Best Picture Winners 2005 - 2008

2005 - Crash was the winner and on film sites is often cited as the worst pick of the recent memory. It is a pretty obvious and sappy film. But I don't like any of the nominees that well. Brokeback Mountain is the best made of the nominees, but it's more than a little overwrought. Not a lot of outrage out there over Good Night and Good Luck losing. Some put an argument in for Spielberg's Munich, not me. I like Capote the best of the nominees. It was a weak year for films. I can't even work up a lot of enthusiasm for my favorite of the year, Batman Begins. Pixar didn't even release anything this year.

2006 - The best thing about The Departed winning this year was that finally a Martin Scorsese film took the prize. An acceptable choice, though I prefer nominees Letters of Iwo Jima (much better than Eastwood's other films of the decade) and Little Miss Sunshine. Nominee The Queen was okay. Nominee Babel is really, really bad. My favorite films of the year, My favorite of the year wasn't nominated, The Prestige. (I should have mentioned a long time ago that we're only dealing with English language films, since foreign language films so rarely have a shot. For instance, easily the best film of the year was the film that won Best Foreign Language Film, The Lives of Others.)

2007 - Finally this year, a Coen Brothers film was recognized as Best Picture, No Country for Old Men. So huzzah for that, excellent choice. I respect nominee, There Will Be Blood, but it's not exactly a film one can feel warm and cuddly about. I'd say the same about nominee, Atonement, with a little less respect. Nominee Juno was fun. Michael Clayton is fun as well, but wildly implausible.

2008 - A really, really weak year for nominees. The best film of the nominees won, Slumdog Millionaire. But that's with four really dull nominees, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk and The Reader. (The Reader is one of the most incredible pieces of Oscar-bait ever made. Before this was made, Kate Winslet was on the show Extras and joked that you need to make a Holocaust film to win an Oscar. So in this film she played a Nazi - WHO CAN'T READ!!!) The Academy got a lot of grief for not nominating The Dark Knight this year. Wall-E and In Bruges deserved to be nominated as well.

So the Academy changed the rules, so that's why I'm only looking at four films this time. Because after 2008, the rules change.