September 18, 2016

The Forties: A Retrospective

A few 40's alcoholics celebrating the completion of a lackluster decade!

I now stand before you an older, more cantankerous Oscar-blogger, completely exhausted by a decade's worth of hyper-safe, hyper-conventional, hyper-heartfelt, and worst of all, hyper-repetitive filmmaking. I can hardly believe it's been two years since I began my trek through the 1940s, mostly because I feel as though this decade has been a constant state of perpetuity.

To watch the Oscar-nominated flicks of the 1940's is to be in a constant state of déjà vu...you make it through a year and yet you feel you had seen it all before - you move on to the next and it's the same people, the same slightly-different storylines, the same 1940s-branded layers of ooey-gooey sentimentality. Applying what I already know about the decades following it, the forties may very well be the most unexciting decade of films that Oscar has to offer. To be frank, I'm not sorry to leave it behind.