1. 1927/28: Wings

Fact Sheet:

Oscars:

• Engineering Effects - Roy Pomeroy
• Outstanding Picture - Paramount Famous Lasky

Nominations:

• Won in every nominated category

Best Picture Contenders:

• The Racket
• 7th Heaven

Duration: 139 min.

Golly, three days in and already a day behind. Well, that's why I left Sundays as a buffer, good thing!

So, on to Wings, the official first winner of the Oscar for Best Picture (OBP). It tells the story of two young men, Jack and David, vying for the hand of the same girl, Shirley, who loves David but doesn't dare to break Jack's heart. Jack in turn is loved by Mary, but he sees her more as a little sister. Alas, their lives are turned upside down because of the war, and the two men leave. In the first days in the army, Jack and David loathe each other, but living together as soldiers drives them to bond, and they become best friends.

One day, David is shot down by Germans, but manages to escape, and he steals an enemy airplane. He tries to fly across the Allied line, but Jack, seeking revenge for his fallen buddy, mistakes him for an actual German airplane and shoots him down. After landing, he sees David, and realizes his mistake. Going through David's stuff, he also finds letters from Shirley saying it's David she loves, and he realizes that Mary truly loved him all along, and as soon as he gets back home they finally kiss in the last frame.

The oscars this movie, and Sunrise, won apart from their respective OBP's actually tell you a lot about the movies. Whereas Sunrise was driven by its beautiful photography, Wings shines in its - for its day - incredibly impressive combat scenes. The 2004 movie The Aviator, chronicling the shooting of Howard Hughes' Hell's Angels, being shot concurrently with Wings, shows us what effort it must have cost to shoot the dogfighting scenes in this film. There are at times almost a dozen planes in the air, performing an aerial ballet. That, in 1928, truly is impressive, hence the Engineering Effects oscar. And they are very watchable even in this day and age.

However, in the 'story' scenes, Wings really does show its age. Murnau showed with Sunrise that he very fully understood the language of film, through the editing, photography, and mostly visual storytelling. Wings uses so many intertitles it sometimes feels as if you're reading a web page with some embedded Youtube clips. The video is fun, but the text is the meat of what you're taking in. The editing is slightly botched as well: the movie is full of jump cuts, discontinuous editing (a door closes, then a cut is made, and we see the same door closing; discontinuous editing was used with effect by Eisenstein, but here it just feels like a mistake), and the photography just lacks the spark that it did with Wings.

So, did Wings deserve its OBP? Surely, for the time it must have been an impressive picture. But Sunrise certainly has stood the test of time a lot better, and there is a reason that Murnau is still regarded as a moviemaking genius, and that Wings is simply known as 'the first movie to win the OBP'.

Next up: The Broadway Melody!