Five Favorite Best Picture Oscar Winners

This Saturday’s list of five favorites will concentrate on Best Picture Academy Award-winners. The Academy started handing out the awards in 1927, and as we know it usually gives the Oscar to very popular movies, which made a lot of money for their producers. But that doesn’t mean what's accepted as popular is always mediocre, or even predictable.

My list of five illustrates the Best Picture award has sometimes gone to somewhat offbeat movies that no one would have expected to have been contenders when they were being produced. Yet, upon their release their excellence just bowled over that year's competition.

“Casablanca” (1943): Directed by Micheal Curtiz; Cast: Humphrey Bogart, Ingrid Bergman, Claude Rains
“Midnight Cowboy” (1969): Directed by John Schlesinger, Cast: Dustin Hoffman, Jon Voight, Brenda Vaccaro
“One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest” (1975): Directed by Milos Forman; Cast: Jack Nicholson, Louise Fletcher, Danny DeVito
“On the Waterfront” (1954): Directed by Elia Kazan; Cast: Marlon Brando, Lee J. Cobb, Eva Marie Saint
“Unforgiven” (1992): Directed by Clint Eastwood; Cast: Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman

Meanwhile, the art above is available on new Biograph T-shirt (in either white or black), it is available only online from F.T. Rea's Inkbites. The painting itself was done in 1974 for a poster to do with a staff art show. The lettering "Biograph" is from one of the theater's programs, No. 59, in the spring of 1982. Other designs are available, too. To see the all images on a preview page, a little bit larger than how they appear on the Inkbites' page, click here