And the Oscar Goes to...

La La Land won 6 Oscars for
2016, but not Best Picture.
(movie poster photo dwm)

  There are 10 movies nominated as the Best Picture for the 2021 Academy Awards:

  Nightmare Alley

  Don't Look Up

  Dune

  Drive My Car

  Belfast

  Licorice Pizza

  The Power of the Dog

  West Side Story

  King Richard

  and CODA.

Since Covid-19 closed things down in 2020, we haven't returned to the theater.  Like many people, we watched a lot of movies on the smaller screen in our living room, streaming them through one app or another.

Of the Best Picture Nominees, we've seen two, Don't Look Up and King Richard.  We've seen the original West Side Story and plan to watch the updated version.  

Argo (2012) is the most recent Best Picture winner we've seen.  Go back 40 years, I'd say we saw most of the winners from 1981 to 1991.  That's about the time our kids came along, so the movies we started watching weren't the kind of films to receive nominations.

The winners I recall seeing include: Gone with the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1943), All About Eve (1950), From Here to Eternity (1953), The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), The Apartment (1960), West Side Story (1961), The Sound of Music (1965), The Godfather (1972), The Sting (1973), The Godfather Part II (1974), Rocky (1976), Kramer v Kramer (1979), Ordinary People (1980), Chariots of Fire (1981), Gandhi (1982), Amadeus (1984), Platoon (1986), Rain Man (1988), Driving Miss Daisy (1989), Dances with Wolves (1990), Forrest Gump (1994), Titanic (1997), American Beauty (1999), The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (2003), Slumdog Millionaire (2008), The King's Speech (2011), and Argo (2012).

King Richard is an excellent movie that tells the compelling story of Venus and Serena Williams and their family.  Don't Look Up is listed as a Comedy/Disaster movie and that's an apt description - it certainly offers political commentary on our current times that seems on the mark and a bit frightening.

Of the winners I've seen - the ones I'll gladly watch again are: All About Eve, The Apartment, Rocky, and Forrest Gump.

Get your popcorn ready - I bet you can watch all twelve nominees by the end of the week.