The Oscars: A Look Back at Recent Best Picture Winners and Nominees

The Oscars are just minutes away, and anyone that has been following this blog for some of my movie reviews may notice I haven't seen a single one of the Best Picture nominees from this year.  But that doesn't mean I don't want to see them.  With the possible exception of Amour, a foreign film I know little about, the other 8 nominees are all films I'd like to see.  Lincoln, of course, is the front runner, but don't discount Argo, or even Zero Dark Thirty (remember Bigelow's win for The Hurt Locker a few years ago?):

Argo                                                                            Life of Pi
Beasts of the Southern Wild                                        Lincoln
Django Unchained                                                      Silver Linings Playbook
Les Misérables                                                             Zero Dark Thirty

Since I haven't seen any of these, which I now understand I could have seen at a recent theater which was running all ten films over the last two Saturdays, I decided to look back over the last 12 years to see what I thought of the Best Picture winners and nominees.  Here's how I broke down all of them:

I loved the following 20 films, and if you haven't seen them, you should definitely check them out:

Avatar
A Beautiful Mind
The Blind Side
Chicago
Chocolat
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon
Erin Brockavich
Finding Neverland
Gangs of New York
Gladiator 
The Help
Inception
The Lord of the Rings Trilogy
The King's Speech
Little Miss Sunshine
Midnight in Paris
Moulin Rouge
Slumdog Millionaire
Toy Story 3
Up



These 10 films I also liked, but not quite as much as those on the list above:

Atonement
The Aviator
Capote
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
The Fighter
Frost/Nixon
Gosford Park
Juno
Million Dollar Baby
The Social Network

These 5 films were merely okay:

Crash
Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World

The Queen
Seabiscuit
True Grit

And I didn't really care for these 4 films:

The Departed
The Hours
Mystic River
No Country for Old Men

Of the ones I haven't even seen yet, I most would like to check out these 10:

The Artist
District 9
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
The Pianist

Precious
Ray 
The Reader
There Will Be Blood
War Horse

These 10 I just might like:

127 Hours
The Descendants
Hugo
Letters from Iwo Jima
Michael Clayton
Moneyball
Munich
A Serious Man
The Tree of Life
Up in the Air

These 10 films I really don't think I'd like:

Babel
Black Swan
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
An Education
Good Night, and Good Luck
In the Bedroom
Lost in Translation
Sideways
Traffic
Winter's Bone

These final three are a definite "No Thank You!" for their moral content, regardless of how well written and acted they may be:

Brokeback Mountain
The Kids Are All Right
Milk

So that's my little trip down recent Best Picture history.  Perhaps by next year, I'll know where this year's nominees stand with all the rest, and maybe I can watch some of those others I haven't seen yet!