Wings

 And this week's Friday night movie has been... Wings!

Original image located here. Accessed 5th January 2024

This year marks a full decade since I started this series. So to acknowledge such a milestone, I'm going to attempt something ambitious:

For every week in 2024, I will be watching a movie that won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Certainly watching the Best Picture winners is something I've been wanting to do for a while so now is as good a time as any to do so. After all, these movies are the best of the best - or so it would seem so it would be interesting to see if such a notion holds up. Of course, it would be easy to kowtow to the ongoing joke that the Academy get wrong time and time again but at the same time, it would be interesting to see if said joke still holds up. 

So some ground rules:

• The one rule of this series - watch a movie I've never seen before - still applies
• At time of writing there have been 95 Best Picture winners. Already I have seen 28 of them. Of course I'm not going to get through all of the remaining 67 so I am allowed to be selective. 
• I have a rough plan mapped out but I am open to suggestions

And now, what better way to commence this year-long plan than with the very first Best Picture winner.

A lot of this movie's reputation is being the first winner as well as being the only silent movie to gain the top honour. It was also worth keeping in mind, in my approach to this movie, that time may not have been kind to it and it may come across as dated now (a notion that may be ever present as this plan continues).

So what we have here is a war movie where air combat is married to a human drama off the battlefield. As it turned out, I wasn't exactly thrilled with the latter (indeed you could easily have shaved half an hour off and no one would've noticed) but the former is where the movie shines. The aerial sequences are astonishing - moreso when considers this was all done with practical effects - and still hold up nearly a century later. Director William A Wellman was a WW1 pilot himself and he shows a great knowledge for realism and how to convey air combat into the screen. 

It looks like this is going to make for an interesting year.....