In Pursuit of Oscarness

Here we are in the wake of the 73rd Annual Academy Awards and, with all the questions that have spawned so much punditry and second-guessing now answered, a new question comes to the fore:

So what?

The Academy Awards don't recognize the best movie of the year. For many people, this is self-evident — and if it wasn't before Sunday night, it very well may be now after seeing the tres-mediocre Gladiator honored. But it's more than just a matter of different tastes; the Academy is a function of the industry that supports it, and so its incestuous attitudes — nominating almost exclusively American films — and its lack of accountability — there's no saying that Academy members have even seen all the nominated films (much less all the films that should be considered for nomination), swinging things inexorably in favor of popular films — come as no surprise.

What the Best Picture Oscar recognizes is not the film whose quality surpasses all others released in the world in a 12-month window, but the film that exhibits the most Oscarness. What is Oscarness? That's what the Flak film writers have set out to determine. Rather that offering up our five favorite films of each of the past 10 years, we're considering the five nominees put forth for Best Picture and examining what motivated the Academy to render the judgments they did, whether right or wrong, and offer up the choice we feel should have been made.

Note that the year of the Academy Awards ceremony is the year after the films are released; thus, Dances With Wolves, released in 1990, won the 1991 Academy Award for Best Picture.

1991 | Dances With Wolves

1992 | The Silence of the Lambs

1993 | Unforgiven

1994 | Schindler's List

1995 | Forrest Gump

1996 | Braveheart

1997 | The English Patient

1998 | Titanic

1999 | Shakespeare in Love

2000 | American Beauty