What Should've Won That Could've Won: 1962

The Year: 1962

What the Nominees Were: Lawrence of Arabia, The Longest Day, The Music Man, Mutiny on the Bounty, To Kill a Mockingbird
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: It’s crazy that John Ford’s The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance didn’t get a nomination. You’d also think The Miracle Worker would make the cut. It’s less surprising, but still disappointing, that the Academy passed over The Manchurian Candidate, Whatever Happened to Baby Jane and Orson Welles’s hallucinatory The Trial. Overseas, more masterpieces kept rolling in, like Jules and Jim, Knife in the Water and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: Lawrence of Arabia
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. To Kill a Mockingbird and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valence would be very worthy winners. As with West Side Story, this movie casts white actors in brownface make-up, so I was tempted to disqualify it for that, but ultimately this movie is so good that I just couldn’t take its Oscar away…

Director: David Lean
Writers: Robert Bolt and Michael Wilson, partially based on “Seven Pillars of Wisdom” by T. E. Lawrence
Stars: Peter O’Toole, Omar Sharif, Alec Guinness, Anthony Quinn, Jack Hawkins, José Ferrer, Anthony Quayle, Claude Rains, Arthur Kennedy

The Story: British Officer T. E. Lawrence goes rogue during World War I and convinces Arabian tribesman to follow him into war against the Turks. Lawrence soon develops a messiah complex, becomes disillusioned, and finally abandons his troops when they are on the verge of getting their own independent state. He goes home and dies quietly in a motorcycle accident.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director, Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Score and Sound. It lost Actor, Supporting Actor for Sharif and Adapted Screenplay.
How It Won: The Academy does love epics, and this might be the most epic American movie ever made, but it’s still impressive that it was able to beat out some of its truly amazing competitors.

Why It Won:

1. O’Toole ignites the screen every time we see his quivering crystal blue eyes. His intensity is almost unbearable. It’s so unfair he had to go up against Peck for To Kill a Mockingbird, who beat him out for Best Actor. It must have seemed like Peck was overdue, whereas O’Toole would have plenty more chances. In fact, O’Toole was nominated seven more times, but he never won, because none of his other performances could live up this one. (The exact same thing has happened with Ralph Fiennes and Schindler’s List: Tommy Lee Jones in The Fugitive was so good, and he had earned an Oscar, whereas Fiennes was just starting out his career, so he could get one later. But he never did, because he never got a part that great again. And then Fiennes would star as Lawrence in a sequel to this film!) In the end, O’Toole, not Peck, deserved it, because this may be the greatest film performance of all time, certainly the best debut performance.
   
2. Two minutes longer than Gone With the Wind, this is the longest Oscar winner and doesn’t waste a second of screentime (well, except the Overture, Intermission, and Exit Music.) Freddie Young’s sweeping Super Panavision 70 cinematography alone would be enough to guarantee this a spot on any list of the greatest films ever made (My only real knock on the film, however is the use of too much “Day for Night” shooting. The daytime, sunrise and sunset scenes look spectacular, but the movie just cheats on the after-dark scenes, which is disappointing.)
   
3. But the genius of the movie is marrying “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore” cinematography with “they’ve only just started to make them this way” editing from Anne V. Coates, who was inspired by the French New Wave to experiment with smash cuts (a match going out smash-cuts to a burning sunset) and sound pre-laps (hearing a new location before we actually cut to it) 
4. Lawrence was probably gay, and Lean, the screenwriters, and O’Toole agreed to hint at it without saying it. Viewers at the time were probably more aware of it than we are today because there’s lots of code that is no longer used. One of the first things he does is light another man’s cigarette. Everyone knew what that meant at the time, but modern-day viewers may not.  
   
5. But maybe the most daring thing about the movie at the time was its anti-colonialism. Wilson was a blacklisted ex-communist and Bolt (who wrote the final draft) was arrested and imprisoned for an anti-nuke protest in the middle of writing his draft. One could certainly accuse this movie of “white savior-ism” but it rises above such accusations by harshly examining and skewering those tropes.
6. Sharif gets the greatest character introduction of all time, appearing as a tiny dot in the middle of a distant mirage, then graaaaadually getting bigger, then BAM, just when he’s big enough to see, he whips out his rifle and kills Lawrence’s guide, before finishing his camel’s stroll into frame. This is a badass, and this is a movie star. (Steven Spielberg says, “The mirage sequence is still the greatest miracle I’ve ever seen on film.”)
   
7. The screenplay is a masterpiece of historical fictionalization, combining many characters into a few composites in a way that must be done. The most brilliant choice is the one to have the man he goes back to save be the same man he has to kill later. If they were different men (as they were in real life) the point would still be there, but would be far less powerful. We accept such fictionalizations for the purposes of a good story.

Ah, 1962: Try not to think about what you saw on “Mad Men” when you smoke our brand, please.

What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 1961

The Year: 1961
What the Nominees Were: Fanny, The Guns of Navarone, The Hustler, Judgment at Nuremberg, West Side Story
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Other than one racist depiction, Breakfast of Tiffany’s is a great film. Over in France, Jean-Luc Godard was still turning out great films like A Woman is a Woman.

What Should’ve Won and Did Win: West Side Story
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard, because Judgment at Nuremberg is pretty great, and West Side Story is rightly criticized these days for not casting Latino actors as some of the Puerto Rican characters, but that can’t stop it from being one of the best movies ever made. As it turns out, I’ll be giving the award to two brownface movies in a row, and I do so reluctantly, but I just can’t deny them…

Directors: Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins
Writer: Ernest Lehman, based on the musical by Jerome Robbins, Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim and Arthur Laurents (and, of course, “Romeo and Juliet” by William Shakespeare)
Stars: Natalie Wood, Richard Beymer, Russ Tamblyn, Rita Moreno, George Chakiris
The Story: The white Jets gang rumbles with the Puerto-Rican Sharks gang. Jets co-founder Tony falls in love with Maria, the sister of Sharks leader Bernardo. Bernardo kills the other co-founder Riff, so Tony kills Bernardo, then gets shot and killed by another shark, dying in Maria’s arms.

Any Other Nominations or Wins: It also won Director(s), Supporting Actor for Chakiris, Supporting Actress for Moreno, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume Design, Editing, Scoring, and Sound. Only screenwriter Lehman lost (losing to Abby Mann for Judgment at Nuremberg)
How It Won: Not hard to figure this one out—It was a hit and universally acclaimed so it cruised to success.

 
Why It Won:

1. Wise got his start making lean little film noir masterpieces, usually about 75 minutes long, so he would seem to be a bizarre hire for a 2.5 hour Broadway adaptation, complete with intermission, but it was a brilliant choice. He hasn’t lost his noir grit, even when the gang members suddenly start doing pirouettes.
2. Sondheim fans are always horrified when I tell them that this is my favorite musical of his. “But he didn’t even write the music to that one!” Exactly. Don’t get me wrong, I love “Into the Woods”, “Company” and others, but as a composer, Sondheim was no Leonard Bernstein, and I cherish a chance to hear his delightful lyrics with even-better music.
3. I first saw this film while also watching “Twin Peaks”, which reunited Beymer and Tamblyn, and it took me years to realize that neither had worked very much in the thirty years between the two projects. I think that Beymer especially is great here and I have no idea why he didn’t become a star, instead laying around fallow until David Lynch finally rediscovered him.
   
4. This is my favorite film musical. Of every one I’ve seen this is the one where it’s most natural when the characters burst out into song and dance, because, while it’s a convincingly grimy world, everybody is supercharged with rhythm at all times. It almost feels unnatural when they manage to go a whole scene without a song or dance. When they’re not actually performing a song, they’re always snapping, or whistling or letting rhythm burst out of them in some other way.
   
5. We begin with the dancers on real NYC streets (the neighborhood where the musical was set had already been torn down to make room for Lincoln Center so they shot it in my old neighborhood of Spanish Harlem) then segue to massive and very convincing Hollywood sets in a seamless transition (and go back to real streets a few times to keep us convinced). The result is a type of hyper-reality: real but hallucinatory at the same time.
6. This does a great job with one of my rules: Always begin with discontented heroes. Tony and Maria both have longstanding personal problems, and then, when they meet, boom, they instantly ignite.

Ah, 1961: It begins…

Best Movies of 2025, #1: Superman

Is this a perfect movie? No, but I didn’t think there were any perfect movies this year, and this was the one I liked the best. This is the one I rushed to rewatch as soon as it was on Blu-Ray and liked it even more on a second watch.

The ending of this movie, watching the tape of his Earth parents, hit me like a cannonball both times I watched it. It’s very powerful, and my favorite movie moment of the year. I’m tearing up as I type this, in fact.

(But the movies biggest flaw was, once again, that it didn’t have something for everybody to do in the finale. The Daily Planet folks are flying around in a ship but they don’t go anywhere. This was fixable: Lex should have been operating Ultraman from hiding. Then the Daily Planet folks should have tracked him down and led Superman there.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: There Are Always New Stories to Tell

The movie’s first twist, which I will now spoil, is that Superman belatedly finds out that his Kryptonian birth parents intended for him to conquer earth and to repopulate his species by taking a harem. I was impressed by this new take and wondered what comic it was from (presumably an Elseworlds graphic novel?) Imagine my surprise when I found out that it was original to the movie. It’s amazing that, after 87 years of Superman comics (with sometimes as much as 8 issues a month) (not to mention the daily comic strip and weekly radio and TV shows) no one had told this one.

Gunn had the choice of thousands of stories to adapt, but instead he asked, what is the worst thing that could happen to this hero emotionally. It also helps that it’s entirely logical his Kryptonian parents would have wanted this of him.

There have been a lot of character-similar-to-Superman-but-he’s-a-bad-guy comics in recent years (two of which, “The Boys” and “Invincible,” have been successfully adapted to TV), but no one had asked “What if the real Superman was supposed to be bad, but chose to be good because of his good Earth parents?” That’s an original take.

(I did find one source online claiming the storyline was from a comic, but I’ve read that comic and it’s really something very different, so I’m counting it as original to Gunn)

(Now of course, you’re probably thinking: Wait, Matt, doesn’t this obligate you to choose this movie when you get to 2025 in “What Should’ve Won that Could’ve Won”. This is when I tell you that no, you can’t go through my lists since 2011 and figure out what movies I’ll say should have won. The criteria are different. My picks will be surprising.)

New episode of A Good Story Well Told about The Brave Little Toaster, featuring Betsy Bird!

Jonathan Auxier and I welcome my legendary wife Betsy to discuss one of the weirdest movies ever made, Disney's direct-to-video epic The Brave Little Toaster. Is it oddly great, or just greatly odd?

Best Movies of 2025, #2: Marty Supreme

If I had to choose for Best Actor between Chalamet in this movie and Hawke in Blue Moon, I’d be mighty stumped. They’re such different performances, but equally great, in their own way. Hawke’s is a masterpiece of subtlety, but this is a masterpiece of intensity.

This is the tale of petty criminal Marty Mauser, who dreams of being world ping-pong champion in the 1950s, but his sleaziness keeps getting in the way. Yes, it’s the fourth movie we’ve looked at about a man who thinks, incorrectly, that by being a “great man” he’ll be able to get away with mistreating women. That’s the theme of the year!

Rulebook Casefile: Winning by Losing, Losing by Winning, and Everything In Between

When discussing F1, I talked about how, in great sports movies, the hero either wins by losing or loses by winning. And in this movie they actually say something like that out loud in the dialogue! But is that actually true of this movie?

Marty thinks that by intentionally losing in an exhibition match, he will win the chance to compete in the main tournament, but then he finds out he will never be allowed to compete in the tournament, so he decides to win the exhibition match, and does so. Then he seems to have grown as a person, and goes home to take responsibility for his child and girlfriend.

So he’s supposed to win big by losing small, then loses the chance to win big, then wins small instead. But even then, he’s pissing off his benefactor by winning the exhibition round, and losing his plane flight home …only to win the support of the American military, getting him another way home.

So yes, the emotions are complex enough to qualify as literature, not just entertainment. But I kind of wish he had lost the match, admitted that he’s not the best, and that realization had led him home to take care of his girlfriend and kid.

It’s interesting that all four of the “problematic great men neglecting their kids” movies (Hamnet, Sentimental Value, Jay Kelly and this) end with the great man being professionally celebrated. It would be interesting if at least one of them admitted that great men, for all their other faults, are sometimes just not that great.

Best Movies of 2025, #3: Wake Up Dead Man: A Knives Out Mystery

This is an astoundingly good movie. Apparently Josh O’Connor has been acting for a while, but I wasn’t familiar with him, and I found his performance here astonishing. He steals the movie from Daniel Craig, which takes a lot of doing, because Craig is once again great as detective Benoit Blanc.

In both of the first two movies, Blanc helps a poor woman-of-color navigate a community of wealthy white assholes. I was expecting the same the third time out. How on Earth was I to guess that it would be a story about helping a decent (white, male) Catholic priest navigate a crappy congregation? It’s a shocking swerve away from what seemed to be the heart of the franchise, but it works beautifully.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Create Unique Obstacles

In the movie’s best scene, Blanc and Jud the priest are racing against time to try to solve the clues, when suddenly they hit a roadblock: The person who has promised to help them needs pastoral counselling before she gets off the phone.

Everything screeches to a halt as Jud listens to the woman’s problem and helps her with it, while Blanc’s eyes are rolling out of his head with frustration.

You really have to read the text of all three movies carefully to figure out that Blanc was probably kicked out of the house by a religious mother for being gay, giving him good reason to reject religion and have little sympathy in this situation, but he’s a good detective and knows this is not the time to press his case. And he’s found one priest he can approve of enough to respect his process.

(I kind of wish the movie had been a little more clear that this was what was going on with Blanc and not made us scratch for it, but if you do the work, it’s very rewarding.)

There are all sorts of obstacles you can throw in your heroes’ way, but the best are ones that are unique to this one hero’s values and commitments.  Only Jud would be stopped in his tracks here, and we love him for that.  

Best Movies of 2025, #4: Weapons

I don’t usually see horror movies, but the trailer for this was so good that I couldn’t resist and I was very happy with what I got.  All the children but one from a third-grade class run out of their homes at 2:17 am, and still haven’t been seen again a month later, when most of the action takes place.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Tease That You’re Not Going to Solve the Mystery

We begin the movie from the teacher’s perspective. Everybody blames her, but she has no idea what’s going on, and she’s snapping under the pressure. Here’s one reason why this section works: Hollywood movies have gotten artier in recent years, and you almost believe they won’t ever explain what happened to the kids. You’re watching it and thinking, “Is this ‘The Leftovers’? Are we never going to know?” (After all, the poster flat-out lies and says “They never came back.”) Keeping that possibility open just makes it all the more gratifying when everything does fall into place, and all mysteries are gradually revealed. (It’s okay for posters to lie.)

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Wring Out the Juice

You’ve got a juicy idea for a movie, but what’s your in-point? As it turns out, there is one character who knows exactly what’s going on: The boy who didn’t run away. He was forced by a witch to help kidnap all the missing kids and they’re in his basement.

This poor kid is a very interesting character. He’s so interesting, that the natural tendency would be to focus the whole movie around him. But the brilliance of the movie is to give us several other POV characters first (starting with the teacher, then an obsessed parent, then a cop, then a criminal, etc.) only getting to the boy well into the second half.

This mystery is so juicy that many characters have interesting reactions, not just the boy (who ultimately saves the day). It would be a shame to deny us the perspectives of those who don’t know what’s going on, or give the truth away too quickly.

Rulebook Casefile: Have Them Do Something Clever (Even Awful Things)

The boy has been ordered by the witch to bring home an object from each classmate so she can take control of them all. We see him sitting at his desk scanning the other desks, focusing in on the objects some of his classmates have …but they don’t all have an object. We don’t support what he’s doing, but now we’re worried he won’t succeed. Then he sees it: Every kid has decorated a piece of art to go on their cubby. He just has to remove all of those. We’re relieved: He’s solved his problem cleverly. (And now all of the kids are literally cursed.)

Best Movies of 2025, #5: Sinners

This movie is very similar to the Tarantino-penned From Dusk Till Dawn: Our characters gradually congregate at a roadhouse, and then the movie makes a very late switch from crime into vampire horror. So why is it so much better? The most obvious reason is that Tarantino didn’t just write that one, he also starred in it (shudder). This movie also reminded me of Tales From the Crypt Presents Demon Knight, which may seem damning, but is actually high praise coming from me.

Like K-Pop Demon Hunters, this was a good movie made great by having great music. I don’t envy the Academy members that have to choose between these songs.

What’s the Matter With Hollywood: Don’t Put Important Plot Elements Mid-Credits!

My friend and I saw this with an interesting crowd, a few weeks into its run. One rowdy group had clearly seen the movie already in the theater and had come out to see it again, and I enjoyed their enthusiasm. Another saw it by himself and was maybe annoyed by the other group.

Then we get to what seems to be the end of the movie and the credits start to roll, and the guy seeing the movie by himself gets up to leave, and the group that had seen it before started yelling out to him, imploring him to stay. He ignored them and left anyway. Then, just after he left, the credits stop and we get the mid-credits sequence, set in the ‘80s! This is the actual ending of the movie, and it is indeed hugely important.

Hollywood, stop doing this. Marvel earned the right to get us to stay for mid-credits and post-credit sequences, but that was a one-studio-only thing! If it’s not a Marvel movie, assume that people will leave after the first credit. Don’t have hugely important stuff happen after that.

Best Movies of 2025: #7 Sentimental Value and #6 Jay Kelly

I’ll discuss these two together because they’re so similar, but I thought one was clearly better than the other. These are both movies about an aging movie-artist who must face the fact he has neglected his two daughters and now he has to try to forge a relationship with them in their adulthood.

But, unlike the Academy, I clearly preferred Jay Kelly.  In Jay Kelly, George Clooney really tries, in his stumbling, deeply flawed way, to be a better father, but it’s too late, and he completely fails to win his daughters over. In the end, he gets acclaim as an artist, but he now knows it’s hollow. That felt real and painful. As a father, this movie really moved me.

In Sentimental Value, Stellan Skarsgard remains a raging asshole and his daughters nevertheless totally cave at the end because they realize he’s such a great artist. Despite the fact that he treats them like dog feces the entire movie, one submits herself and the other submits her son to his new magnum opus. That felt like a power fantasy on the part of the filmmakers. As a father, this one just pissed me off.

Wouldn’t it have been possible for some attempt at growth in Sentimental Value? Like maybe he does force himself to sit through one of his daughter’s plays? Like maybe he begins to realize he shouldn’t have given his ten year old grandson Irreversible and The Piano Teacher on DVD? (A joke you only get if you’re familiar with the content of those movies.) It was an interesting “Portrait of the Asshole as an Old Man”, but not as interesting as it would have been if he had at least a shred of inner turmoil.

Sentimental Value is the more artistically made movie (I’ve always liked the filmmaker and highlighted one of his early movies way back in 2010), but Jay Kelly was so much more human and heartfelt and, thus, painful. Watching Clooney try and fail is so much more interesting than watching Skarsgard not try and succeed anyway.

It is true that the daughters have meatier roles in Sentimental Value (I’m not sure they were Oscar-worthy, though) but, the meatier they are, the more frustrating that they just morally collapse. As a writer or a moviegoer, there’s only so much you can respect characters who, in the end, show no self-respect.

Best Movies of 2025, #8: Hamnet

As with Nomadland, this is a beautifully-shot movie filled with well-observed little moments. It’s certainly hard to believe this writer/director also made The Eternals in between.

Storyteller’s Rulebook: Culture Changes

The most shocking thing about this movie, of course, is what it tells us about how much the cultural conversation has transformed in the 28 years since Shakespeare in Love was released. That movie (which I like a lot) was a frothy concoction, saying, “Oh, those great men who cheated on their wives, weren’t they such delightful little scamps?” In this movie, even though there’s no indication here he was adulterous, the theme is clearly, “Fuck the great men, what about the wives and children who deserve our real sympathy??” As it turns out, this question, too, can create great movies.

Who the heroes and villains are is always changing in the public mind. In the time I was selling screenplays, I wrote some early scripts about awkward guys who couldn’t get laid. When I started, that was still seen as an inherently sympathetic trait. Then the cultural conversation shifted, and such men began to be regarded as villains, or at least creeps. So much for those screenplays.

Culture changes, and novelists/playwrights/screenwriters (Hamnet has now been a book, a play and a screenplay, all quite successful) have to change with the times. Always ask yourself, who are the new heroes? What undervalued perspectives are now valued? Who can I celebrate that wasn’t celebrated before? And who can I no longer celebrate?