There are few things cinephiles like to argue over more than what movie should have won Best Picture in a given year. Hindsight is always 20/20 in these cases, but some years provoke the argument more so than others, years like 2005 (when Crash beat Brokeback Mountain). To better argue which films deserve to win the big prize over others, a test was devised: the TNT test. Theoretically, the films that age the best and are played most often are the films most deserving of accolades.
Let’s take a look at some of the Oscar winners from the last several years, shall we? Argo, The Artist, The King’s Speech, The Hurt Locker, Slumdog Millionaire, No Country for Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby, and Chicago to name a few. The Departed passes snuff, as does No Country for Old Men, but a majority of the last ten best picture winners don’t though, not even half.
Judging by the TNT test, seven of the last ten winners the Academy picked can’t justify their place as Best Picture winners. The only recent winner that looks to buck the trend is Argo. Ben Affleck’s award winner swept the circuit last season and will be appearing nightly on cable channels to the delight of many fans as the film builds its way to being a TNT perennial for the next ten years. It will fit right in with other fan favorites like the Bourne saga and The Town, played weekly on basic cable.
Argo is the rarity in Oscar winners lately, most popular films in the race usually don’t win. The Dark Knight, The Town, Saving Private Ryan, and Pulp Fiction either finished runner-up, or not nominated at all. Those films all appear on cable with fairly high viewers and have large followings, and yet, these genre pictures weren’t deemed prestigious enough to win in their respective years.
Re-watchability doesn’t always correlate to quality, but there is something to be said for a film’s ability to be played over and over again without viewers getting tired of the proceedings. Many of the films listed above, are caught in progress on television, watched dozens of times a year while the critically adored Amour and Holy Motors collect dust.
There is no way to objectively determine the true quality of films, but for viewer enjoyment, the film that is re-watched most is held in higher esteem. How many times has How Green Is My Valley been played in comparison to Citizen Kane?
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6 thoughts on “An Inquisition for our Readers: Does Rewatchability Equal Excellence?”
Why use foreign language titles as comparison? Which non-English language movies do Cable channels ever play. The local French channel which plays two movies a night has played Uncle Boonmee at least twice in the last year, I wouldn’t call it the most rewatchable film.
It’s true that movies like Uncle Boonmee rarely see airtime on cable, I selected those two films as reference to films that were considered “better” than Argo last year.
I saw Holy Motors something around five times last year and Argo a total of zero. Based on my experience, I would say Holy Motors is not only a more rewatchable film (look at the numbers! They don’t lie!) but also a significantly better film (Argo MUST be a terrible film if it couldn’t entice me to even see it once.) Develop a better fucking method for critically assessing films.
It’s not a method for assessing films, just a diving board for a discussion about whether excellent movies and movies that are endlessly re-watchable are one in the same. And for most film aficionados that answer is always different.
So “enjoyment” and “quality” are different things? There’s a whiff of anti-intellectualism in your article which I’m not buying. The films I enjoy the most are the ones that move me the most are the ones that I watch the most. It’s “reverse-snobbery” and an extension of the increasingly popular (and distressing) notion that intelligence in cinema equals pretension and stuffiness.
You’re reading something that isn’t there friend.