Justin at the Movies

Past & Present

// January 28th, 2010 // Random Movie Musings

I had this thought the other day that centered around Avatar winning best picture this year. I wondered how many movies have won best picture without even getting a writing nomination. I thought this because I can almost guarantee that Avatar won’t be nominated for best original screenplay. Like I have stated before, I like Avatar, I think it’s a cool movie, but the plot isn’t original in the slightest bit, the characters don’t have much depth, and some of the dialogue is tacky and cliche. So I did my research and I came up with the movies that have won best picture without getting a writing nomination. Do you want to know how many movies it has happened with? Out of a total of 81 years of the Academy Awards, it has only happened seven times! And it gets even better, four of those seven were in the first four years of the academy awards when the nominations were all messed up and from weird years. In fact one year there were only two nominations for writing and ten best picture nominations. So those four from 1929-1934 don’t even really count.

Then in 1949, Hamlet won best picture without being nominated for a writing award. You wanna know why? Because that year there was no category for best adapted screenplay, it was only for original screenplays, therefore it couldn’t be nominated for writing. That’s five of the seven. The other two it has happened to are completely legit, and coincidentally, two of the most undeserving best picture winners of all time. They were The Sound of Music in 1966 and, yep, you guessed it, Titanic in 1997. Oh gee, James Cameron’s other big movie. Gee, that’s weird. Think maybe they have a thing for James Cameron?

So really, it has only happened twice in the history of the oscars and is about to happen for a third time, and two of those three will be James Cameron movies. Hmm. Not only has it only happened twice, but it has only happened ONCE in the last forty-four years! I can’t comprehend how something can be the best picture of the year if it isn’t even one of the ten most well written movies of the year. After all, aren’t movies stories? And doesn’t good writing go hand in hand with good storytelling? I don’t know, it doesn’t make sense to me. I am not trying to bash Avatar at all, although it may seem that way. I like the movie, I just don’t think it’s worth all the praise and awards that it is getting. I feel there are better movies that are more deserving.