Top 10 Best Picture Follow-Ups

The critics have been split over Peter Farrelly's The Greatest Beer Run Ever. But it got us thinking here at Cinema Paradiso about the quality of the films that directors produce on the back of winning the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Inspired by John 'Chickie' Donahue's memoir about taking brews to his buddies fighting in the Vietnam War, The Greatest Beer Run Ever (2022) is Peter Farrelly's follow-up to Green Book (2018), which had won the Oscars for Best Picture, Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor, in spite of criticisms about the accuracy of its characterisation and its depiction of race relations in the United States in the 1960s.

However, Farrelly is hardly the first film-maker to suffer a post-Oscar backlash and certainly won't be the last. We look back at the triumphs and tribulations of ten decades of Hollywood history.

From Silent Beginnings

It took the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences a while to work out its annual award categories. At the first Oscar ceremony in May 1929, F.W. Murnau's Sunrise won the statuette for Unique and Artistic Picture, while William A. Wellman's Wings (both 1927) took the award for Outstanding Picture. By the time the second edition took place in April 1930, AMPAS had decided to dispense with the former category and declared Wings to have been the overall best picture, as it was joined in the Outstanding Picture ranks by Harry Beaumont's The Broadway Melody (1929).

As Murnau's reunion with Janet Gaynor on 4 Devils (1928) is thought to be lost, we shall bend the rules to recommend his extant Oscar follow-up, City Girl (1930), a romance between Charles Farrell's farmer and Mary Duncan's waitress that influenced Terrence Malick's Days of Heaven (1978), with Richard Gere and Brooke Adams. As for Wellman, he rejoined forces with Clara Bow for another lost feature, Ladies of the Mob. But we're not currently able to bring you his next outing, Beggars of Life (both 1928), even though this Depression saga teams Wallace Beery and the peerless Louise Brooks.

Having taken the top prize with an all-talking, all-singing, all-dancing musical, Harry Beaumont reverted to silence (albeit with sound effects and a score) for Speedway (1929), while Lewis Milestone followed his deeply moving adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) with the first screen version of Ben Hecht and Charles MacArthur's classic newspaper comedy, The Front Page (1931). This should really be on disc in this country, along with Billy Wilder's 1974 remake, with Jack Lemmon and Walter Matthau in the roles of Hildy Johnson and Walter Burns that had been created on screen by Pat O'Brien and Adolphe Menjou. Cinema Paradiso users need not despair, however, as they can seen Rosalind Russell and Cary Grant squaring off in Howard Hawks's screwball makeover, His Girl Friday (1940).

Having helped Cimarron become the first Western to win Best Picture - a feat that wouldn't be repeated until 1990 - Wesley Ruggles went on to direct the largely forgotten drama, Are These Our Children? (both 1931). Edmund Goulding similarly went from the all-star winner, Grand Hotel, to the less vaunted Blondie of the Follies (both 1932), which starred Marion Davies, whose role in the genesis of Orson Welles's Citizen Kane (1941) is recalled in Benjamin Ross's RKO 281 (1999) and David Fincher's Mank (2020).

Neither Frank Lloyd's Best Picture winner, Cavalcade, nor its follow-up, Berkeley Square (both 1933), is currently available, even though they're both fine films. But the Scottish-born director was the pick of his peers at the 8th Academy Awards, thanks to Clark Gable and Charles Laughton's performances as Fletcher Christian and Captain Bligh in Mutiny on the Bounty (1935), which can be rented from Cinema Paradiso, even though Lloyd's entertaining follow-up, Under Two Flags (1936), cannot.

Another who got a taste for hearing his name being read out was Frank Capra. He followed a haul of the Big Four Oscars for It Happened One Night with the horse racing dramedy, Broadway Bill (both 1934), which teamed Myrna Loy and Warner Baxter. He won Best Director with Mr Deeds Goes to Town, even though Robert Z, Leonard's The Great Ziegfeld (both 1936) took Best Picture. However, Capra would repeat the Picture-Director double with his adaptation of George S. Kaufman and Moss Hart's farce, You Can't Take It With You (1938), which co-stars James Stewart and Jean Arthur.

Capra followed this with Mr Smith Goes to Washington, which earned 11 nominations, but only won once, as Victor Fleming's Gone With the Wind carried all before it, with the notable exception of Best Actor, which saw Clark Gable pipped by Robert Donat for Sam Wood's Goodbye, Mr Chips (all 1939).

Back at the 10th Academy Awards, William Dieterle confirmed his reputation for biopics by taking Best Picture with The Life of Emile Zola (1937). He followed this by teaming Henry Fonda and Madeleine Carroll in the Spanish Civil War drama, Blockade (1938), which boasted James M. Cain and Clifford Odets among its writers. Victor Fleming took Best Director the following spring, although George Cukor and Sam Wood had previously been at the helm of David O. Selznick's epochal take on Margaret Mitchell's bestseller. Fleming's epic 1939 has also included The Wizard of Oz and he took a sabbatical in 1940 before returning with his interpretation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1941), which earned Oscar nominations for its monochrome photography, editing and music scoring, but nothing for the splendid performances of Spencer Tracy and Ingrid Bergman.

A Land Fit For Heroes?

On 27 February 1941, Alfred Hitchcock became the first English director of a Best Picture winner at the Academy Awards. He followed his adaptation of Daphne Du Maurier's Rebecca with Foreign Correspondent, which was also nominated for Best Picture, having largely been made to placate the critics back home who had questioned why Hitch wasn't in Britain during the Blitz. He didn't win the Oscar for Best Director, however, as it went to John Ford for his take on John Steinbeck's Depression masterpiece, The Grapes of Wrath (all 1940).

Having made The Long Voyage Home (both 1940) and Tobacco Road, Ford would become the first consecutive winner of the Best Director category with How Green Was My Valley (both 1941), an adaptation of a Richard Llwellyn novel that also took the Best Picture prize. Wartime propaganda took precedence over the next few years, with The Battle of Midway (1942) and December 7th (1943) being the highlights. Available from Cinema Paradiso, the latter won the Oscar for Best Documentary Short. Ford's next feature is also on offer, They Were Expendable (1945), a tribute to America's PT torpedo boat crews that starred John Wayne, who infamously stayed out of uniform while the likes of Clark Gable and James Stewart did their bit.

Life on the British home front was the subject of William Wyler's Mrs Miniver (1942), which earned Greer Garson the Oscar for Best Actress. Wyler (who is the subject of one of Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert guides) took Best Director and followed his triumph with his first Technicolor outing, The Memphis Belle (1944), a lauded documentary that inspired Michael Caton-Jones's feature, Memphis Belle (1990). Returning to features, Wyler would win the Picture-Director double again with the postwar melodrama, The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), before he guided Olivia De Havilland (see our Getting to Know article) to the Academy Award for Best Actress for The Heiress (1949), which was adapted from Henry James's novel, Washington Square, which was filmed again under its original title by Agnieszka Holland in 1997.

Michael Curtiz's Casablanca (1942) took the Best Picture honours in March 1944, even though Henry King's The Song of Bernadette (1943) received more nominations (11) and won more awards (4), including Best Actress for Jennifer Jones. Curtiz followed his immortal teaming of Humphrey Bogart and Ingrid Bergman by earning another Best Director citation for steering James Cagney to the Best Actor award in Yankee Doodle Dandy (1942), which qualified for the Oscars a year early because of the timing of Casablanca's Californian release.

Leo McCarey sprang something of a surprise when Going My Way (1944) won Best Picture and Director. Bing Crosby also took Best Actor, while co-star Barry Fitzgerald took Best Supporting Actor, while also being nominated for Best Actor for his performance as Fr Fitzgibbon. McCarey scored another hit with The Bells of St Mary's (1945), a sequel that earned him a second nomination, while Crosby became the first performer to be nominated twice for playing the same character, Fr Chuck O'Malley. His achievement has since been emulated by Paul Newman as 'Fast Eddie' Felson in Martin Ritt's The Hustler (1961) and Martin Scorsese's The Color of Money (1986), Peter O'Toole as Henry II in Peter Grenville's Becket (1964) and Anthony Harvey's The Lion in Winter (1968), Al Pacino as Michael Corleone in Francis Ford Coppola's The Godfather (1972) and The Godfather Part II (1974), Cate Blanchett in Shekhar Kapur's Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), and Sylvester Stallone as Rocky Balboa in John G. Avildsen's Rocky (1976) and Ryan Coogler's Creed (2015).

Until the mid-1940s, the majority of directors were under contract to the studios and accepted whatever project was assigned them. Thus, after Billy Wilder won Best Picture and the top prize at Cannes for The Lost Weekend (1945) - a feat only since matched by Delbert Mann's Marty (1955) and Bong Joon-ho's Parasite (2019) - Paramount put him in charge of the Bing Crosby musical, The Emperor Waltz (1948), because it was set in his Austrian homeland.

On a more sombre note and typifying the trend for 'problem pictures' in postwar Hollywood, Elia Kazan's Gentleman's Agreement was a study of anti-Semitism in America that found an echo in Edward Dmytryk's Crossfire (both 1947). Kazan followed up by examining racism in Pinky (1949), which caused considerable fuss through the casting of Jeanne Crain as a Black woman who passes for white. The film sparked a debate, however, and earned Crain an Oscar nomination for Best Actress.

The big winner at the 21st Academy Awards was Laurence Olivier's Hamlet (1948), which became the second part of a Shakespearean trilogy bookended by Henry V (1944) and Richard III (1955). Corrupting power was also the theme of Robert Rossen's All the King's Men (1949), an adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel that earned Broderick Crawford the Oscar for Best Actor for his performance as Willie Stark and Mercedes McCambridge the Best Supporting Actress statuette for her work as campaign assistant, Sadie Burke. The roles were played by Sean Penn and Patricia Clarkson in Steven Zaillian's 2006 remake.

Taking on Television in a Big Way

As box-office takings started to slide as more Americans bought television sets, Hollywood started to produce widescreen epics in order to dazzle people back into cinemas. The decade started, however, with Joseph L. Mankiewicz becoming the first to do the Director-Writer double in consecutive years, when he followed A Letter to Three Wives (1949) with the Best Picture-winning All About Eve (1950). He missed the hat-trick, though, as People Will Talk (1951), a medical romcom pairing Cary Grant and Jeanne Crain, nettled too many in the film colony with its asides on the House UnAmerican Activities Committee's investigation into Communism in in the entertainment industry.

Despite the brilliance shown in staging An American in Paris, Vincente Minnelli missed out on the Oscar for Best Director, which went to George Stevens for A Place in the Sun (both 1951). He got his own back with the damning Hollywood exposé, The Bad and the Beautiful, which is bafflingly unavailable on disc. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this failed to make the Best Pictures nominations at the 25th Academy Awards, as HUAC discord meant that Cecil B. DeMille's circus saga, The Greatest Show on Earth, prevailed over Fred Zinnemann's masterly Western, High Noon (all 1952).

Four years would pass before DeMille followed up with his biblical epic, The Ten Commandments, which was nudged out of Best Picture glory by Michael Anderson's all-star version of Jules Verne's Around the World in 80 Days (both 1956). Anderson would return to Britain for Yangtse Incident (1957), a tense naval drama that recreated an encounter involving HMS Amethyst during the Chinese Civil War.

Meanwhile, Fred Zinnemann had followed his adaptation of Carson McCullers's The Member of the Wedding (1952) with a stellar version of James Jones's From Here to Eternity (1953), which won eight awards from its 13 nominations, including Picture, Director and the Best Supporting Oscars for Frank Sinatra and Donna Reed. On a roll, Zinnemann was given the chance to bring Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein's genre-changing Oklahoma! (1955), to the screen. But the musical wasn't his forte, even though it's enthusiastically mentioned in The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

One of the most contentious features of a decade in which the HUAC blacklist divided Hollywood, Elia Kazan's On the Waterfront (1954) received 12 nominations and won the Academy Award for Best Picture, as well as drawing Marlon Brando his overdue Oscar for Best Actor. Kazan followed this gritty drama with an adaptation of John Steinbeck's East of Eden (1955), which reinforced the reputation of James Dean. However, the aforementioned television transfer Marty took Best Picture, which the debuting Delbert Mann followed with another Paddy Chayefsky screenplay, The Bachelor Party (1957).

David Lean would do the Picture-Director double twice, with The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957) and Lawrence of Arabia (1962). Set during the Great War, the latter was the follow-up to the Second World War story of the Burma Railroad and Lean would score in both categories again with his adaptation of Boris Pasternak's novel about the Russian Revolution, Doctor Zhivago (1965).

Contrasting period pieces ended the decade, as Vincente Minnelli got his Best Director statuette for Gigi, a musical delight that he followed by teaming husband and wife Rex Harrison and Kay Kendall in William Douglas-Home's acclaimed stage comedy, The Reluctant Debutante (both 1958). William Wyler went further back in time for his epic staging of Ben-Hur, which set the record for 11 Oscar wins that has since been matched by two films we shall encounter later in our survey. Fred Niblo had made a silent version of Lew Wallace's blockbusting tome at MGM in 1925 and it should really be on disc. But Cinema Paradiso users can see how Timur Bekmambetov and Mark Atkins fared when they respectively attempted remakes in 2016 and 2018. Scaling down, Wyler revisited his own These Three (1936) in pairing Audrey Hepburn and Shirley MacLaine in The Children's Hour (1961), Lillian Hellman's play about same-sex relationships at a private boarding school for girls.

Winning the Post-Code Lottery

The 1960s took their time to get swinging in Hollywood, as the Production Code that had restricted content since 1930 remained in situ until 1968. Nevertheless, a hint of permissiveness could be felt after the country fell under the sway of the British Invasion led by The Beatles following the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in November 1963.

Typifying the more grown-up approach to taboo topics like sex was Billy Wilder's The Apartment (1960), which boasted an outstanding performance by Jack Lemmon as the office drone with a crush on lift attendant Shirley MacLaine. Learning from his previous victory, Wilder followed up with One, Two, Three (1961), a satire about James Cagney selling Coca-Cola in Cold War Berlin. The year's big hit centred on another divided territory, as the Sharks and the Jets revisited William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet in West Side Story, which saw the award for Best Director shared for the first time between Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins. Primarily a choreographer, Robbins never directed another film, but Wise went on to chronicle the romance between Robert Mitchum's Nebraska lawyer and Shirley MacLaine's Greenwich Village dancer in Two For the Seesaw (1962).

Having made his name as a social realist, Tony Richardson revelled in the bawdiness of pioneering novelist Henry Fielding's prose in his adaptation of Tom Jones (1963), an 18th-century romp that won four Oscars. He remained in Hollywood to adapt Evelyn Waugh's novella, The Loved One (1965), which satirises Tinseltown to perfection and really ought to be available on DVD in the UK.

The next two Best Picture winners should have been headlined by Julie Andrews. However, she had to make do with winning Best Actress in Robert Stevenson's Mary Poppins after Audrey Hepburn was chosen to play Eliza Doolittle in George Cukor's My Fair Lady (both 1964), in spite of the fact that Andrews had originated the part on stage. Five years would pass before Cukor directed again, but there were fewer takers for Justine (1969), his adaptation of a Lawrence Durrell novel set in British-mandated Palestine in 1938, in spite of the accomplished performances of Dirk Bogarde and Anouk Aimée.

The second Andrews triumph was, of course, The Sound of Music, which saw her pipped to Best Actress by Julie Christie for John Schlesinger's Darling (both 1965). Director Robert Wise would steer The Sand Pebbles (1966) into the Best Picture category the following year, only to be outmanoeuvred by Fred Zinnemann's A Man For All Seasons. Adapted by Robert Bolt from his own play about the feud between Sir Thomas More (Paul Scofield) and Henry VIII (Robert Shaw) over the latter's desire to divorce, this exceptional historical drama will fascinate those hooked on the 2015 BBC serial based on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall.

Zinnemann took his time before returning to the director's chair and surprised many by taking on Frederick Forsyth's bestselling thriller, The Day of the Jackal (1973), about an attempt to assassinate French president, Charles De Gaulle. Six years earlier, Norman Jewison had exposed America's racial tensions with the cop drama, In the Heat of the Night (1967), which saw Rod Steiger beat Sidney Poitier to the Oscar for Best Actor. Jewison kept his finger on the pulse for The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), a trendy crime caper that teamed Steve McQueen and Faye Dunaway in the roles that would be taken by Pierce Brosnan and Rene Russo in John McTiernan's 1999 remake.

British directors took the honours at the next two Oscar ceremonies, as Carol Reed's Oliver! (1968) was followed by John Schlesinger's Midnight Cowboy (1969). The former captured the exuberance of Lionel Bart's musicalisation of the Charles Dickens novel that David Lean had controversially filmed as Oliver Twist in 1948. Making history as the first Best Picture winner with an X certificate, the latter was based on James Leo Herlihy's book about hustler Joe Buck (Jon Voight) and his pimp, Ratso Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman).

Reed would misstep with what would prove to be his penultimate picture, Flap (1970), which starred Anthony Quinn as a drunk on a Native American reservation. By contrast, Schlesinger would snag another nomination in guiding Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch to Best Actor and Actress nods for another gay-themed drama, Sunday, Bloody Sunday (1971). There would be no going back to the old days of pre-approved screenplays. However, the New Hollywood boom would turn out to be short-lived, as the studios were snapped up by conglomerates who recognised that there was more money to be made by blockbusters that would hoover up the pocket money of adolescents around the world, who would not only pay for repeat screenings, but also spin-off merchandise.

Never Going Back Again

The talk at the 43rd Academy Awards revolved around George C. Scott refusing the Best Actor prize for his performance in the Best Picture winner, Patton (1970). Director Franklin J. Schaffner followed this biopic of Second World War general George S. Patton with another historical drama, Nicholas and Alexandra, a recreation of the last days of the Romanov dynasty that also earned a nomination for the top award. It was beaten by William Friedkin's drug thriller, The French Connection (both 1971), which was followed by his adaptation of William Peter Blatty's The Exorcist (1973), which became the first horror film to be nominated for Best Picture.

Having co-scripted Patton, Francis Ford Coppola went on to win the Best Picture-Director double twice in three years with The Godfather and The Godfather Part II. The latter was the first sequel to take the award and pitted Coppola against himself in the Best Picture stakes, when his Palme d'or winner, The Conversation (1974), was also nominated. He was unable to land the hat-trick, however, even though The Godfather Part III (1990) was nominated in both categories.

Coming between Coppola's wins, George Roy Hill's The Sting (1973) was a 1930 con comedy that reunited Paul Newman and Robert Redford after the same director's Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (1969), the buddy Western that was also nominated for Best Picture and Director. Hill and Redford teamed again on the 1920s aviation drama, The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), but it failed to achieve the same success.

A strong Best Picture line-up at the 48th Academy Awards included Steven Spielberg's Jaws, which had been the box-office behemoth of 1975 and launched Hollywood into its blockbuster phase. But the AMPAS electorate plumped for Miloš Forman's take on Ken Kesey's classic counterculture novel, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, which also earned Jack Nicholson and Louise Fletcher the top acting awards. Forman couldn't repeat the trick, however, as his version of Gerome Ragni and James Rado's hit anti-war musical, Hair (1979), felt like its day had come and gone. Curiously, Forman also stumbled after doing the Picture-Director double with his adaptation of Peter Shaffer's Amadeus (1984), when Valmont (1989) failed to match Dangerous Liaisons, Stephen Frears's 1988 interpretation of Pierre Choderlos de Leclos's 1782 novel, Les Liaisons dangereuses.

As America celebrated its bicentenary in 1976, it fell under the sway of an underdog story that saw John G. Avildsen's Rocky beat Martin Scorsese's Taxi Driver, Sidney Lumet's Network and Alan J. Pakula's All the President's Men to the Best Picture award. Avildsen's follow-up failed to strike the same note, despite Paul Sorvino and Anne Ditchburn delivering charming performances in the romantic drama, Slow Dancing in the Big City (1978).

For the second time in three years, grumbles about the Academy looking down on commercial success were heard as Woody Allen's Annie Hall took the Oscars for Best Picture and Director over George Lucas's Star Wars (1977). This reworking in a galaxy far, far away of Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai (1954) and The Hidden Fortress (1958) continues to delight fans though its ever-expanding franchise. But Allen's Manhattan romcom was a worthy winner, although he surprised many by following it with Interiors (1978), an Ingmar Bergman-influenced drama that earned further nominations for Best Director and Original Screenplay.

At the 51st Academy Awards, Michael Cimino took the top two honours for The Deer Hunter, a Vietnam drama that saw off competition from Hal Ashby's Coming Home (both 1978), which earned the acting Oscars for Jon Voight and Jane Fonda, as America counted the cost of its defeat in a protracted and divisive conflict. Meryl Streep had received the first of her record-breaking 21 nominations for Cimino's film, which he followed with the recklessly ambitious, but enduringly underrated Western, Heaven's Gate (1980). Streep moved on to the decade's last Best Picture winner, Robert Benton's Kramer vs Kramer (1979), which saw her win the award for Best Supporting Actress.

Dustin Hoffman took the Best Actor award, while Benton was named Best Director in a category that also included Francis Ford Coppola for Apocalypse Now and Bob Fosse for All That Jazz (both 1979), which would win the Palme d'or at Cannes in separate years, with the latter tying with Akira Kurosawa's Kagemusha (1980). All three films are available on high-quality discs from Cinema Paradiso. As for Benton, he would hook up with Streep and Fosse's leading man, Roy Scheider, for the thriller, Still of the Night (1982).

Ordinary People at the expense of two monochrome masterpieces, Martin Scorsese's Raging Bull and David Lynch's The Elephant Man (all 1980). Acting duties meant that Redford would have to wait seven years before following his domestic saga with The Milagro Beanfield War (1987), an undervalued account of the resistance mounted by some New Mexican farmers to the property developers trying to drive them off their land with tax increases.

Screenwriter Colin Welland's Oscar night assertion that the British were coming was proved right when Richard Attenborough's Gandhi (1982) followed Hugh Hudson's Chariots of Fire (1981) as the Best Picture winner. Hudson lost out for Best Director to Warren Beatty for Reds and rather stumbled with his follow-up feature, Greystoke: The Legend of Tarzan, Lord of the Apes (1984), which so upset Robert Towne that he credited the script to his sheepdog, P.H. Vazak, who remains the only dog to have been nominated for an Oscar, although the rumour persists that German Shepherd Rin Tin Tin won the inaugural Academy Award for Best Actor rather than Emil Jannings, whose triple citation included Josef von Sternberg's The Last Command (1928).

Richard Attenborough slightly lost his footing in following Gandhi with A Chorus Line (1985), the James Kirkwood and Nicholas Dante musical that had been a sensation on Broadway. Several directors had previously been linked with the project, including Mike Nichols, Sidney Lumet and Joel Schumacher, before Attenborough came aboard and famously turned down Madonna at the auditions.

Back at the 56th Oscars, James L. Brooks won Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay for his take on Larry McMurtry's novel, Terms of Endearment (1983), which also saw Shirley MacLaine and Jack Nicholson receive the awards for Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor. Brooks would also snag Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay nods for his follow-up, Broadcast News (1987), a TV newsroom comedy that also earned nominations for its acting trio of William Hurt, Holly Hunter and Albert Brooks.

Following Amadeus, the Academy plumped for another period piece in Sydney Pollack's Out of Africa (1985), which was adapted from a book that Dane Karen Blixen had written under the pseudonym, Isak Dinesen. Converting seven of its 11 nominations (in a year in which Steven Spielberg's version of Alice Walker's The Color Purple was snubbed in its 11 categories), this classical drama starred Meryl Streep and Robert Redford, who would headline Pollack's follow-up, Havana (1990), which centres on an American gambler caught up in the Cuban Revolution of 1958.

Oliver Stone would famously interview Fidel Castro for his 2003 documentary, Comandante. In 1987, he would win Best Picture and Best Director for his trenchant Vietnam drama, Platoon (1986), which was based on his experiences as an infantryman in a bid to counter the propaganda peddled by John Wayne and Ray Kellogg in The Green Berets (1968). Stone would return to the conflict in Born on the Fourth of July (1989) and Heaven & Earth (1993). But he would follow his victory with Wall Street (1987), a snapshot of the decade's 'greed is good' culture that missed out on the top two awards, but brought Michael Douglas the Best Actor statuette for his display as financier Gordon Gekko.

Douglas headlined Adrian Lyne's Fatal Attraction, which was the most discussed movie of 1987. But it lost out for Best Picture, as Bernardo Bertolucci's The Last Emperor won nine Oscars for retelling the history of China's last imperial ruler, Puyi. The Italian completed his 'Oriental trilogy' with The Sheltering Sky (1990) and Little Buddha (1993), although neither proved such a commercial juggernaut.

The 62nd Academy Awards was dominated by a smaller-scale drama, although Barry Levinson's Rain Man (1988) proved a hugely popular winner of both Best Picture and Best Director, while Dustin Hoffman won Best Actor for his performance as autistic savant Raymond Babbitt. Moreover, it became the first and (to date) the only feature to win Best Picture and the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. Despite earning him a writing nomination, Levinson would have less luck with Avalon (1990), which formed part of a quartet set in his Baltimore hometown that also included Diner (1982), Tin Men (1987) and Liberty Heights (1999).

It must have seemed to the AMPAS voters that Driving Miss Daisy (1989) had directed itself, as it won Best Picture without Bruce Beresford even being nominated. Despite becoming the first Australian to helm a Best Picture winner, he joined William Wellman and Edmund Goulding in a club that would later welcome Ben Affleck, Peter Farrelly and Sian Heder as members. Beresford also made history with Mister Johnson (1990), as this follow-up adaptation of Joyce Cary's colonial satire was the first American film to be shot on location in Nigeria.

Seeing Out the Century

The 1990s was a decade when AMPAS battened down on its definition of an Oscar-worthy movie. Audiences didn't necessarily agree, as they preferred blockbusters laden with the new computer-generated special effects. But Tinseltown's great and good insisted that box-office takings were no guarantee of artistic merit (not that many critics agreed that Hollywood was producing great cinematic art on a regular basis).

There was a consensus that the return of the Western with both Kevin Costner's Dances With Wolves (1990) and Clint Eastwood's Unforgiven (1992) doing the double was a good thing, as the genre had always retained a soft spot, even in its abeyance. However, the revival proved short-lived, with Costner venturing into post-apocalyptic territory with The Postman (1997) and Eastwood (who is the subject of a Cinema Paradiso Getting to Know profile) choosing to star Costner in the odd couple road movie, A Perfect World (1993).

In between the winning oaters, Jonathan Demme's The Silence of the Lambs (1991) joined It Happened One Night and One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in the Big Four pantheon, as Jodie Foster and Anthony Hopkins took the acting Oscars to go with Best Picture and Best Director. This adaptation of Thomas Harris's bestseller came after Michael Mann's Manhunter (1986) in chronicling the crimes of Dr Hannibal Lecktor/Lecter and Demme followed up his achievement by guiding Tom Hanks to the Academy Award for Best Actor in the groundbreaking AIDS drama, Philadelphia (1993).

The big winner on that March night in 1994 was Steven Spielberg's Schindler's List, an adaptation of Thomas Keneally's Booker Prize-winning novel, Schindler's Ark, which converted seven of its 12 nominations. Just as notably, Jane Campion became only the second woman to be nominated for Best Director for The Piano, after Lina Wertmüller had been cited for Seven Beauties (1975). Campion would also become the first woman to be nominated in the category twice forThe Power of the Dog (2021), another revisionist Western that will be available on disc in November.

After a four-year hiatus, Spielberg would follow up rather limply with The Lost World: Jurassic Park (1997). But he would be back in the mix the following year, when he won Best Director for Saving Private Ryan. However, his D-Day epic was trumped for Best Picture by John Madden's Shakespeare In Love (both 1998), which also brought Gwyneth Paltrow the Oscar for Best Actress. Madden would move on to Captain Corelli's Mandolin (2001), which failed to capture the public's imagination in spite of Hugh Grant reading Louis de Bernières's source novel at the end of Roger Michell's Notting Hill (1999).

Meanwhile, back at the 67th Academy Awards, when Mike Newell's Four Weddings and a Funeral was up for Best Picture, the big prizes went to Robert Zemeckis's Forrest Gump (both 1994), which brought Tom Hanks his second consecutive Best Actor award. A Carl Sagan novel lured Zemeckis into the distant cosmos to search for extraterrestrials in Contact (1997), but Apollo 13, Ron Howard's account of a real-life space drama, failed to impress the voters as much as Mel Gibson's remembrance of Scottish warrior William Wallace in Braveheart (both 1995). Gibson didn't direct again for almost a decade and ran into considerable controversy in drawing three nominations for The Passion of the Christ (2004).

Anthony Minghella became the first person from the Isle of Wight to win the Best Director award as his adaptation of Michael Ondaatje's novel, The English Patient (1996), took Best Picture. Minghella would remain in a literary vein when he took on Patricia Highsmith's thriller, The Talented Mr Ripley (1999), which drew five nominations in the year that fellow Brit Sam Mendes would do the double on his feature debut with American Beauty before moving on to adapt Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner's graphic novel, Road to Perdition (2002).

Oscar and the box office did coincide at the 70th Academy Awards, however, when Hollywood's first billion-dollar movie, James Cameron's Titanic (1997), matched Ben-Hur's haul of 11 gongs. In tying with All About Eve on 14 nominations, Titanic missed out in three categories, as Kate Winslet and Gloria Stuart joined the make-up team on the sulking step. Winslet and Stuart were nominated for playing the same character, Rose, and Winslet would find herself in the Best Supporting slot when she and Judi Dench were both nominated for essaying Iris Murdoch in Richard Eyre's Iris (2001).

As for Cameron, he went on to make the documentaries, Ghosts of the Abyss (2003) and Aliens of the Deep (2005), before directing the world's first two billion-dollar movie. Avatar (2009) topped the all-time box-office charts until being temporarily displaced by Anthony and Joe Russo's Avengers: Endgame (2019) before a 2021 Chinese re-release put it back on top of the pile (although Gone With the Wind would surpass it in any inflation-adjusted listing).

Y2K and All That

Strictly, American Beauty was the first Oscar winner of the new millennium. But Ridley Scott's Gladiator was the first winner produced in the 21st century. Ironically, it harked back to 180 AD to tell the story of Maximus Decimus Meridius. But the voters reckoned that Steven Soderbergh (who was up against himself for Erin Brockovich) did a better job of directing Traffic (all 2000) and Scott had to move on to Hannibal (2001) - the cannibal not the Carthaginian general - without an Oscar on his mantelpiece. Both Scott and Soderbergh have been profiled in Cinema Paradiso's Instant Expert series, so check out the other films we have on offer.

Russell Crowe took Best Actor for playing a Roman general with an Aussie accent. But he was denied a double by Denzel Washington in Antoine Fuqua's Training Day. However, Ron Howard's biopic of Nobel Prize-winning mathematician John Nash did prevail in the Picture and Director stakes, as A Beautiful Mind held off Peter Jackson's first J.R.R. Tolkien adaptation, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (all 2001). Jackson remained in Middle Earth, while Howard took his tilt at the Western with The Missing (2003), a quarter of a century after he had accompanied John Wayne on his final frontier journey in Don Siegel's The Shootist (1976).

History was made at the 75th Academy Awards, as Rob Marshall's Chicago (2002) became the first musical to win Best Picture since Oliver! It converted six of its 13 nominations, but Roman Polanksi controversially took Best Director for The Pianist, which saw 29 year-old Adrien Brody become the youngest winner of the Oscar for Best Actor. The debuting Marshall dusted himself down to adapt Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha (2005), which received six nominations in the craft categories.

Having missed out the previous year with The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, Peter Jackson finally found Academy favour with an 11-Oscar haul for The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003). Despite costing a record-breaking $207 million, his remake of King Kong (2005) fell short of expectations, however. He's not registered personally at the Oscars since, although he took home his first two Emmys, as The Beatles: Get Back (2021) won Best Director and Outstanding Documentary among its five awards. Rent it now in all its magnificent Blu-ray glory from Cinema Paradiso.

At the age of 74, Clint Eastwood became the oldest winner of the Academy Award for Best Director when he doubled up for the boxing drama, Million Dollar Baby (2004), which earned Hilary Swank her second Best Actress Oscar after Kimberly Peirce's Boys Don't Cry (1999). Showing no signs of easing up, Eastwood moved on to the Second World War duo, Flags of Our Fathers and Letters From Iwo Jima (both 2006), with the latter having Japanese dialogue.

Having scripted one Best Picture winner, Paul Haggis went on to direct the next, when Crash surprisingly beat Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain (both 2005) to the top award. Ang could console himself with the Best Director statuette, while Haggis would keep writing until he returned to the director's chair with In the Valley of Elah (2007), which explored the legacy of the Iraq War.

After producing some of the most dynamic and original cinema of recent times, Martin Scorsese (another Instant Expert subject) finally won the Oscar for Best Director with a remake. Inspired by Andrew Lau and Alan Mak's Infernal Affairs (2002), The Departed (2006) also won Best Picture. It might not have racked up 11 nominations like his Howard Hughes biopic, The Aviator (2004), but it allowed him to greenlight his adaptation of Dennis Lehanne's bestseller, Shutter Island (2010).

Joel and Ethan Coen might not have been tilting at the big prize for quite as long, but most critics agreed that their win for No Country For Old Men (2007) was overdue. In addition to the Coens securing the Oscars for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay (from a Cormac McCarthy novel), this neo-Western thriller also saw Javier Bardem take the Best Supporting award for his unsettling turn as hitman Anton Chigurh. The brothers had to be content with BAFTA and Golden Globe nominations for their follow-up, however, the comedy of espionage errors, Burn After Reading (2008).

The mood was eventually more upbeat in Danny Boyle's Slumdog Millionaire (2009), in which Dev Patel excels as a teenager from a Mumbai slum who is accused of cheating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? Not everyone was charmed by the film's depiction of poverty, however, although Doyle moved on smartly to 127 Hours (2010), a climbing biopic of Aron Ralston that earned six Oscar nominations, including Best Picture and Best Actor for James Franco.

As the Best Picture category was expanded to contain 10 contenders, any hopes that James Cameron might have had about Avatar adding to his Oscar collection were stymied by his ex-wife. Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to direct a Best Picture winner and take the Academy Award for Best Director with The Hurt Locker (2009). Following an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit on a tour of duty in Iraq, this tense and often distressing war zone thriller earned nine nominations and included Mark Boal's screenplay in its four other wins. Bigelow and Boal remained in the region for their follow-up, Zero Dark Thirty (2012), which centres on the hunt for Osama bin-Laden. This was also nominated for Best Picture and Screenplay, while Jessica Chastain secured her first nomination for Best Actress. She won a Golden Globe for her performance as a CIA intelligence analyst, while Bigelow had to be content with a nomination.

Ninety-Four and Counting...

As the Academy Awards drift towards their centenary, victorious directors keep striving to match their past achievements. Competition is fiercer than ever, although prior award season results generate a pre-ceremony hullabaloo that often dictates where the Oscars will go. Nevertheless, there are always surprises, as AMPAS tries to reconcile the commerce/art dilemma and demonstrate its somewhat tardy commitment to diversity.

There was something reassuringly classical about Tom Hooper's The King's Speech (2010), however, as it revealed how George VI (Colin Firth) overcame his stammer to address his subjects in times of crisis. Firth would win the Oscar for Best Actor, while Hooper would follow his success with the screen version of Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schönberg's stage musical, Les Misérables (2012), which was nominated for eight Oscars, including Best Picture.

Hollywood hasn't always responded positively to screen depictions of its inner workings. But everyone fell in love with 1920s movie actor George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) and his dog, Jack (Uggie), in Michel Hazanavicius's The Artist (2011), which became the first silent film to win Best Picture since Wings. With its writer-director and star also picking up Oscars, it remains the most decorated French film of all time. Having reunited with Dujardin for a segment in the portmanteau comedy, The Players (2012), Hazanavicius made The Search (2014), which starred wife Bérénice Bejo and Annette Bening in a Chechen remake of Fred Zinnemann's 1948 film of the same name about a young Auschwitz survivor.

Film-making also provided a pivotal plot point in Ben Affleck's Argo, as it detailed how the CIA used a fake sci-fi flick to rescue six diplomats from Tehran during the Iran hostage crisis of 1979-81. But, while Affleck won the Golden Globe and the BAFTA for his direction, the Oscar went to Ang Lee for his adaptation of Yann Martel's Life of Pi (both 2012), without Affleck even being nominated. He has since focussed on his acting career, although he did direct himself in Live By Night (2016), a reworking of a Dennis Lehane novel about some exiled Boston mobsters confronting the Ku Klux Klan in Prohibition-era Florida.

Brad Pitt was among the producers, as Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northup's 12 Years a Slave won Best Picture. However, while he became the first Black producer to take Oscar's top prize, McQueen failed to win Best Director, as Alfonso Cuarón became the first Mexican to take the award for Gravity (both 2012). McQueen followed up by switching a London-based 1983 Lynda La Plante TV series to Chicago for Widows (2018), which remains his last feature to date, as he devoted considerable time to the magnificent collection of BBC tele-films, Small Axe (2020).

Mexico got its second Best Director winner the following year, as Alejandro González Iñárritu picked up the double when Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) took the Oscar for Best Picture. Like Paul Thomas Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel (both 2013), it landed four of its nine nominations, with Iñárritu also sharing the prize for Best Original Screenplay. He would be back on the podium to claim a consecutive Best Director award (for the first time since Joseph L. Mankiewicz) for The Revenant, as Tom McCarthy was overlooked, even though Spotlight (both 2015) won Best Picture. He followed up this account of the Boston Globe's exposé of a child sex abuse scandal with the Disney fantasy, Timmy Failure: Mistakes Were Made (2020).

The top two awards were also split at the 89th Academy Awards, which will forever be remembered for Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway having an envelope malfunction while presenting Best Picture. They announced the musical La La Land, which had already earned Emma Stone the Best Actress award and Damien Chazelle the Oscar for Best Director. However, the actual winner was Barry Jenkins's Moonlight (both 2016), which became the first Best Picture pick to have been directed by an African American. Jenkins would pick up a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination for his 2018 take on James Baldwin's If Beale Street Could Talk, which earned Regina King the Oscar for Best Supporting Actress.

The 90th Academy Awards witnessed the second Mexican double-header in four years, as Guillermo del Toro took Best Picture and Best Director for The Shape of Water (2017). Del Toro followed this fantasy romance set in 1960s Baltimore with Nightmare Alley (2021), a lavish reworking of Edmund Goulding's 1947 adaptation of William Lindsay Gresham novel about a scheming carnival barker, who was played by Tyrone Power in the original noir and Bradley Cooper in the reboot.

The following year, Alfonso Cuarón secured another Best Director win for Mexico with the monochrome memoir, Roma. In so doing, he became the only dual winner never to have directed a Best Picture, as the Academy Award went to Green Book, which retraced the 1962 tour of the Deep South by pianist Don Shirley (Mahershala Ali) and his unenlightened minder, Frank 'Tony Lip' Vallelonga (Viggo Mortensen). Having already become the first Muslim actor to win an Oscar for Moonlight, Mahershala Ali became the first African American to win Best Supporting Actor twice. And, as we have already seen, Farrelly stayed in the 60s for The Greatest Beer Run Ever.

Although there had been scenes with Italian dialogue in The Godfather Part II, no subtitled film had ever won the Oscar for Best Picture before 9 February 2020, when South Korean Bong Joon-ho took the Big Two for his biting social satire, Parasite. Inspired by Kim Ki-young's The Housemaid (1960), this home infiltration saga made more history by also winning the Oscar for Best International Film. Yet, there were still complaints that it had triumphed over Todd Phillips's Joker (both 2019), which had amassed 11 nominations, as AMPAS was accused of being biased against comic-book movies.

The choice of Nomadland (2020) for Best Picture and Best Director took some of the heat off, as Chloé Zhao became only the second woman to do the double. Ironically, the Beijing-born director who had spent her career to date in the indie sector veered off into the Marvel Cinematic Universe for her follow-up, Eternals (2021), which contained the first openly gay superhero character in Phastos (Brian Tyree Henry), who is married to Ben (Haaz Sleiman).

For the first time in Oscar history, consecutive Best Picture winners were directed by women. However, in reworking Thomas Bidegain's La Famille Bélier (2014) as CODA, Sian Heder was deemed to have done a less impressive job than Jane Campion, who prevailed in winning the sole Oscar for The Power of the Dog (both 2021) from 12 nominations. The New Zealander, who is the only woman to have been nominated for Best Director twice, has yet to announce her next project. But Heder is currently working on a romcom based on Sarah Lotz's bestseller, Impossible, about a self-doubting ghostwriter and a commitment-phobe. Watch this space.