Why I'm Watching the Academy Award Winners

A month ago, I stumbled upon E Weekly's Sirius XM channel, and my commute home became filled with pop culture, a fairly positive experience when compared to listening to the BBC and hearing about world conflicts. Typically, I listen to the show News and Notes on E Weekly, and on this show, one of the hosts (Julia) is watching Entertainment Weekly's 100 Greatest Movies of All-Time. She made a New Year's resolution to do this, and I thought, "hey, that's a really good idea to have an excuse to watch movies." Being a working parent, I don't have much time left in my day to watch movies, but ever since middle school, I've loved the power of film. Transporting myself to another world to view other people's stories is a cathartic escape from life.

So I began thinking about Julia's resolution--maybe this was something I should do. But then the question was how would I select movies to watch? I didn't want to copy Julia (plus there are horror movies on that list and I don't do horror movies...at all), and I didn't want to randomly select movies. I knew if I did that, I wouldn't push myself to watch something new. After thinking about it for a few days, I realized that the Academy Awards was the solution. My goal is to watch all the movies that have been awarded Best Picture by the Academy Awards, beginning in 1927/1928 with Wings, the only silent film ever awarded the Oscar for Best Picture. And I added the idea of blogging to this project because if I was going to watch all these movies, I wanted to have some way to share my experience with others. We'll see how this experiment goes.