Everyone has their own way of handing the unprecedented times we find ourselves in. While I’m thankful that my work is mostly unaffected – as a college professor, I was already teaching one class fully online and was well prepared to switch the other one over – my hobbies have been decimated. I am not spending most evenings this spring umpiring Little League games. Boy Scouts has for all practical purposes stopped. And, worst of all for me personally, the movie theaters are closed. I saw 17 movies in the theater in April and May of 2019, and this year will likely see none.

I generally watch very few movies at home because the constant interruptions and less comfortable seating and lower-quality sound really do make for a completely different (and to me, lesser) experience, but we do what we can.

Therefore, I have decided that if I’m going to be forced to do my movie watching from home for the next who-knows-how-long, I might as well try to accomplish something I have thought of doing many times in the past: watch every movie that has ever won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

This is a bit less daunting for me than it might sound. I have already seen all of the winners since 1988 and had seen a decent number of them prior to that. In fact, now that I’m serious about taking this on, I’ve counted them up and discovered that I need to watch 42 of the 90 films. And while I’m doing it, I figured I might as well share my journey through film history with our readers here.

A quick note: I have no plans to rewatch most of the 48 winners I have already seen. A few, like The Bridge on the River Kwai, are ones I think my son will enjoy. A few others are ones my wife has said she wants to see. But for the most part, this will be a 42-part series on the ones I missed.

Also, while I plan to work through the list chronologically when I am watching them alone, the ones I see with my wife or son I will watch when they’re able. However, for the sake of continuity, I will publish these reviews chronologically.

One last thing: the movies I’m reviewing here range from close to 100 years old to 30-odd years old. I’m not going to worry about spoilers.

Clara Bow in ‘Wings,’ the first movie to win Best Picture

And so, without further ado: the first movie to ever win Best Picture: Wings, a 1927 production from Paramount Pictures, directed by William A. Wellman and Harry d’Abbadie d’Arrast, and starring Clara Bow, Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers, and Richard Arlen – with a cameo by a then-unknown Gary Cooper in one of his first credited roles.

Wings is the also the first, and until 2011, only silent film to win the award. (The first “talky,” The Jazz Singer, was released the same year.) For several decades, the film was thought to be lost, until a copy turned up in the Cinémathèque Française film archive in Paris. It has since been fully restored and reorchestrated. The newer edition – the one I watched – is longer than the original film, but having only seen the one version, I’m not sure exactly which parts were added.

For a movie that is almost 100 years old, the film holds up remarkably well. It often falls toward the lower end of rankings of Best Picture movies, but I think that the fact that it’s not only watchable but downright enjoyable today speaks a lot about how maybe the nascent Academy of Motion Picture Sciences knew what it was doing in giving it the award all those years ago.

The movie revolves around a love triangle. At the outset of World War I, Jack Powell (Rogers) and David Armstrong (Arlen), despite coming from different walks of life, are friends from the same small, unnamed American town, and both are vying for the attention of local beauty Sylvia (played by Jobyna Ralston). When America enters the war, both men sign up to be pilots and end up billeted together during training with Cadet White (Cooper), who is almost immediately killed in a midair accident. (Cooper has a scant 2 minutes of screen time, but it was enough to get him noticed by producers and launch his career. He was also noticed by Bow, and the two had a well-publicized affair on set.)

The men then ship off to France, where they fight in a series of extremely well-shot aerial battles. Those are challenging to do today with modern technology, but this movie carries them off brilliantly, making them fast, exciting, and surprisingly realistic.

What Jack didn’t realize was that Sylvia preferred David but was just too kind to tell him. More importantly, though, was that the pretty “girl next door,” Mary (Bow), had a crush on Jack. As the men go off to war, Mary signs up to be an ambulance driver and so ends up in France with the men.

After a particularly brutal battle, the pilots are given leave in Paris, and in an extended (and, honestly, too-long) nightclub sequence, Jack becomes completely drunk and starts hallucinating bubbles everywhere. (It’s weird.) What he doesn’t realize is that the pretty girl who helps him up to his room is none other than his childhood friend Mary. He’s also too drunk to do anything other than pass out.

At this point, Mary is changing back from her fancy dress to her uniform when two other soldiers burst in to tell Jack that his leave is canceled and he’s been ordered back to the front lines. Seeing Mary undressed (Wings is one of the first commercially released films to feature nudity, although it’s very brief), they think that she took advantage of the unconscious hero pilot and ruin her career, forcing her back to the States.

The action then returns to the men. They end up participating in the Battle of Saint-Mihiel, one of the key battles the U.S. participated in during the war. During the battle, David is shot down. Believing that his friend has been killed, Jack flies into a rage, taking unnecessary chances as he strafes enemy positions and takes down one enemy plane after another. Unfortunately, he doesn’t realize that the last plane he shoots down is being flown by David, who had stolen it to try to return to his own lines.

The scene as David dies in Jack’s arms is as touching today as it was decades ago (another first for the movie is showing two men kiss).

The final few scenes of the movie fall into melodrama as Jack returns home, confronts David’s parents to confess that he killed their son, and finally ends up with Mary, but by then you’re invested enough in the film not to worry too much about it.

Overall, I enjoyed Wings a whole lot more than I thought I would. The aerial sequences are fantastic, and though Arlen’s performance is a bit over-the-top, Rogers does well. It’s very easy to see from this movie why Bow, already one of the biggest stars in Hollywood, had earned the title “The It Girl” and would go on to almost another decade of stardom in both silent and sound pictures. That is, until she married actor Rex Bell and retired, at age 28, from the movies.

Her story after that is pretty tragic – she struggled with mental health issues and ended up dying alone in 1965. Arlen was one of her pallbearers.