! Go on one of your own sometime, because it's really quite interesting...

At any rate, the first two Best Picture films, Wings and Sunrise, will have to be watched totally out of order, after July 27th and September 2nd, respectively. And when I move on to watching the Best Director films, I'll have to remember that there were also two Best Director categories in that first year, for Drama and Comedy...