If you’re an awards geek and you haven’t yet discovered Nathaniel Rogers and friends’ series of “Best Pictures from the Outside In” discussions, you have a treat in store.
The premise is both eccentric and beautifully simple: word from both ends of the Oscar timeline, each episode pits two Best Picture winners against other for discussion, re-evaluation and occasional ridicule, with the comparison of two often wholly disparate films bringing out interesting elements in each other.
In the ring for the latest instalment are “How Green Was My Valley” and “Forrest Gump” — an appropriate match-up in that they are both sentimental pieces that beat out more daring, enduring works in their respective years, and have retrospectively become less popular choices for it.
I’m pleased to see Rogers, together with his two fellow bloggers Nick Davis and Mike ‘Goatdog’ Phillips, giving “How Green Was My Valley” more respectful attention than most people, who routinely dismiss it as “That Movie That Beat ‘Citizen Kane’” and little more.
It’s still a John Ford film, after all, and one of his most intimate, visually lyrical works, even if it succumbs to hokum on more than one occasion. As Davis so aptly puts it, it’s a film wherein “you really feel the cycles of the day and the season, sometimes within a single shot.”
They don’t, however, hold back on their mutual loathing for “Gump,” which I have to agree is one of the most artistically and ideologically objectionable films ever to wins Best Picture. (“Gump” and “Braveheart” back-to-back represent the Academy’s all-time nadir, as far as I’m concerned.)