Ray Canzanese

The Academy Award for Best Picture is awarded to the film that is determined to be the best movie produced in that calendar year.  The award takes into consideration the writing, direction, production, cinematography, acting, costumes, dancing, music, and all other aspects of the film.

In 2007, I was 23 years old, and I sat watching the Academy Awards by myself in my room as I worked on schoolwork.  The Academy was celebrating 80 years of the ceremony, and did so with a montage of every best picture film since 1927.  I put down my pen to watch, only to realize I had not seen a majority of these films.  This thought brewed in the back of mind for a few days, until it came up in conversation with my girlfriend.  She said that she too had not seen most of the films.  So, on that day, we resolved to watch every picture, starting from the beginning, that we had not seen.  It was to be an epic quest, but thanks to local libraries and Netflix, it was definitely attainable.

So we started by compiling what we affectionately referred to as “The List”.  We went through and checked off every movie we had seen.  And so it began…

The following table lists all the winners.  An ‘X’ under our names indicates we saw the film together.  An ‘O’ indicates that we had already seen the movie before we started this quest.

Two films are listed for 1928 because there was no best picture award that year, but rather two equivalent awards, Most Outstanding Production and Most Artistic Quality of Production, won by Wings and Sunrise, respectively.  Both of these films are silent films.