The following films all have something in common — Gone with the Wind, Mrs. Miniver, Going My Way, The Lost Weekend, The Best Years of Our Lives, On the Waterfront, Marty, The Bridge on the River Kwai, A Man for All Seasons, Patton, The French Connection, Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer, Gandhi, Terms of Endearment, Amadeus, Rain Man, Forrest Gump, American Beauty, and The King’s Speech. This list is comprehensive.
Thanks to Russell Saunders for this week’s puzzle; he shall take the lead on hints and determining the winner in the comments.
Surely it’s to do with the Oscars. My first guess was Best Pictures starring Best Male actors, but the internets tell me that Woody Allen didn’t win the acting award for Annie Hall.
My revised guess is movies that won best picture, best director, best screenplay, and either best actor or best actress.
Well, that certainly didn’t take long.
While this isn’t technically the precise answer I was looking for, in reality it’s obviously correct. Of the five most prestigious Oscars (Best Picture, Director, Screenplay [Adapted or Original], Actor and Actress), all of these have won four. Technically a film could have made the list by winning both Actor and Actress but losing one of the others, but as it happens none actually have. In all of the above cases either a nominee lost (eg. Annette Bening for American Beauty ) or there was no nominee from the film (eg. there was no Best Actress nominee for Patton. )
This will probably also prove too easy, but I have a follow-up question. Without resorting to Google, anyone know which films have won all five?
A guess (no Google!!), but: Gone with the Wind, Kramer vs. Kramer, Terms of Endearment, Forrest Gump, and American Beauty?
The fact that “Terms of Endearment” won the Oscar for Best Picture is the reason why I stopped paying attention to the Academy Awards altogether.