Greatest Best Picture of All Time: New Millennium, Round 1

When a person sets out to watch every single movie ever awarded "Best Picture", a person learns things about the entertainment industry, film preservation, public libraries, special effects, and oneself. Among these lessons is, "it is currently easier to get ahold of very old or very new movies than it is to get ahold of movies of intermediate age."

This is due to the intersection of copyright law and the law of supply and demand. Brick-and-mortar libraries tend to keep newer movies in stock, so as to attract patrons who just missed them in theaters. Online streaming services tend to have easier access to old stuff that's passed into the public domain, or at least into the domain of cheap royalties. Movies of middling age might, or might not, pop up in either place.

I say all this by way of explaining why, for the fourth entry in this tournament, I have skipped forward in the timeline of Oscar-winning films, to Chicago (2002) vs. Birdman (2013)

First Contestant: Chicago

Chicago is one of 10 musicals to have won top prize at the Academy Awards. It's based on a 1975 stage musical of the same name, which was originally choreographed by Bob Fosse. I first saw it as an in-flight movie when I was 11. The rewatch seemed much more sexual; I'm not sure whether the airplane version was censored or if I was just too innocent to appreciate it in 2002.

Perhaps both.

The Plot
Roxie Hart (Zellweger) is a married woman with no respect for her husband, Amos (John C. Reilly). As a sign of this lack of respect, she's been sleeping with Fred Casely (Dominic West). Casely, however, has lied about having contacts in show business just to get her into bed. When she finds out, she shoots him dead.

Roxie first tries to get away with this by having Amos confess to the crime and claim self-defense. When that story unravels, she is taken to jail. There, she meets Matron Mama Morton (Queen Latifah) and several other accused murderesses, including jazz performer Velma Kelly (Zeta-Jones). Velma killed her husband and sister after finding them in flagrante delicto. This backstory is explained in the best dance number ever written about domestic violence:

Velma and Roxie become rivals for the attention of the press, the sympathy of the public, and the time of defense attorney Billy Flynn. Various hijinks ensue. In the end, Velma makes a deal to get her charges dropped in exchange for testifying against Roxie. Billy, in turn, eviscerates Velma on the stand to win an acquittal for Roxie. This is shown in a tap dance number:

Roxie and Velma are both released from jail, but find their 15 minutes of fame are over. They're both alone and broke. So, they join forces and create a jazz act based on the gimmick of having two "jazz murderers" sing songs about how great it is to get away with murder.

Note: I am not kidding about any of the preceding description.

Second Contestant: Birdman

Birdman has the distinction of being the only Best Picture whose filming involved having Michael Keaton walk through Times Square in tighty-whiteys.

It's difficult to do Birdman justice in a written description, because it's an intentionally strange film. For starters, it was shot and edited in such a way as to suggest that it was filmed in one long take. There are no jump cuts, no shot-counter-shots, no montages - it's just people doing things, on film. At one point, the camera records an empty hallway for 16 seconds while waiting for something plot-relevant to stumble by. The overall effect is somewhat odd, since this is not what viewers expect from film, and yet very difficult to look away from.

The Plot

Riggan (Keaton) is a former action-movie star who has written, and is directing, his Broadway debut. This is, unfortunately, not going well. The production is over budget, as manager Jake (Zach Galifinakis) keeps reminding Riggan. The show is not yet gelling, and it already faces a backlash from Broadway fanatics who don't like Hollywood moving in on their turf. Riggan's daughter Sam, a recovering addict, has been working as his assistant, which is also not going well. His girlfriend, who might be pregnant, is also angry because he's being nicer to the other actresses than he is to her.

In the final days of rehearsal, a light crashes down on one of the actor's heads. Riggan, who has been hallucinating that he has the powers of his old character Birdman, thinks that he telekinetically caused this accident because he hated the actor. Either way, though, they're forced to replace him with Mike (Edward Norton), a brilliant but difficult actor whose salary puts the production even more over budget. This leads to an iconic scene where retired-Batman and former-Incredible-Hulk come to blows in a state of undress..

As the previews roll forward, the production faces more and more problems. Mike is a publicity hound with a drinking problem, and also has an affair with Sam. Riggan gets locked out of the theater on a mid-act smoke break and has to run through Times Square to make his next cue. (See "Michael Keaton in tighty-whiteys," above.) A theater critic threatens to close the play simply because of how much she hated the Birdman series. Riggan's hallucinations get more frequent and violent - he imagines smashing up his dressing room, bombing a crowded street, and flying off the roof of a tall building. 

Or maybe he really is being followed around by a psychic anthropomorphic bird?

Finally, on opening night, he swaps out a prop gun for a real one. When his character commits suicide at the end of the play, he shoots the nose off his face. In an ironic twist, this turns out to be the only thing that the audience has never seen before. The critic raves about the play, tickets sell out, and paparazzi swarm his hospital room. He jumps out his hospital window, and either flies away or hallucinates doing so. 

Or else maybe the whole hospital scene is a dream. Interpretations differ.

The Winner: Chicago

This was a close call for Bryan and me. These movies are both weirdly mesmerizing and also plainly weird. We decided that Chicago is slightly more entertaining because of the sing-along possibilities and the bright, vibrant staging.