Thanks, Academy!

It sure was great to see a classic live up to its billing for once. This is just a fantastic movie, and -- BONUS -- there's a great and quite explicit gay romance driving the plot. Oh, sure, Humphrey Bogart's Rick is still getting over his summer camp fling with Ingrid Bergman's Ilsa, but once he clears out those emotions, Captain Renault is right there to whisk Rick off his feet. Austin and I enjoyed the looks, the lewks, and the loooooooks between all these dewy-eyed fashionistas. But it's Claude Rains who steals the show with his sassy, morally compromised, cheerful slimeball of a sex machine. With additional discussion of Bugs Bunny's gender.

I've hated Woody Allen my whole life. Anytime I told people that, they'd ask if I'd seen this movie. I'd say no. They'd tell me to see this movie and then decide. So now I saw the movie. He still sucks, maybe even harder than ever. I capture Woody Allen agnostic Bonnie Ambers and bring her over to the right side of history with nary a push. Woody is disgusting in this movie, and if it weren't for Diane Keaton's incredible, luminous performance, would likely be a footnote in history.

What do you get when you cross no plot with no music and a very small cast of characters all acting against type? You get paint drying. Robert Redford's directorial debut was impressive to somebody the year it came out, but in retrospect it drags like a student film and is full of inexplicably blank moments. The movie attempts to be "subtle" but goes to far and is flat-out dull. Check out John Rabon and I trying to keep our sanity as the movie drags on and on and on...

Gladiator is an okay 90-minute acton movie stretched out to epic proportions and shot in an epic style without any epic content. The story and the stakes are strangely small -- one dude wants revenge on another dude, but first he has to show off how invincible he is. There is also a woman who both men pursue for the simple reason that she is the only woman -- even though dude one is married and dude two is her brother. Also, dogs and tigers. It's just a sports movie pretending to be something it's not, and all that pretending leads to laughable artsy directorial choices and interminable conversations inside of tents. Brendan and I ponder how something like this even became popular, much less emerged as Best Picture.

Titanic is a movie that seared itself so deeply into the world consciousness, it hardly seems worth revisiting. But it turns out there was a reason it blew away all records and became the biggest movie of all time (at the time): it's pretty damn good. Tune in as Ky Krebs watches for the first time and we rediscover the love and tragedy of James Cameron's most obvious, but still best, movie.

We're about a third of the way through this project, it's Christmas season, and I'm stuck at home recovering from a major surgery, so I decided to abandon the "random order with random friends" part and watch the ONLY Best Picture winner that's fully suitable for young children, 1965's "The Sound of Music." As a bonus, my kids have seen this several times in school and other places, but I've really, truly, never watched this movie. Tune in as they guide me through and also introduce me to Wild Bunny & Snake, foot-fiving, and other survival tactics kids develop to get through a three-hour movie. Our first episode without explicit language, and if you don't like the long before-and-after analysis bits, well, this episode's for you!

Based on a true story that's been told a hundred different ways, this 1935 version stars Clark Gable and presents the infamous mutiny as a battle between nice and mean. Gable's (comically American) Fletcher Christian believes the crew of the HMS Bounty should be treated with carrots, but Charles Laughton's Captain Bligh treats them with sticks. Also keelhauls, starvation, and all other manner of verbal and physical abuse. During the return voyage from Tahiti, Christian takes over the ship, packing Bligh and a handful of his loyalists onto a rowboat. He then sails back to Tahiti where he lives the good life until England finds him again. That's the movie version. Real world documents prove that Christian enslaved and kidnapped several Tahitians, dragging them against their will to Pitcairn, where his descendants still rule the island to this day (fun fact: his descendants are also still engaging in large scale sexual abuse that came to light in some famous trials this decade). But why let moral ambiguity get i

A fascinating look at the hard-headed racism of the 1960s South. Unflinching, unrelenting, but also grounded in enough reality to avoid being a mere polemic, this film basically tortures Sidney Poitier's Detective Tibbs as he tries to solve a high-profile murder case in a low-profile Mississippi town. Poitier's performance is majestic -- assured, but nuanced enough to allow his character to make mistakes, get scared, get confused, and still come across as the most competent cop in the state. Basically a "serious" version of Beverly Hills Cop. Great soundtrack by Quincy Jones and a healthy dose of Ray Charles, too. Highly recommended.

The most depressing Billy Wilder film for sure. This trudge through the story of one man's recidivist bender exposes the impossibility of living with alcoholism, and walks Ray Milland right up to the brink of suicide. Frightening -- indeed it's shot and scored like a horror film -- and bleak, the film has a mesmerizing power despite its downbeat story arc. The ending rings false, but was likely necessary for audiences to swallow what they just saw. Just because it's an old movie, don't take it lightly. I would honestly not recommend watching it if you would be triggered by the unflinching portrait of an alcoholic in the throes of the disease's deepest cycles. On a par with Requiem for a Dream, especially when adjusting for the techniques and conventions of the 1940s.

If you like intelligent verbal sparring, overly dramatic personalities, sizzling put-downs, Shakespearean plotting, gorgeous outfits, wisecracking sidekicks, high-falutin' accents, drunks, intense bathroom conversations, facial masks, or just movies in general, then this is the flick for you.

Normally I write a summary but this movie is so boring it doesn't deserve one. It's about the 1924 Olympics, specifically Great Britain's track team, which did okay. Finland won more track medals that year but sure, let's learn about this team. The movie beat Raiders of the Lost Ark. I'm dead.

Everything about this movie is crazy, and not necessarily in a fun way. Like a lot of '70s movies, it focuses on an oddball group of people just kind of .... hanging out. Aaron and I get frustrated trying to make sense of it, which may be the point, but leads to a very unsatisfying experience, especially compared to the movie it beat for the award that year: Jaws. Still, the acting is top-notch and there are some iconic scenes for a reason. Dive in, cuckoos.

Quite possibly the perfect movie. A rare comedy winner starring Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine, this screwball-ish comedy with a dramatic heart explores the absurd distance between loneliness and privacy in a world that still maintains a paper-thin Victorian morality atop a fully horny modern reality. The acting is superb, but this is a writer's movie first and foremost, stuffed with tense scenes, perfectly witty lines, dense layering, and huge laughs. The only reason the entire movie isn't played in the middle of the episode is that Ella and I spent long stretches silent and transfixed by what was happening. If you haven't seen it, do. I promise it will be one of your new favorites.

This movie didn't just win Best Picture, it won ALL the major Oscars, and it's easy to see why. Tense and gripping throughout, with some of the most incredible acting performances ever. Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins perfectly convey a grounded reality within the high camp of Thomas Harris's shock-based plot. Jonathan Demme also deserves a lot of credit for making the movie feel coherent as it careened between moments of intimate terror and grotesque violence. But the real surprise is that the tone of the movie holds up. There's hardly a cringey misstep, and even the (relatively) low-tech setting doesn't feel dated or awkward in 2018. This is one of the Academy's best picks of all time.

This endless dirge of Welsh coal miners singing hymns is a great movie to watch if you want to fall asleep. Plotless and devoid of any tension, the movie feels like a book someone forced you to read in middle school. It's honestly a miracle Nick and I didn't give up halfway through. Featuring "Miracle on 34th Street"'s Maureen O'Hara and future non-boring director John Ford at the helm, the film must have struck a chord in late-Depression America because it beat "Citizen Kane" for the trophy. If you watch only one Best Picture winner this year, make it ANY other pick than this one.

This movie is something else. It's played as a quirky slice-of-mid-life-crisis with wacky scenarios interspersed between hot-button topics, and I guess that's exactly what it was in the late '90s, but NOW, in 2018, knowing what we know about its star and speaking how we speak about victims of sexual assault, it's a horror movie that has romantic comedy lighting for some offensive reason. Kevin Spacey plays a manipulative self-centered pedophile who destroys his family and neighbors in pursuit of hedonistic pleasure, and he naturally does a good job, that being his life, as we now know. Almost nothing holds up about this, and we were braced for that, but Vanessa and I were genuinely wounded by how -- and I hate to sound this prude, but there's no other way to say it -- INAPPROPRIATE this movie is. Join along with the hate watch, now with longer movie clips for better context, by popular demand. Keep passing along your feedback, it helps!

Say, fellas, I got an idea! What if we take a vaguely creepy story about a vain and jealous man who will destroy himself and everyone around him in a tantrum the minute he's not universally adored, then remove all the dialogue and replace it with sweet music so nobody notices? What's that? We'll need a dog to complete the illusion that he's not a piece of shit? And set the story in Hollywood so the industry will give it awards? Done! Send screeners to the Academy immediately. Sincerely, Harvey Weinstein, monster-at-law.

Oliver Stone's Mary Sue autobiography about being a rich kid voluntarily joining up to fight in America's Dumbest War. The movie throws 75 characters at the screen, then adds 75,000 explodey noises in for good measure, but somehow Oscar-winning screenwriter Stone still can't cover up the clunkiest dialogue he's ever written. The movie is effective in its realism. Unfortunately, that means suffering through the reality of an obnoxious war full of half-crazed, leaderless, extremely un-woke soldiers for two hours that will feel like two tours. Duncan Carson joins for this (no doubt) important movie that everybody should procrastinate on watching as long as possible.

This movie is EPIC. It defines epic. And it clearly influenced both George Lucas and John Williams, because some of the scenes and score clips are obvious precursors to the Star Wars saga. But is it fun to watch? It was with Andrew, who developed an insta-crush on Charlton Heston's body that sustained him for almost the entire 3 hours and 45 minutes. For me? Well, it's a lot of men, manning around, plus 250% of your recommended daily allowance of Jesus. The movie still holds the record for the most Oscars (in a three-way tie with Titanic and LOTR), and it's obvious to see why it gave Hollywood a hard-on. The chariot race still holds up, and some of the crowd sequences stuffed with thousands of extras are spectacular. That said, the Best Supporting Actor that year was for a white guy in this movie who plays an Arab by wearing dark bronze makeup and affecting a thick accent and silly manner, so ... it's still a 1950s movie, through and through. Strap in, because it took us a while to cover all the Ben in this H

If you like piña coladas and getting caught in the rain, this is the Shakespeare movie for you. Stuffed with super obvious callbacks and sitcom plotting, this soft rock movie somehow captured the Academy's heart in a year stuffed with Big Important Dramas. Gwyneth Paltrow got an award for having boobs. Judi Dench got an award for having a face. Tom Stoppard got an award for copy-pasting. And Harvey Weinstein got an award for doing things we'd still rather not think about. Join Brooke and me as we break the record for "what is happening" exclamations and try to puzzle out how a movie this inherently gay managed to be so frustratingly hetero. Also, we both forgot Ben Affleck was in it.