A Cinematic Quest: Watch All Films Nominated for a Major Academy Award
SO MANY MOVIES, SO LITTLE TIME
When first I met Karen, the woman I would before long wed, we discovered that we shared many interests, including an abiding love of film. As our relationship began, so too did we commence our joint journey through the world of cinema. At a time when video-rental stores still existed, we would visit one or another of them in an attempt to locate a movie we both wanted to watch—or in some cases, to rewatch. Karen wanted to share with me films she loved that I had never seen, and I wanted to do the same with her. Fortunately, our tastes and appreciation of the medium almost completely aligned (and still do).
A Blockbuster Video store in Fairbanks, Alaska in 2018
©2018 Will Buckner
In those early days of screening movies together, Karen and I decided that a good way to select films would be to choose those that had garnered the Academy Award for Best Picture. Our subsequent research unearthed that, during the first Oscar presentation, which celebrated films released in 1927-28, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Wings (1927) in the category “Outstanding Picture,” and Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans (1927) in the category “Unique and Artistic Production.” At the time, the Academy deemed both movies Best Picture. The following year, though, AMPAS dispensed with such distinctions, retroactively declaring Wings as the winner of 1927-28’s top trophy. Regardless of the Academy’s decision, Karen and I opted to include both films on our list of Best Pictures. Several years passed before we could obtain a copy of Sunrise, but it turned out to be well worth the wait. The first Hollywood effort by German director F. W. Murnau—acclaimed for Nosferatu, eine Symphonie des Grauens (1922), his adaptation of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel Dracula—Sunrise is widely considered among critics and filmmakers as one of the greatest movies ever made. In my own article, “The Best of the Best Pictures,” my tally counts Sunrise as a member of that lofty group.
As Karen and I wended our way through all of the Best Pictures, we found that we had both seen most of them already. Still, we decided to watch them together, and of course, to make sure to screen those few that neither of us had previously seen. Before too long, we exhausted the list.
We pondered in which direction we should next take our cinematic experience. After some deliberation, Karen and I arrived at the notion of watching not just those films that had netted the ultimate Oscar, but also those that had earned a Best Picture nomination. All at once, we measured the entries on our to-see menu of films not by tens, but by hundreds.
A glance at a section of our to-see film spreadsheet.
©2024 David R. George III
But Karen and I did not stop there. Rather, we put together a catalogue of all movies that had ever been nominated for what we deemed the “Big Eight” Oscars: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Adapted Screenplay. (The Academy Awards for writing have actually varied through the years, and have included such bygone categories as Best Title Writing, Best Writing Achievement, Best Original Story, Best Story and Screenplay, and Best Story. For Karen and me, any film nominated in any of those categories warranted a place on our newly expansive list.) Our compendium of movies to watch ballooned to well over a thousand. As of December 2024, the list numbered 1,745 films.
But choosing to watch an old film does not make doing so easy, or in some cases, even possible. Karen and I learned, with great disappointment, that one of the Best Picture nominees no longer exists. Director Ernst Lubitsch’s The Patriot (1928), starring Emil Jannings, scored a Best Writing Academy Award, while collecting four other nominations—Best Pic, Best Actor, Best Director, and Best Art Direction—and yet no known print of the movie has survived.
A handful of other films on our extensive list also no longer exist in their entirety: The Way of All Flesh (1927), The Private Life of Helen of Troy (1927), Glorious Betsy (1928), Wonder of Women (1929), and The Rogue Song (1930). Still other movies can be seen in only a few—or in some cases, a single—venue. The only surviving print of Best Picture nominee The White Parade (1934), for example, resides at The University of California, Los Angeles film archive.
Of the 1,739 extant movies nominated for one of the Big Eight Academy Awards, Karen and I have so far made our way through 1,660 of them. That leaves our list with just 79 remaining movies. But even as we strive to watch all of those films, we understand that we are chasing a moving target. Our list will continue to expand as new movies are produced, released, and nominated for Oscars, meaning that we can only hope to catch up, however briefly, before once more falling behind. For Karen and me, though, the prospect of being able to watch more new, Academy Award–worthy films definitely falls onto the plus side of the ledger.
©2024 David R. George III
