Do We Know What a Best Picture Winner Looks Like Anymore?
2007: No Country for Old Men
No Country may be more conventional than the other films on this list, but it was up for awards opposite a film that could have been designed with a Best Picture Oscar in mind: Atonement. The latter was a sweeping epic drama with war and romance that concluded with a monologue which explicitly spelled out the theme of the film over seven minutes, while the former was a quirky, violent genre hybrid whose ambiguous closing speech baffled so many audiences that Oscar pundits expected it would cost the film Best Picture. Atonement may have taken the Golden Globe, but No Country won the Oscar.
2008: Slumdog Millionaire
Slumdog Millionaire was such an awards season juggernaut that it's easy to dismiss how unlikely a winner it really was. Films rarely take home Best Picture without a single acting nomination, let alone films that star an all-Indian cast of unknowns. Suffice it to say that when Warner Bros. planned to send the film straight to DVD (before Fox Searchlight swooped in to save it), the conventional wisdom was that a film like this would never even get nominated for an Oscar, let alone win the biggest one of all.
2009: The Hurt Locker
The Hurt Locker is the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner ever made, and you barely even have to adjust for inflation. You'd have to go back to Marty in 1955 to find a Best Picture winner that's made less than Locker's $14.7 million tally, and considering how rapidly movie ticket prices have risen over the last century, that's a fairly impressive achievement. Still, it would have been one thing for the underseen Locker to win the Oscar any other year; it's another thing entirely for it to win against Avatar, the highest-grossing film of all time. This isn't David vs. Goliath -- it's Baby David vs. a Goliath who comes riding a dragon, armed with two bazookas.
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If any fantasy film deserved a Best Picture award, it was Return of the King. A feast for the eyes and mind.
It's weird that I can rattle off the Best Pictures winners in the 70's 80's, and 90's, but I had to be reminded about half of the movies you mentioned.
Here is what kills me about all the talk about THL being the lowest grossing Best Pic winner ever it makes it sound like a little art house flic when in fact it has more tension & action then just about any film released last year. It looks great & is as entertaining as any film I've ever seen. It is the best war movie since "Saving Private Ryan". It doesn't have that film's epic set pieces, but it has acting that at least matches Spielberg's war classic & minute for minute is much more intense.
It was marketed horribly, but to hear Bigelow's & Boal's comment it apparently was a minor miracle that it was marketed (& released) at all. It is clearly a better movie than "Avatar".
Oscar got it right this year for a film that was criminally under-seen (like Bigelow's other great movie, "Near Dark"). Let's hope DVD, et.al. changes all of that.
The Hurt Locker did not deserve the Oscar and it has nothing to with the marketing or box office. It has everything to do with the message. The Hurt Locker inspires chaos and destruction while Avatar inspires peace and hope. What do you think our world needs more of? Certainly not more positive publicity for a seven-year-old war that has long since expended its good purpose. However, the final decision doesn't matter anyways. The Hurt Locker may have the Oscar but it will soon be forgotten while Avatar will endure for the ages.
I don't get it, who would not want this to be here?
It takes more thought to come up with a good blog comment then a bad one. For instance, it takes much less brain effort to say “you suck” than to say “I profoundly disagree with the simplistic drivel that has been touted on this networked opinion delivery system.” As evidenced by the number of moronic comments that are left on various blogs, it appears that the majority of blog readers have the cranial capacity of cattle who spend a lot of time defecating in the same pool they drink from.
this was a prodigious cut thanks for the help.