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Jenelle Centeno
With the terrifically entertaining 96th Academy Awards behind us, let's look back at some of the more memorable past winners in various categories, or at least the ones that are currently streaming on Netflix (in no particular order).
In 2023, Wes Anderson directed a series of short films based on Roald Dahl stories for Netflix. It was the longest and most substantial of the four that finally got the director his long-overdue Oscar statue. (Let's pretend it's an apology for the crime that was not giving his 2023 masterpiece Asteroid City a single nomination.) The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar (taken from the 1977 collection of short stories with the same name) tells the tale of a disaffected gambler (Benedict Cumberbatch) who learns how to harness the power of his mind from a legendary yogi (Ben Kingsley) to win big. But what happens once you have everything? This 39-minute short hits that final mark beautifully.
This 1997 film from the deeply underrated director Curtis Hanson was a big hit at the Oscars, getting nominated for nine awards total. An adaptation of James Ellroy's 1990 crime novel, L.A. Confidential is basically about the war between some good cops and some bad cops in 1953 Los Angeles. Guy Pearce, Russell Crowe, Kevin Spacey, and James Cromwell all take to the suits and fedoras and hard-boiled dialogue extremely well. And Hanson provides a rock-solid foundation for Ellroy's intriguing dark mystery to play out upon. But it's Kim Basinger, playing a sex worker whose resemblance to Veronica Lake is her great blessing and curse, who steals the movie. And it was Basinger who walked away with its only acting statue.
When he was just 29 years old, writer/director Damien Chazelle's second feature film, 2014's Whiplash, took Sundance by storm. By the time he was 30, he had snagged himself a Best Adapted Screenplay nom, along with a slew of other honors for the adrenaline-fueled indie. Thank goodness he didn't let all of that early success go straight to his head and blow all his movie-making capital on a great big vanity project next! (He waited, making two more movies and winning a Best Director Oscar for La La Land before bestowing upon us the toxic epic that is Babylon.)
Director David Fincher's father Jack had a decades-long obsession with the story of the making of Orson Welles' masterpiece Citizen Kane. Specifically, he was fascinated by screenwriter Herman J. Mankiewicz (aka Mank) and how much credit he deserved for the final product, given the well-known fact that Mank was a fall-down drunk. And so Jack wrote a film script about the story, hoping he and his son could make the movie together. But the project languished and Jack passed away in 2003, never seeing it realized.
Julia Roberts put her superpowered movie stardom to its best use yet (ever?) with Steven Soderbergh's legal thriller Erin Brockovitch. Here, our beloved Pretty Woman tackled a brash real-life role and knocked it out of the park.
A Tollywood spectacle like they're only capable of making, this three-hour-plus epic from director S.S. Rajamouli tells the 1920s-set story of the best buddies Bheem (N. T. Rama Rao Jr.) and Raja (Ram Charan), who end up on opposite sides of the revolution against the British Raj. Will they fight? Will they make up? Will they sing and dance? Absolutely.
Four years after Paul Newman and Robert Redford Thelma-and-Louise'd themselves off that cliff together in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the prettiest American movie stars of their generation (give or take a Warren Beatty) reunited with their director George Roy Hill for another good time in snug pants with The Sting. And the Academy went absolutely bonkers for it, nominating the film for ten Oscars and ultimately giving it seven of them. Among the three losers that night was Robert Redford, who would win one in a few years for Best Director of Ordinary People, and who'd get an Honorary in 2002. But, fun fact, this remains his only acting nomination to date.
Early on in the filmmaking process, very serious artists writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson and actor Daniel Day-Lewis were trying to figure out a name for the lead character in their next collaboration. Naturally, their text thread led to a dick joke that, in turn, birthed the moniker "Reynolds Woodcock."
That movie became Phantom Thread, a darkly hilarious romance about a stuffy fashion designer who meets his match in a blushing waitress (Vicky Krieps). There's something perfect about it all being built on a dick joke. Phantom Thread is ultimately a satire of male domination, and an ode to the armies of women who've trussed up the egos of pampered men and gotten the jobs done in spite of them.
Like Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio, King Kong was a lifelong dream project for Lord of the Rings helmer Peter Jackson. And like Pinocchio, this passion shows in every overstuffed minute. Over three hours long, Jackson's film drips with love and ambition, as well as with a desire to take the genius of Merian C. Cooper's 1933 classic and update every square inch of it to the best of 2005's abilities.
This is one of the rare instances where a remake of a classic film ended up being a terrific idea. The original 1930 All Quiet on the Western Front was one of the very first Best Picture winners, and it remains great to this day. So, how did they make a remake work? It was a pretty simple idea, actually. Director Edward Berger took the original story, which drops audiences down in the dirt with the German soldiers during World War I, and he filmed it in Germany with German actors. Wild, right?
Leonardo DiCaprio is Jay Gatsby, the mysterious self-made millionaire who's seized ahold of the 1920s society pages of the New York set through sheer force of will (not to mention much tossing of money). Tobey Maguire is Nick Carraway, a down-on-his-luck writer who gets pulled under Gatsby's spell. And there's Joel Edgerton as an old-money prick with tight hair and tighter jodhpurs named Tom. And Carey Mulligan as Tom's wife Daisy, the dapper flapper somehow at the center of it all. And is that Elizabeth Debicki swanning around as a sumptuous female golfer?
Jason Adams is a freelance entertainment writer at Mashable. He lives in New York City and is a Rotten Tomatoes approved critic who also writes for Pajiba, The Film Experience, AwardsWatch, and his own personal site My New Plaid Pants. He's extensively covered several film festivals including Sundance, Toronto, New York, SXSW, Fantasia, and Tribeca. He's a member of the LGBTQ critics guild GALECA. He loves slasher movies and Fassbinder and you can follow him on Twitter at @JAMNPP.
The Academy Awards aren't everything. Sometimes winning movies truly represent the best films of their years; sometimes they reflect a trend or a zeitgeist that winds up looking a little backward in later years; sometimes they're just completely inexplicable.
But let's focus on the times the Academy has awarded movies that are actually pretty good, or that at least reflect their eras enough to be interesting. Here are 25 of the best award winners currently streaming on Netflix, including their most recent original Oscar-winner, Wes Anderson's The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar.
Stepping back from the cerebral science-fiction of Children of Men and Gravity, Alfonso Cuarn won his second Best Director Oscar for this semi-autobiographical drama inspired by his own childhood in Mexico City of the 1970s, in the middle of Mexico's long, violent Dirty War. Yalitza Aparicio plays Cleo Gutirrez, a Mixtec live-in maid for an upper-middle-class couple with four children whose marriage is slowly disintegrating. When husband Antonio leaves with his mistress, wife Sophia and the pregnant Cleo bond over their unexpected situations. Cuarn is wonderfully adept at creating a sense of time and place, and the performances are indelible. Roma won Best Foreign Language Film, but was also nominated for Best Picture, and it's a far stronger work than the year's actual winner, Green Book.
Nominated for six Oscars, Noah Baumbach's sensitive, devastating story of a crumbling marriage feels like a modern American update of Ingmar Bergman's Scenes from a Marriage, and earns the right to be mentioned in the same company. As warring couple Nicole and Charlie Barber, Scarlett Johansson and Adam Driver give emotionally raw performances, but the real story is Laura Dern as Nicole's lawyer Nora Fanshaw; she's one of our finest actresses, with decades of excellent work, and it was high time she won her first Oscar. Driver and Johansson were also nominated, as was Baumbach for his original screenplay
A second adaptation of the 1929 anti-war novel from Erich Maria Remarque, this version didn't take home Best Picture nor Best Director as the original 1930 version did, but still, All Quiet wound up being the second-most awarded film on Oscar night 2023, behind Best Picture winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. If it doesn't have quite the impact of the earlier adaptation, it's still a powerful film about the futility of war, set amid the trenches of World War I.
Filmmaker Craig Foster spent a year forming a relationship with a wild common octopus in a South African kelp forest, transferring some of the lessons learned to his relationship with his own son. If Foster could form a bond with such an alien intelligence in its own natural (and naturally dangerous) environment, surely there's hope for humanity? Maybe?
Perhaps not surprisingly, all of Jurassic Park's Oscar nominations and wins were in technical categories. No question that the movie is a technical marvel, with dinosaur effects that hold up shockingly well 30 years later. It's more than an effects film, though, and time has shown it to be one of Steven Spielberg's most enduring films, even if that endurance means that we're subject to sequels that have more-or-less worn out their welcomes. This one, though? Pure cinematic magic and a great time at the movies or, in our case, in front of the TV.
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