Alfred Hitchcock's film of Rebecca is considered by some film historians as a major turning point in the evolution of Hollywood, because it signaled the end of the reign of the producer as the dominant force on the making of a film and the beginning of the age of the director. Rebecca is a memorable film that contained classic Hitchcock touches, the usual sumptuous David O. Selznick production, and some of the most awe-inspiring cinematography in the history of film by George Barnes (winning the film its only other Oscar). But Rebecca loses track in the second half as it shifts the emphasis away from the travails of the second Mrs. DeWinter (a magnificent performance by Joan Fontaine) and concentrates on the far less engaging premise of what became of her predecessor. It is hardly surprising that it was honored over most of the more deserving nominees, because they were comedies: The Great Dictator, The Philadelphia Story and the non-nominated His Girl Friday and The Bank Dick never had a chance over the dramatic histrionics of Rebecca.

But it took all of Selznick's Oscar campaigning skills to wrestle the Best Picture Prize over the far more deserving winner, John Ford's devastating adaptation of The Grapes of Wrath. Steinbeck's dust bowl drama came to gut wrenching life and pulled nary a false note, even in the face of the censorial limitations of the period. It features a remarkable cast with staggering performances by Jane Darwell, John Carradine and the remarkable Henry Fonda, who gives the finest performance by an actor in a year of memorable performances in the role that he seemed born to play (and had to sign a seven year contract with 20th Century Fox to secure it). The Grapes of Wrath is unique in being a film that has its finger pressed squarely on the sensibilities and concerns of its contemporary audience without seeming at all dated when viewed today, because the material was handled with such unusual skill, candor, and honesty.

After years of playing second string gangsters for Warner Bros., Humphrey Bogart had one of the great breakout years in screen history with his back-to-back performances in High Sierra and The Maltese Falcon. He deserved a nomination for either role (and indeed might have canceled himself out in the balloting with this impressive one-two punch), but his Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon was particularly deserving of recognition. This was acting in a new vein: the cynical anti-hero who seemed to be the selfish antithesis of the usual movie leading man. Most actors couldn't have gotten away with it, but Bogart's unique charisma made the sleazy character spellbinding.

The troubled shooting and on-the-spot rewriting of Casablanca has been told and retold many times, but what many movie fans overlook that it holds an unprecedented spot among Best Picture winners. In our current thinking that a film must be released after Thanksgiving to be fresh enough in the voters' minds to be a Best Picture contender, it is surprising to discover that the Best Picture of 1943 was actually released in New York in November of 1942 to mixed reviews and lackluster business. The film opened in Los Angeles in January to coincide with the peace talks taking place in Casablanca, and finally found the audience that has been embracing it ever since. It hardly seems a surprise that it made such an impact that the Academy chose to honor it fourteen months after its initial release; Casablanca is still going strong and finding legions of new fans in its sixtieth year, when most World War II propaganda has been consigned to time capsules or the History Channel. 1943 was a year when the Academy definitely got it right.

There were a wealth of superior nominated films in this movie year and had Casablanca been out of the running, MGM's The Human Comedy would have been the front runner for the award. But Casablanca is such a sublime mixture of exotic locales, romance, adventure, intrigue and even comedy that it seems to say "the movies" more than any film ever created. It also has the most extraordinary gathering of characters ever assembled in Rick Blaine, Elsa Lund, Victor Laszlo, Captain Renault, Major Strasser, Signor Ferrari, Ugarte, Sam, et al. depicted by the most unforgettable cast of actors ever assembled. When lists of the greatest films ever made are drawn up, Casablanca is invariably named in the top ten (being represented as number two on the AFI list and number nine on IMDb). Madbeast.com places it squarely as number one on the list.

Darryl F. Zanuck felt that he was robbed of the Best Picture Oscar for Wilson, his excruciatingly self-important drone of a film that pretended to be a tribute to the the twenty-eighth President but was really just a monument to Zanuck's ego. When Zanuck failed to win the top prize for what he considered his finest achievement, he went back to the well of pretension and came up with Gentleman's Agreement, which told the story of a gentile writer posing as a Jew in order to experience anti-Semitism first hand; starting a much imitated (Glory, Tootsie, Dances With Wolves) Hollywood trend of pretending to tell the story of an oppressed group, but doing it from the point of view of a white male. Some effective films were made using this device, but at times it is hard to get past the hypocrisy of the enterprise. If the story were about a Jew writing about anti-Semitism played by, say, Everett Sloan, the film would have opened and disappeared without notice. But because it is WASP-ish Gregory Peck suffering the indignities, contemporary audiences didn't mind sensing outrage at the treatment he received. Zanuck finally won the award he coveted,and when he took the podium to accept it, he used the occasion to comment that he was still bitter that Wilson hadn't won the Best Picture Oscar three years before.

Zanuck should have had to keep waiting to vent his frustrations over Wilson, because a much more memorable and unpretentious film was a far more deserving winner of the award. Miracle on 34th Street, the beloved classic of a department store Santa who may be the real thing, is so familiar that it does have the air of a chestnut roasting on an open fire after too many viewings over a lifetime of Decembers. But watched with fresh eyes, it is a revelation to appreciate not only how charming and clever the story is, but how laugh-out-loud funny the Oscar winning screenplay by George Seaton is. With the Academy's well-documented distaste for comedy, it is a telling indication of the film's quality that it won two Oscars for writing (for Best Screenplay as well as for the original story by Valentine Davies) and for the touching and hilarious performance by Edmund Gwenn as Kris Kringle (matched every step of the way by Maureen O'Hara, John Payne and Natalie Wood).

Laurence Olivier followed up his magnificent film of Henry V with Hamlet, and was immediately anointed as the greatest interpreter of Shakespeare's work in film history. That, he surely was (based on Henry V and his wonderful 1956 film of Richard III); but Hamlet was never Olivier's role and his 1937 stage performance was universally panned by critics. By 1948 he was impervious to criticism, so no one dared point out that the film, while a decided improvement over Hollywood's earlier attempts to film the Bard's work, is a badly butchered and only tolerably performed adaptation of Shakespeare's play. Olivier and text editor Alan Dent cut the script to the bone, eliminating not only the character of Fortinbras (who is a common casualty of the editor's pen), but Rosencrantz and Guildestern (who are indispensable to depicting a complete version of the story). Olivier said that he was not initially keen to make a film of Hamlet (he would have preferred Macbeth, but Orson Welles was making a film of that play at the same time which would have reached theatres first) and when he did decide to do it, claimed that he would have preferred to cast another actor in the lead but was unable to find a suitable performer who would play the role according to his interpretation (when he did direct another actor in the part, Peter O'Toole in the premiere production of the National Theatre, the result was a notable disappointment). It is unfortunate that Olivier was unable to cast someone else as Hamlet, as he is frankly wooden in the role for which he received such acclaim at the time, and the rest of the cast (with the exception of Jean Simmons as a memorable Ophelia) are forgettable in their various generic characterizations. The resulting film is only a mildly engrossing collection of the play's most famous scenes; Hamlet's Greatest Hits, salvaged only by a truly magnificent rendering of the duel in Act V.

Far more memorable and entertaining was John Huston's immortal film of what greed can do to the human soul,Treasure of the Sierra Madre. The Academy appeared to think so too in the end, giving Huston Best Director over Olivier (despite the fact that Olivier's real achievement was as a director more than anything else), and awarding Treasure the Oscars for best Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor for Walter Huston's immortal performance as a grizzled prospector. It is somewhat surprising that Hamlet won the Best Picture Oscar because there was a backlash against the success of British films in Hollywood, to the point of the major studios pulling out their financial backing of the awards that year. But the garment most closely associated with the Oscars isn't black tie and floor-length evening gowns as much as it the Emperor's New Clothes, and Hamlet is decked to the nines.

The Academy has nominated only seven foreign language films for the Best Picture Oscar: La Grande Illusion (1938), Z (1969), The Emigrants (1972), Cries and Whispers (1973), Il Postino/The Postman (1995), Life is Beautiful (1998), and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000). All were good selections (with the exception of the offensive and atrociously acted Life is Beautiful), but the chance of a foreign language film actually winning the award is as likely as a Libertarian winning the White House. But during the late forties, the finest films were being produced in Europe, and even Hollywood recognized it; creating the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 1947 and handing out a trickle of nominations to non-American films. In 1949, the American film industry was on the offensive from invasion not only from foreign films, but from the coming onslaught of an even bigger menace: television. The idea that Hollywood would give its top prize to anything that wasn't home grown was unthinkable.

It's unfortunate that this nationalistic sentiment was so prevalent at the time, because the most memorable film of 1949 didn't come from Hollywood, but from Italian director Vittorio De Sica. The Bicycle Thief, with its story of a man in a desperate hunt to retrieve the stolen bicycle that is vital to his livelihood, is frequently listed second to Citizen Kane as the greatest film ever made.

The film the Academy chose for Best Picture is surprisingly weak: All the King's Men, Robert Rossen's adaptation of Robert Penn Warren's Pulitzer Prize novel based upon the reign of Louisiana governor Huey Long, is an annoyingly one-note affair featuring a typically bombastic Broderick Crawford as a bombastic politician who is so transparently corrupt that he might as well be twirling a cape and tying virginal young girls to railroad tracks. There were a wealth of superior films from among the nominees (A Letter to Three Wives, Battleground, The Heiress) and the non-nominees (On the Town, The Fallen Idol, White Heat). But nothing Hollywood created in 1949 was on a par with De Sica's masterpiece, and it would have been a bold statement for the Academy to recognize that.