Time goes by, and 2007's Oscar show is history ["Casablanca"]
The 79th annual Academy Awards are history. Now you have most of a year to wonder, again, why they don't make movies like they used to. Maybe your perspective on what it means to make movies like they used to only goes back to, like, "The Godfather" or "The Lord of the Rings." Maybe you think, of course they don't make movies like they used to, because ... if it isn't new it's, you know, old.
Wherever you stand on the light beams called the movies, see "Casablanca." You've seen it? See it again. You've seen it many times? See it again. You've never seen it? You've never seen "Casablanca?" If you claim to like movies, see it - more than once.
I bumped into "Casablanca" running on another channel two hours before this year's Oscar broadcast. I watched it for the twenty-leventh time. It did the trick for me again, and not merely because it is so familiar to me, and not merely because it epitomizes what a classic movie is.
"Casablanca": the larger-than-movies love story, the delicious bowl of characters, the wit and sentiment of the dialog, the cynicism and hopefulness and hill-of-beans-edness of the politics. Every scene. Little things in every scene. "Casablanca."
For the 79th annual Oscar brouhaha, "The Queen" was solidly contemporary in a historic way. "Little Miss Sunshine" was a most unlikely family treat. "Letters from Iwo Jima" held war up to new light. "Babel" held the international fabric of the world up to a new light. "The Departed" - the Oscar-winning Best Picture this time around - dished up the violence we are addicted to.
See all five of what has just come and gone as Oscar's Best Picture nominees. They are good new movies. They will be old movies soon enough. If you claim to like movies, see "Casablanca." There is no time like an all-time movie.