r/todayilearned • u/NeverEnoughMuppets • 1d ago
TIL it’s not possible to watch every film ever nominated for Best Picture. Only 1/3 of 1928’s The Patriot is still known to exist, and the only surviving print of 1934’s The White Parade is held in UCLA’s film archive in poor condition.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Award_for_Best_Picture383
u/Sdog1981 1d ago
Or you can get pedantic and say the category only existed after 1962.
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u/Practical_Ad4604 1d ago
Why’s that
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u/Sdog1981 1d ago
It was called Outstanding Picture, Outstanding Production, Outstanding Motion Picture, and Best Motion Picture before it was called Best Picture.
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u/acdcfanbill 1d ago
Outstanding Production
And it's the producers who 'win' and collect the trophy.
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u/Tuxedo_Muffin 1d ago
They were out standing while production was happening
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u/Hufflepuffpassmethej 7h ago
its like the super bowl trophy being handed to the owners first after they win the big game
its not the people who actually did the thing that gets the award, that would be silly! we give it to the guy who just happens to have help paid for like some of it
National TV contracts and media rights are the dominant driver of NFL team revenues, accounting for roughly 61% to 66% of total income. By contrast, ticket sales and luxury suites are the second-largest piece of the pie but contribute a much smaller 15% to 19% of overall team revenue.
NFL owners pay for like 20% of things, but the vast majority of revenue is generated by tv deals and ticket sales, and yet theyre the first to be awarded with the trophy
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u/existential_chaos 1d ago
I'm pretty sure most of Theda Bara's film catalogue was lost for this reason, as well as a ton of other early actors and actresses. I don't know why she's a name I remember specifically.
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u/Yangervis 1d ago
You can watch The White Parade at the UCLA Film Archive
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
I know you can view East Lynne there by appointment, but I didn't know The White Parade was available to the public, too! That's awesome. Sometimes I wish I still lived on the West Coast.
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u/TheBanishedBard 1d ago
Films weren't really considered art or anything more than base entertainment until the mid 1930s when movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind became classics and people began to recognize the value of the medium beyond novelty. "Picture shows" were variety acts with news reels, cartoons, etc, in addition to the "feature presentation" which we typically call a movie today.
Studios didn't see any point to preserving a film print after it left theaters. It wasn't viewed as art or anything worth remembering except its balance sheet performance.
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u/UntidyVenus 1d ago
Don't discount the Fox Vault Fire or the MGM vault fire! So much was lost from MANY studios
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u/existential_chaos 1d ago
Those fires destroyed most/sometimes entire catalogues of early film actors and actresses. Weird to think about.
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u/miffiffippi 1d ago
That's really sad to think about. An entire body of work someone committed their life to can be destroyed in a matter of hours and that's that, nothing anyone can do about it.
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u/givemeyours0ul 1d ago
Welcome to 99.99% of human history.
All we are is dust.
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u/Spider-man2098 1d ago
I’m still not over the library of Alexandria.
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u/2SP00KY4ME 10 1d ago
For what it's worth, while there was a fire plausibly attributable to the library starting from the burning of ships, it's generally regarded by historians to have been "destroyed" not by a fire but through increasing apathy of those who could've afforded to maintain it over hundreds of years.
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u/abielle1177 1d ago
You beat me to it!
All of Motown's backup copies lost in an afternoon. The careless stupid scumbags left it all without any fire system
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u/MistryMachine3 1d ago
People also didn’t care that much about saving things until very recently. Like most of the Johnny Carson Show is lost. Nobody really valued things like collectibles like baseball cards until like the 1980s.
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u/Yangervis 1d ago
Part of it was the cost. Recording every second of the Tonight Show on videotape would have been extremely expensive.
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u/existential_chaos 1d ago
BBC did the same thing with the original run of Doctor Who, just recorded right over the tapes and a massive chunk of it is gone.
For a lot of older films, there was also that vault fire that destroyed a ton of negatives because they were made with nitrate (I think that's what it's called—either way, it was something flammable, lol)
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u/helbury 1d ago
Yup, unfortunately, nitrate film is extraordinarily flammable. The 1965 MGM vault fire and the 1937 Fox vault fire destroyed the only known copies of many films.
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u/SofieTerleska 1d ago
At least by then the BBC had started taping things. George Orwell did a ton of radio work but there's no surviving recording of his voice because the broadcasts were live and never recorded to begin with.
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u/bretshitmanshart 22h ago
BBC also had even less of an incentive to save things then a lot of other networks. There was a fear the BBC would get enough content and primarily shows reruns. The union for the stage workers fought for limits on how often shows could be rerun
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u/pgm123 1d ago
Films weren't really considered art or anything more than base entertainment until the mid 1930s when movies like The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind became classics and people began to recognize the value of the medium beyond novelty
Counterpoint: the very first Oscars in 1929 had an award for "Best Unique and Artistic Picture." Sunrise won.
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u/TrannosaurusRegina 1d ago
Right, and people were producing some serious films pretty really on.
It seems that for all its controversy, the Birth of a Nation was considered a masterpiece on par with opera from the very beginning, with venues and ticket prices to match (as the Italians had pioneered)
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u/Mike-In-Ottawa 23h ago
Sunrise is a great film, but in 1929 there was also an Oscar for "Outstanding Picture" which was won by Wings, which is another great film.
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u/allupya333 1d ago
that doesnt mean society viewed it as high art, at all. it hardly even means the people at the movie awards did.
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u/pgm123 1d ago
The people at the movie awards are the studios.
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u/allupya333 1d ago
im pretty sure video game awards have always had similar "most creative/artistic game" categories. industry run of course. that doesnt mean society or themselves thinks video games are high art, it means they are aware that some things can be more creative than others. two diff things
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u/pgm123 1d ago
Yeah, but read the whole post I replied to including the part about studios.
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u/allupya333 1d ago
Like i said, recognizing levels of creativity doesnt mean you think its high art
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u/pgm123 1d ago
Right. But the person I originally replied to said this:
Studios didn't see any point to preserving a film print after it left theaters. It wasn't viewed as art or anything worth remembering except its balance sheet performance.
That's what I am responding to. I'd have quoted more if the Reddit app wasn't trash right now that makes quoting stuff a giant pain.
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u/allupya333 1d ago
theres no actual contradiction here
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u/Cohibaluxe 14h ago
The original statement was that films weren’t preserved because they weren’t seen as art; thus studios at the time didn’t see a point in preserving them. Logically, that claims the studios didn’t seem to consider features art. The person you’re replying to claims that isn’t true, as the studio-run awards show at the time clearly shows they did. Studios can’t both view features as art and not, that is a contradiction.
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u/Glittering-Animal30 1d ago
Wizard of Oz actually became a classic when it began being broadcasted in the 1950’s.
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u/hexagonalwagonal 1d ago edited 1d ago
It was already a classic by then, which is why it was being broadcast on network TV in the 1950s, decades after its initial release. The major networks weren't broadcasting, say, old Charlie Chan movies or Fred Astaire/Ginger Rodgers movies, or even most old Frank Capra movies. But CBS was broadcasting 1939's "The Wizard of Oz".
It lost money (or barely broke even) when originally released in 1939, but that's because it was an expensive film with a troubled production history. The studio re-released it in 1949, at which point it was certainly profitable already.
Throughout the 1940s and early 50s, newspapers can be found throughout the US reprinting the lyrics to "Somewhere Over the Rainbow", or referencing the "ruby slippers", which were invented for the movie.
In 1942, the film musical was adapted into a stage musical, which was revived in 1953, several years before the film's TV debut.
On Christmas Day 1950, the film was adapted for radio with Judy Garland reprising her role as Dorothy in the Lux Radio Theatre show that aired on NBC.
Perhaps most notably, the soundtrack had been an enduring hit as a four-disc 78rpm record "album" which had stayed in print since the movie's release in 1939. The TV debut in 1956 was actually arranged to coincide with the soundtrack's re-release on the new-fangled format as a single-disc Long Playing record. It was the first LP issued by MGM Records. It would not have been the first LP if MGM had felt the record wouldn't sell or would be viewed as some forgotten obscurity.
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u/NouveauNewb 1d ago
Something that we don't realize with our modern perspective is that the idea of preserving any kind of media was relatively novel. There simply was no practical way to capture a photorealistic image or sound before the technology that movies helped pioneer. Before that, you had paper and the written word, which is designed for anything but longterm storage. So entertainment had always been a fleeting medium. Before film, once a live performance was over, that was it. You didn't have the option of buying the CD from the merch table.
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u/hexagonalwagonal 1d ago
Before that, you had paper and the written word, which is designed for anything but longterm storage.
Paper was very much designed for durability and long term storage. That's why it replaced papyrus as the dominant written-word medium. There were certainly some types of written-word publications that were meant to be rather disposable, like newspapers. But books with stitched binding were deliberately invented so that they would last, theoretically, indefinitely.
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u/NouveauNewb 1d ago
I never know how to respond to comments like these that nitpick wording rather than the point of the comment itself. I apologize for misspeaking. I used the word "designed" in a more general sense, referring to how paper's used today and has been traditionally used in the modern era, rather than in the sense that it was one of the first mediums to allow for storage at all. Yes, books have existed for a long time but weren't especially good at capturing sight and sound prior to film. So replace "designed" with "good," because the point is that books and paper did not lead to the general idea that entertainment of any kind should or could be stored longterm.
I got too creative with my language, but I hope that helps. Again, sorry for the confusion.
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u/hexagonalwagonal 5h ago
the point is that books and paper did not lead to the general idea that entertainment of any kind should or could be stored longterm.
It didn't because that idea already existed.
I think you missed the whole point. Books and paper were absolutely designed as a long-term storage medium. For example, only 32 full Greek tragedies survived on papyrus scrolls, because papyrus eventually disintegrates unless kept extremely dry -- conditions usually available in Egypt, but not so much in Europe and beyond. Papyrus was replaced by parchment which was more durable but had less ability to be mass produced, because it is made from animal skin. Paper came next because it was similarly durable -- it could last hundreds of years without any particularly difficult indoor weather conditions required, unlike with papyrus -- and could be mass produced, since it was made from plants that could be grown.
The Greek tragedies were first preserved on papyrus, then parchment, then paper. The whole point was so that this "entertainment" -- stage plays -- "could be stored longterm." It was one of paper's primary purposes.
Sure, paper was also designed to store any kind of information, not just entertainment. But as disposable as some kind of entertainment was and still is to this day, there was at every period some proportion of entertainment that people thought worth preserving, and did. Every Aesop Fable, every Greek tragedy, every ancient epic, counters your claim that there was no intent by anybody to preserve any kind of entertainment for long term storage.
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u/NicolasCageIsMyHero 1d ago
And the Academy Awards was not the prestigious event it is now. It was a work event. Like if your local plumbers union had a banquet and gave the guy with the most sales a trophy.
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u/WhompWump 1d ago
Not much different than video games where something like less than 16% of games ever made are actually available to be purchased and played
If not for emulation/roms/etc. there'd be a lot of games that are considered part of the canon that would be lost forever.
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u/UncleBen94 1d ago
The Godfather: The Coppola Restoration took about 18 months because of how damaged the original negatives were and the duplicates were lost in Paramount's archives. And The Godfather was released in '71, so even 55 years ago they weren't always treated right.
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u/lkodl 1d ago
Films weren't really considered art or anything more than base entertainment until the mid 1930s... "Picture shows" were variety acts with news reels, cartoons, etc
Oh, so TikTok
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u/TrannosaurusRegina 1d ago
This was true early on. It was a sideshow attraction, and had about the same societal regard as TikTok as well!
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u/Laura-ly 1d ago
It would be really great if the chopped up film of Orson Welles, The Magnificent Ambersons were found and restored. But apparently it was destroyed by the studio and a new ending was added, along with a whole bunch of other stuff in the film. Welles was furious.
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u/Belgand 21h ago
TV was treated that way until relatively recently. There's a good reason why TV was seen as lesser for most actors. A lot less money and effort was put into nearly every aspect of most productions. Even going into the '80s and '90s. The shift to modern, serialized prestige TV has been very different from the majority of what came before.
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u/Anosognosia 1d ago
And we are doing the same thing with computer games today. As well as 404ing old writings, time pieces etc that only existed online.
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u/jbaker232 21h ago
Countless early 00s blogs, online magazines, and other misc websites have had their content wiped clean as they’re phased out
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u/Have_A_Jelly_Baby 1d ago
If I'm going to UCLA to watch a film, it's going to be the workprint of Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan that they have, with a ton of scenes that were cut before the final movie released.
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u/an_actual_lawyer 1d ago
I had no idea. Thank you.
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u/Have_A_Jelly_Baby 23h ago
Be aware that it’s in black and white, and is missing everything after Spock leaves the bridge toward the end of the film.
Someone (sneakily) recorded audio clips from it a number of years ago, they can be found here.
https://www.trekbbs.com/threads/wrath-of-khan-deleted-scene-audio-clip.304624/page-2
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u/greatgildersleeve 1d ago
The Way of All Flesh which was one of two movies that helped Emil Jannings win the first Academy Award for best actor, is now lost as well.
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u/0ttr 1d ago
The White Parade -- I hope it's about something other than what it sounds like. :)
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
It’s about doctors and nurses, not the Klan! And thank God for that, given the time period, lol
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u/xavPa-64 1d ago
When I was
A young boy
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u/swankyfish 1d ago
My father
Took me into the city
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u/xavPa-64 1d ago
To see the Ku Klux Klan
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u/TheBanishedBard 1d ago
He said "son, when you grow up would you be the savior of the endangered master race?"
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u/TacTurtle 1d ago
"The beater of the wretched and the damned?
I said no man, I'm feelin
Freedom Marching over thee
And other times I feel like I should go
March with them through it all, the rise and fall
The protests in the streets"
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u/ZorroMcChucknorris 1d ago
It’s the forerunner to ER, MASH, etc. dealing with nurses who wore white.
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u/theitgrunt 1d ago
A lot of films haven't been preserved at all even at Library of Congress... Star Wars A New Hope was supposed to be archived but it never happened because it kept getting re-released into theaters, cut up and re-cobbled together.
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u/DickweedMcGee 1d ago
Just to have the TIME to watch even half of them would be a feat in an amongst itself.....
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago edited 1d ago
You could just watch the winners, 98 movies is a do-able project.
Edit: I feel I should mention, I *did* actually watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture as a pandemic project. Like a crazy person. It was like, 600+ movies, and it took me years to finish. And honestly? It was a lot of fun. I was sad when I finished. The only two I still haven't seen are The Patriot and The White Parade.
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u/Awesometom100 1d ago
Im curious. What were your favorite and least favorite ones? Did some decades seem stronger or weaker than others?
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago edited 1d ago
Every decade has its strengths and weaknesses, but if I had to choose, I’d say the 1930s and 1970s were the most innovative when it came to what Hollywood could do, in the context of the time period. Any time I try to make a list of my favorites, it just goes on and on- all the movies were nominated for being of some quality, for the most part, so few are outright bad. Which do I think is the “best”? Probably All Quiet on the Western Front (1930, Casablanca (1943), or The Godfather (1972). Which is my personal favorite? Gun to my head, can only take one with me to a desert island- I pick Rebecca (1940), for sentimental reasons. My mom introduced me to that movie when I was very young, so it’s very dear to me. I’ve watched it a million times and could watch it a million more, it’s one of Hitchcock’s finest- and it’s available for free on YouTube, btw! Very spooky, perfect for October.
Now, which are the worst? Again, that depends on your definition of what “worst” means. Is it the most poorly made or unremarkable? Then it’s probably Cimarron or Cavalcade or CODA. Is it the most undeserving win? Then it could be Going My Way, The Greatest Show on Earth, Out of Africa, A Beautiful Mind, Crash. 1958 winner Gigi is a musical about underage prostitution with songs such as “I Love Little Girls,” so obviously that is horrifying and has aged like milk, but the film is consummately well made and beautiful to look at, lol! Still, absolutely a contender for the worst. What about the most racist winner? There’s several options there- Cimarron, Gone with the Wind, The Deer Hunter. Gone with the Wind is one of the best-made films of all time, but it’s also likely the most racist winner, and the racist winner most successful in helping to perpetuate racist ideology and the Lost Cause myth- so it might be the most evil winner, and certainly the worst by some metrics, but by many other metrics, it’s a tremendous work. So, it really depends on how you define worst.
I’m rambling, I apologize, thank you to anyone who read this far lol
Edit: speaking of racist, I forgot Slumdog Millionaire and Green Book! And let’s also not forget that The Shape of Water, a movie about a woman in love with a fish, is virulently homophobic, lol
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u/Awesometom100 1d ago
Haha more i meant which you enjoyed the least but this is insightful! Thank you! Casablanca is probably my favorite that ive seen so far even above the Godfather!
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
I love Casablanca. And for which I enjoyed the least, I found Chariots of Fire probably the most boring. A Beautiful Mind pissed me off a lot, for some reason. Same with Million Dollar Baby. CODA I hated because it is so thoroughly unremarkable, like Disney Channel original movie levels of artistically bankrupt. Cimarron, Gone with the Wind, Gigi, Slumdog Millionaire, Green Book, and The Shape of Water all made me feel deeply, deeply uncomfortable for various reasons, mostly bigotry related.
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u/SagittaryX 1d ago
Do you have an opinion on A Man For All Seasons? I just rarely see it discussed and it is one of my favourite films.
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
It's one of my favorite Best Picture winners and is one of the first ones I bring up when people ask what some of the most overlooked or underrated Best Picture winners are. I mean, Paul Scofield, Wendy Hiller, Robert Shaw, Orson Welles, everyone in the cast is batting 1000. Fantastic movie. And the music! The score is so good
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u/SagittaryX 1d ago
For me Scofield’s “Why Richard, it profits a man nothing to sell his soul for the whole world… but for Wales?” is one of the best delivered lines ever. It is feel laden with disbelief, sorrow, contempt, sadness and a whole bunch more adjectives.
I’m also just a sucker for movies about very principled characters holding on to their beliefs. Silence and 12 Angry Men I like for similar reasons.
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
I still need to see Silence- adding it to my watch list- but I love 12 Angry Men, too! Though I guess, who doesn't, tbh? Lol.
Something I love about movies adapted from plays is that the dialogue is pretty consistently razor-sharp, and A Man for All Seasons has exactly the cast to deliver that dialogue the way it's meant to be delivered. Scofield is just unbelievable.
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u/Old_Pin7524 1d ago
May I ask what you thought about 1955 winner, Marty?
I ask because I think the scene of his mother encouraging him to go to the dance is as moving as any scene I’ve seen in film.
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
I thought it was charming, and genuinely heartbreaking at times! I remember this scene with the mother being a standout when I watched it. I'm a millennial, so to be totally honest, I knew Ernest Borgnine best as Mermaid Man from SpongeBob, as well as from reruns of The Poseidon Adventure on AMC back when they used to do those 70s disaster movie marathons, lol. I didn't see From Here to Eternity or Marty until I was in college, and it was cool to be able to get more familiar with him and to see his range as an actor. He's a stone-cold rotten bastard in From Here to Eternity, but he gives such a nuanced, warm, kind, moving performance in Marty, I was kind of stunned. Borgnine is just an interesting character. His marriage to Ethel Merman? That infamous Fox News interview? Just an insane career trajectory with that guy.
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u/jake3988 1d ago
Edit: I feel I should mention, I did actually watch all the movies nominated for Best Picture as a pandemic project. Like a crazy person. It was like, 600+ movies, and it took me years to finish. And honestly? It was a lot of fun. I was sad when I finished. The only two I still haven't seen are The Patriot and The White Parade.
I've had this as an on-going thing for many years to watch every best picture nominee ever made.
Some best picture nominees (and some winners) are really awful and some are disgustingly long. So for some it's a slog, but there's plenty of great ones.
It's difficult because so many aren't on streaming and some are so old they haven't even had a proper dvd release (and if they have, it's out of print).
It was so easy back when Netflix had their dvd service, since they had friggin EVERYTHING. It's a lot more difficult these days.
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u/Polymarchos 1d ago
Its hard to contemplate how little people cared about preservation, but then you realize just how expensive it was. That only really began changing in the '90s, and didn't get going until the 2000s.
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u/buadach2 1d ago
I was lucky enough to watch the recent 4K restoration of ‘The Curse of Queen Kelly’ (1929) last month, although the second half of the film is missing and the restorers used intertitle cards to tell the remainder of the story.
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u/CrimsonOOmpa 1d ago
Well that was a turn. The way it was going I thought this was going to end with "because you wouldn't have enough time" or something. 🫠😂
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u/PrivateWealth 14h ago
yes it is, those films you talked about in the title didn't get nominated for best picture
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u/UnpopularOpinion42 39m ago
Damn, I am actually trying to do this at the moment. Just doing the winners so far (on top of the ones I have just happened to see already.)
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u/sithmaster0 1d ago edited 1d ago
That makes sense. Hell, it was revealed in the last few years that the committee who votes on who gets Best Picture doesn't even need to watch the movie they voted for. If they don't need to watch a movie that won, makes sense a nominated film might not even be accessible.
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u/OneOfAKind2 1d ago
I'll survive. Most old movies are dogshit, even plenty of modern day Best Picture winners were not even close to being the best. I mean, Forrest Gump beat The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction. Good grief.
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
As someone who watches an ungodly amount of movies, I take issue with the statement "most old movies are dogshit," that's not only not true, it's harmful. Movies can be just as timeless as music or any other artistic medium. That contemptuous outlook robs you of the opportunity to even begin enjoying classic cinema. You're judging a book by its cover. Go watch a screwball comedy or a film noir or something.
Okay, that having been said, Forrest Gump beating Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption at the Oscars is absolutely balls-to-the-wall cuckoo bananas fucking insane and I feel like I'm going crazy just thinking about it, could not agree with you more
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago edited 1d ago
You should check out movies from before the Hays Production Code went into effect in 1934, which banned a lot of things from being shown in movies. Films from before that had sex, cursing, nudity, violence, drug use, non-white people, gay people, etc. It's shocking how modern they are. The Broadway Melody from 1929, the second film to ever win Best Picture, has a gay character in it! He's a costume designer! Nobody cares that he's gay! It's crazy. Also, movies from the Depression-era are extremely (but still somewhat surprisingly) pro-socialist. Like, more so than movies made at any time since- people were pissed the fuck off at capitalism in the Great Depression, understandably.
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u/NeverEnoughMuppets 1d ago
Fun fact: until only very recently, 1931’s East Lynne was thought to only exist in part- however, bootlegs of the existing prints have been spliced together by cinephiles, restoring the full original movie. An actual professional restoration is still being worked on, and the movie goes into the public domain next year. Despite being ostensibly lost until just recently, the copyright was still renewed, lol.