I want to make four comments about this Buzzfeed ranking of the 85 best picture winners.
Comment the first: I really and truly appreciate the level of effort that went into Kate Aurthur's piece. Sixteen thousand words or so (plus all the images, which are a pain in and of themselves) and lord only knows how many hours rewatching films she either hadn't seen before or hadn't seen for a long time. It's an impressive amount of work.
Comment the second: Taste is subjective, but any list that ranks American Beauty ahead of The Last Emperor, The Artist ahead of Gladiator, Chicago ahead of Braveheart—and any of a dozen more offenses to good taste—is objectively incorrect. So there.
Comment the third: As I note in the title of this post, there's no accounting for taste, but taste isn't all that matters when it comes to judging a list of this nature. One particular, repeated complaint jumps out at me: That the movies are too long. Wings is "long! Almost two-and-a-half-hours long." The Great Ziegfield is "ridiculously long." Around the World in 80 Days? "This damn movie is three hours long." Don't even get her started on The Last Emperor: "There was an actual law on the books during the 1980s that every movie that won the Best Picture Oscar had to be 26 hours long. The Last Emperor was 26 hours long; Broadcast News was not." You get the idea.
Now, if we were talking about action films or comedies, these complaints may have had some legitimacy. If an action flick or a laugher are longer than 105 minutes, there better be a damn good reason. But prestige, best-picture-caliber movies are a horse of a different color. I will just say that I question someone whose attention span becomes a roadblock for their critical faculties.
Comment the fourth: There is a wearying amount of hemming and hawing about ideological factors. A few examples:
—The Great Ziegfield: "there is also… blackface. No." (The film was released in 1936.)
—Cimarron: "there are some terrible racial/anti-Semitic stereotypes that are of the movie’s time, but a bummer." (The film was released in 1931.)
—Around the World in 80 Days: "features horrifyingly cringe-inducing ethnic stereotypes."
—Dances with Wolves: "a white-person fantasy about bonding with Native Americans."
—Driving Miss Daisy: "its racial politics do not work anymore."
—Braveheart: "It’s impossible to watch Braveheart without thinking about Mel Gibson’s politics, whether it’s the movie’s anachronistic obsession with personal freedom." (We're less than halfway through the list; I'm going to go ahead and stop there.)
That last one is interesting to me, because it shows Aurthur wants to have it both ways: She is not only criticizing films that weren't problematic at the time for being problematic now, but also criticizing films that reflect modern sensibilities for failing to conform to the sensibilities of the timeframe being portrayed.*
As I joked on Twitter, "The Last Emperor is a paean to Communist repression. However, it's ALSO BETTER THAN AMERICAN BEAUTY." The point, though it was lost on some, is that when you're dealing with great art you need to set aside your ideological priors as best as you can. Believe me, I understand allowing one's ideology to influence how they feel about a film (I'd be lying if I said that my distaste for imperial Japan did not influence my distaste for The Wind Rises, though I maintain that I would have disliked that messily-plotted-but-pretty cartoon regardless). Allowing one's ideology to dominate how they feel about films, however, is another thing altogether. The politicized life, and all that.
Or, as Glenn Kenny noted in a subtweet** of the list in question:
"All About Eve" really IS a great movie. But it's not a great movie just because it repeatedly passes the Bechdel Test yo.
*I question the description of Braveheart as obsessed with personal freedom; it's much more nationalistic than anything else. The "Freeeedoooommmmmm" howled at the end of the film was less about personal agency and more about the oppression of the Scots writ large. Also, the idea that the peasants were just kinda cool with prima nocta is an odd one.
**At least, I'm pretty sure he was subtweeting Aurthur.