3) Citizen Kane
Even though there’s a bunch of hipster-critic pushback over the course of the past few years, Citizen Kane has long been considered the best movie ever made (if such a distinction even has any meaning). As far as the Academy is concerned though, it wasn’t even the best movie of the year it was released. It lost the Best Picture award to John Ford’s How Green Was My Valley. That one was apparently deemed less controversial and therefore more worthy of a statue. Sounds a little like this year’s backlash around Zero Dark Thirty.
Who knows a thing about How Green Was My Valley today though? Who has even seen it? I know I haven’t, partly out of spite, partly because it frankly has a stupid-ass title. Also, Quentin Tarantino says John Ford is racist so I hesitate to watch anything he did. Citizen Kane, on the other hand, has gone on to be considered such an advance in moviemaking history that it’s the one film that virtually every Film 101 class studies closely. It wasn’t textbook cinema at the time, but it is now. I think that says everything.
Not only that, since the first time I saw it (and I don’t usually respond strongly to movies from before the 1970s) it has always felt more like a contemporary movie than anything else from around that time. Some aspects are dated but it’s surprisingly easy to watch, even today. It makes you realize the Oscars tend to be the short game, but in the scope of film history, the long game is what matters, and Citizen Kane kind of won at that. Maybe I’m not giving How Green Was My Valley the credit it deserves though. All you How Green Was My Valley fans, let me hear from you.
