Oscars

[Bonnie and Clyde trailer voice]: They’re old, they kind of hate each other, and they read envelopes. Since Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway mistakenly announced La La Land as the recipient of the Academy Award for Best Picture on Sunday night, everyone‘s been looking for an answer as to how such a massive goof could come to pass. Blame has been passed around like a hot potato, with fault assigned to Beatty, Dunaway, some tweeting nitwit from the accounting firm that tabulates the votes, the person who lays down the envelopes, and just for good measure, a cold and uncaring god. But now the trenchant, Spotlightesque journalists at TMZ claim to have the full story behind just what went down.

I’ve been saying it for months: It’s too bad there can only be one Best Picture winner.

You know the old saying about how it’s an honor just being nominated? It is. An Academy Award nomination is a win no matter the final outcome on Oscar night. For one thing, it guarantees a major boost in profile and an upgrade in the caliber of roles an actor gets offered. There’s no way, for example, that any Oscar nominee will accept the sorts of roles you’re about to see below.

It’s that time of the year again where we must set aside our personal opinions and favorites to try and guess which movies the Academy will deem the most culturally significant. A lot had changed since our initial Oscar predictions last December. Manchester By the Sea is no longer a Best Picture frontrunner, a race dominated by La La Land with Moonlight shortly behind. The days of calling Natalie Portman a Best Actress shoe-in last fall feel like a distant dream, and Lion and Hacksaw Ridge might just lend this year’s Oscars some surprising upsets.

Who would win if the Patriots, Cavaliers, Cubs and Blackhawks all played at once? That's my feeling about choosing a favorite for the Best Picture Oscar for Sunday.

This Sunday’s Oscars will be the 87th annual Academy Awards. In nearly a century of honoring Hollywood’s best, the Academy has sometimes has made some bold choices, and some dumb choices. This gallery has them all; the complete history of nine decades of Best Picture winners in pictures. Some are classics, still watched to this day. A few are almost totally forgotten to history. (Cavalcade, anyone?) But they all won. Even Crash, somehow.