9 Great Best Picture Winners That You May Not Have Seen

The Lost Weekend (1945)

There have been many great movies about substance abuse, and several that awarded their lead actor – the one playing the despaired addict – an Oscar or Oscar nomination. Frank Sinatra received a nod for The Man With the Golden Arm, as did Jack Lemmon for the haunting Days of Wine and Roses. Nicolas Cage gave one of the best turns of his career as a nihilistic drunk in Leaving Las Vegas and won an Oscar for it in 1996. The films listed above all strived to be as stark and terrifying as Billy Wilder’s uncompromising Best Picture winner from 1945.

The Lost Weekend is a harrowing movie about a writer’s implosion as a result of massive intoxication. Ray Milland is staggering and harsh in the role as troubled drunk Don, and also won Best Actor for his performance. The Academy went through awarding a streak of bleak, unromantic films during the War and postwar period, and Wilder’s sour, strikingly filmed drama may be the most unrepentant of the bunch. (Ironically, theatre attendance was at its highest during the 1940s, a decade where several of the best films were the opposite of a crowd-pleaser.)

Wilder wrote the screenplay (based off Charles R. Jackson’s novel) as a way to understand the demons of alcoholic novelist Raymond Chandler, who he worked on Double Indemnity with. The final result was harsh, although just hopeful enough to get the respect of the Academy. To date, it remains one of the writer/director’s boldest films, and one of cinema’s best noirs.