In Sight & Sounds poll of film critics, "Citizen Kane" was voted the top film every decade from 1962 to 2012. It has a 100% critics rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Roger Ebert called it the greatest film ever made. Seeing as how "Citizen Kane" is widely regarded as the greatest movie ever made, you might be surprised to hear that the Oscars did not even regard it to be the best movie of 1942. It was nominated for Best Picture and did not win. The movie that beat it was "How Green Was My Valley", which as far as I know, has never been #1 in any poll ever since.
Last Sunday I decided to watch "How Green Was My Valley".
"How Green Was My Valley" is about a small boy growing up in a small mining town in Wales. It's not just a movie about the boy but the trials and travails of his family and the town as well. It simply follows the lives of ordinary people and how their lives unfold over time. I'm not going to do a giant "takedown" of how the movie that robbed "Citizen Kane" is terrible - it isn't terrible. It's pleasant and interesting enough, but it's fairly dated and clearly the wrong choice for Best Picture 1942 (eh, in hindsight, of course).
So I've watched all of the Best Picture nominees again this year. It seemed to me that after a few years of dreadful decline, this year's nominees were a marked improvement overall. My favorite continues to be "Parasite". But if "Little Women" or "Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood" win, I'll be ok with that.
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