Continued from the previous installment.
6. You Can't Take it With You (1938) - I can't resist a romantic comedy starring Jean Arthur and Jimmy Stewart, especially when it's from Frank Capra organizing the screwball hijinks. However, it's hard to make a case that this is better than all nine of the other nominees, especially when those nominees include "The Adventures of Robin Hood," "Boys Town," "Pygmalion," and Jean Renoir's "Grand Illusion," which was the first foreign language film nominated for Best Picture. And though "You Can't Take it With You" remains very watchable, it's not one of Capra's best.
7. All Quiet on the Western Front (1930) - The beloved WWI novel is brought to screen with wonderfully evocative imagery. However, the film is very old, very long, and despite all the thunderous effects and explosions, it doesn't match up to more modern depictions of warfare. However, for 1930 it was a standout, and none of the other nominees even comes close. 1930 was an odd, transitional time for Hollywood, and this was only the third Oscars, so the quality of the films in contention wasn't great. It's only real competitor was the Maurice Chevalier comedy, "The Love Parade."
8. Mutiny on the Bounty (1935) - Charles Laughton was one of the most dependable portrayers of villainy in the 1930s, so of course he played the tyrannical Captain Bligh to perfection, Clark Gable (sans moustache) played Fletcher Christian, and the film was a huge box office hit. I don't have particularly strong feelings toward this version of "Mutiny on the Bounty" otherwise, but I will note that it was up against some really iconic films for Best Picture, including "Top Hat," and "Captain Blood," and very good versions of "David Copperfield" and "A Midsummer Night's Dream."
9. Grand Hotel (1932) - This is one of the films that Greta Garbo is best known for, especially the famous "I want to be alone" line. The cast also boasts two Barrymores, Wallace Beery, and Joan Crawford. It's a perfectly fine romantic melodrama of the era, with some notable production advancements, but 1932 was the first year with an expanded number of Best Picture nominations - eight this year, and ten from 1933-1943 - and I absolutely would have picked Josef von Sternberg's adventure film "Shanghai Express" or Mervyn LeRoy's newspaper noir "Five Star Final" over this.
10. The Great Ziegfeld (1936) - Frankly, this wasn't a great year for the Oscars. "The Great Ziegfeld" is a perfectly decent showbiz biopic that features some of the most elaborate song and dance production numbers of all time. It's nearly three hours long, and absolutely smothered in excess. However, I didn't find any of the other nominees particularly deserving either. Maybe I could make an argument for Jack Conway's "A Tale of Two Cities" with Ronald Colman, or Capra's "Mr. Deeds Goes to Town." However, "Ziegfeld" wasn't even close to the bottom of the barrel for this decade.
11. Cavalcade (1933) - A remarkably maudlin chronicle of an upper class family's eventful history from the turn of the century to after the end of WWI. There's nothing objectionable about the film aside from laying on the syrup too thick, but I have no idea how this movie managed to beat out some of the other nominees. 1933 had some of the best nominees of this era, including "42nd Street," "The Private Life of Henry VIII," "Lady for a Day," "She Done Him Wrong," and the only adaptation of "A Farewell to Arms" worth anything. "Cavalcade" isn't the worst of this lot, but it's close.
12. The Broadway Melody (1929) - The general consensus is that "The Broadway Melody" won on the strength of its technical achievements. It was the first sound film to win, one of the first sound musicals and one of the first to feature a technicolor sequence. It helped usher in the sound era, but the content is pretty mediocre stuff - your standard showbiz tale of a group of up-and-comers who put on a big show. Still, it didn't have much competition. "The Patriot" is lost, but the other nominees are pretty rudimentary - "Hollywood Revue" is essentially a filmed theater show.
13. Cimarron (1931) - Finally, my pick for the worst of the decade (and really, the worst in any era) is "Cimarron," a western about the Oklahoma land grab. It morphs into a family epic and melodrama about the taming of the frontier. It's very unfocused, badly paced, and fundamentally doesn't work as the feminist narrative the book was. What really kills the film from a modern POV, however, are the unfortunate racist caricatures of the African-American and Native-American characters, who are patronized relentlessly by all the white characters.
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