Easily one of the worst Best Picture Oscar winners

Wings is a brilliant film; I don't know what you're talking about. I also really enjoy Cimarron. You especially have to place Cimarron within its proper historical context. Sound films were new then and the technology wasn't yet refined. The fact that they were able to shoot such an expansive film with limited sound technology is a feat unto itself. It also touches upon such hot-button issues of the time in a favorable light: such as women's rights (the female protagonist is elected to Congress at the end! and there is an inter-racial marriage).

I also did enjoy Cavalcade to some extent. Yes, it's a bit stuffy but in an historical context it gives us a look at attitudes of turn-of-the-century events from people who actually lived during the turn of the century. It was also an immensely popular play of the time. The film suffers from coming at a crossroads in motion picture history: 1933 is around the time that the early talkie period gives way to the Classical Hollywood era (notice that 1934 Best Picture winner of It Happened One Night is considered an absolute classic.)

I have seen all of the Best Picture winners and I don't believe any of them are "crap." They are all good films, many of them are of course undeserving of the prize Best Picture but in and of themselves they are not terrible. Most of them cannot withstand the limelight they're put in after the winning the prize and thus become horribly under-rated. If I hear one more person knock How Green Was My Valley...I swear!

GAY RIGHTS ARE CIVIL RIGHTS

Do you really think this is worse than Titanic, Crash and Chicago? Seriously?

I actually thought this film was fabulous! Why is old fashioned bad? I can't understand that. Give one reason.

Sure it's not the best film of the year but when did that actually happen? Once? Twice? The winners have been far worse recently IMO.

Somebody here has been drinking and I'm sad to say it ain't me - Allan Francis Doyle

i thought cavalcade was rather boring and fairly incohesive. didnt like it much so I agree with you there...

disagree with the shots you take on Wings too. that is a really well done movie.

It is truly HORRIBLE! How they managed to ruin a Noel Coward play AND to make it drag so is beyond me, as his stuff is known for it's brisk pace. High School productions could do better.

"Think, before you drink, before you drive me mad!"

I don't agree. I find this movie wonderful!

Bimbo Boy
http://bimboboy.com
http://twitter.com/bimboboy

CAVALCADE surely has its weak moments. Of the modern winners, however, I choose
CRASH. What a piece of overrated, pretentious crap! One cliche after another.
After the ending(mercifully)where Sandra Bullock trips over her cell phone, I
half expected Hattie MacDaniel to enter and save the day!

I don't know about worst but this has to be the Most Boring best picture winner I have seen

When there's no more room in hell, The dead will walk the earth...

For the historian this movie is a rare find. It contains details of life then that could only have been reproduced by people who had lived through that era. For someone who knows a great deal about the British experience in that time it is heart-wrenching, and it is extremely revealing of the reasons why the world dealt with Hitler as it did and the issues we have all struggled with since that time. It is one of the anti-war movies of the early talkies era but also deals with the discordant social upheaval. Clearly, dignity, greatness, and peace aren't going to be the keywords of the future despite the toast by the older generation. I'm sure for those who were aware of world events, this movie was a warning of what was on the horizon. We saw references to the Lost Generation we know so well through F. Scott Fitzgerald, the human toll the war took for what?--for national pride and apparently little else with tragic consequences, the battling ideas about morality and the nature of modern warfare, and the kicking over of the traces of Victorian values by the young who were changed and sometimes destroyed by the new technologies as represented by the Titanic and later the war, and opportunities as represented by a nice girl singing in a nightclub and dating a nice boy of another class, as well as by the cruel and disillusioning experiences of the war. It is a movie about the future and the past--what the people had gone through and hints of what might lie ahead.

This isn't an Americanized version of British life, which is what makes it so special. It is a treasure and I feel privileged for the opportunity to see it in such good condition on TCM. I would have given it the Academy Award that year, too. It has an epic quality that in many ways seems very modern for so early in movie history. It didn't rush. It let us get a real feel for that time and people. That is an era I love and I wasn't bored in the least. I was glad the movie didn't hurry from one event to another. I would like to get a copy of this so I could watch it several times, especially to really take in the montages, and pause to sort out all the various voices clamoring for the public's attention in Britain in the postwar era.

Judging by the comments here I would suggest it isn't a movie for young people or those with no historical or British reference points. And if you ignore or don't understand the montages you will miss a good deal of the movie's message which is in no way happily ever after! They were already discussing the next war. The men and women who had gone through The Great War had a conviction that they were going to have to deal with war again, and it was a matter of how they would do that rather than if it happened. As this showed, in the time of empires, distant wars were a frequent fact of life, as they illustrated with the Boer War, but WWI with its gassing and trench warfare and bombing of Britain was terribly different. Yes, the older generation was old-fashioned next to the Jazz Age babies, but that's part of the point, too. While we tend to think our own time has seen the most upheaval, in reality it was theirs that went from the carriage age to the air age, from strict Victorian rules to working out new ways of relating and living, from limited war mostly against underwhelming odds--the relief of Mafeking was a foreshadowing of the change in the easy assumption of British success, to world war. There is SO MUCH in this movie it is impossible to take it all in during one viewing, if you have the background to understand it as the viewers in 1933 did.

I would suggest reading The Forsyte Saga for more insight into this same era--no, NOT seeing the remake of the series that removes all of what makes it noteworthy and turns it into just another costumer soap opera.