Oscar Winners Streaming Now: Best Picture

We close out our Oscar Winners series with some of our favorites to win the Academy's top prize

Apr 16, 2021

Welcome to the final edition of our three-part Oscar Winners Streaming Now series. First, we recommended movies with Oscar-winning performances, and then we did the same with Best Screenplay winners. To close it out this week, you guessed it, we’re writing about Best Picture winners that you can find streaming right now. From maybe the definitive Western to an influential 1950s romance, we cover a lot of ground this week. Whether you’ve seen these before or not, read our thoughts (no spoilers, don’t worry) and let us know what you think.

With this year’s Academy Awards just a little over a week away, keep your ear to the grindstone for our 2021 Oscars Preview coming next week!

Drew recommends…

Unforgiven (streaming on HBO Max)

Right before the thunderous climactic stretch of Clint Eastwood’s masterpiece Unforgiven, a young hired killer named the Schofield Kid tells Eastwood’s Will Munny that the men they just killed “had it comin’.” As Munny looks off into the distance with that famous Clint grimace, he makes a corrective: “We all have it comin’, Kid.” Right there in that exchange is the crux of the 1992 Best Picture winner Unforgiven, the Western to end all Westerns.

After a long and fruitful career as one of the two iconic Western figures (John Wayne is the other), Eastwood hung up his spurs on the genre with Unforgiven, claiming he had said all he wanted to say. His timeless film successfully deconstructed both the traditional Western and the whole Eastwood cinematic persona.

With a cast of heavy hitters, Unforgiven marries brilliant storytelling and A-plus acting. Eastwood plays the lead role of Will Munny, a former cold-blooded outlaw who settled down a long time ago. He takes one last job as a hired killer when two men cut up a prostitute’s face in the little town of Big Whiskey, Wyoming. The town’s sheriff “Little Bill” Daggett (Gene Hackman, in an Oscar-winning role) fails to fairly punish the men, so the prostitutes hire area assassins to travel to Big Whiskey and kill them. Munny calls on his old partner Ned Logan (Morgan Freeman) for the job, with the Schofield Kid tagging along.

Will Munny doesn’t seem like much of a gunslinging cowboy when we first meet him. He can barely shoot straight or even get on his horse. Eastwood makes Munny a worn down and guilt-stricken old man, far from the quick-trigger Eastwood we know and love from the 60s Spaghetti Westerns and the Dirty Harry movies. In fact, he waited about ten years so he could more convincingly play the image-dismantling character.

In addition to Eastwood himself, Unforgiven exposes many of the West’s other mythical figures. Hackman’s Little Bill isn’t the noble sheriff we usually see in this story, but a complex villain that maybe isn’t so monstrous when viewed from a different angle. Richard Harris (who would go on to play Dumbledore in the Harry Potter movies) plays the expert assassin English Bob, who travels with his biographer, fashioning his own myth in real time. (As they say in an earlier classic Western The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, “When the legend becomes fact, print the legend.”) His character doesn’t turn out to be exactly what he’s cracked up to be, which goes the same for the “sharp-shooting” Schofield Kid looking to make a name for himself as a gunslinging hero. These characters are all building their own myth.

READ: Watch These Five Fantastic Westerns

Unforgiven breaks the myth of the Western character that Eastwood’s career had helped create. Relatedly, it also explores what violence does to a person’s soul. There’s actually not a ton of action in this movie; it’s more about the suspense before the violence and the consequences that come after. For the entire story, Will Munny is lamenting the violent depravity in his past, while other characters come to grips with the sobering reality of murder. When the Schofield Kid, visibly shaken after his first killing, remarks that you can take a life “all on account of pulling a trigger,” Munny replies that, “It’s a hell of a thing killing a man. You take away all he’s got, and all he’s ever gonna have.” This clear-eyed view of violence is genuinely revolutionary in a genre that typically celebrates the cowboy hero that has no problem gunning down bad hombres. Unforgiven’s “heroes” are just as morally ambiguous as its “villains.” Everyone needs forgiveness in this story. We all have it comin’.

And yet, this is a Western, which means we still get a tremendously satisfying finale where Eastwood delivers the goods he’s been withholding for the whole movie. He gives us both the deconstruction and the entertaining fulfillment of the genre. True to his word, Eastwood never made another Western after Unforgiven. He’d said all he had to say on the matter, and in doing so made the greatest Western ever and one of the best films to ever win Best Picture.

Moonlight (streaming on Netflix)

I guess it’s fitting that such a transcendent and atypical Best Picture winner won in the most unexpected way possible at the 2017 Oscars. Do you remember that unbelievable moment? The shock, the awkwardness, the chaos, and then the cathartic realization that a small drama about a gay black boy growing up in Florida could win the Academy’s top prize? Here: watch it again.

I’ve probably seen the Oscar envelope mix-up between Moonlight and La La Land a dozen times. I don’t know why I’m so fascinated by it, but it probably has something to do with the two films at the center of it all. La La Land is a fantastic movie and would’ve been a worthy Best Picture winner, but it very much would’ve been a win for a nostalgic throwback to Old Hollywood. There’s nothing inherently wrong with that, but the film that actually won meant so much more, because films like Moonlight -- a coming-of-age story with an all-black cast -- simply don’t win Best Picture. Until they do.

Moonlight paints a portrait of its main character Chiron in three sections, childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood. This means that we get an intimate peek into the life of a young boy struggling with his identity, sexuality, and masculinity at three critical junctures. We grow to love Chiron and empathize with his experience. He’s abused and neglected at home and often bullied at school. Only a few key figures in his life care enough to look after him. One of those is Mahershala Ali’s warmhearted drug dealer Juan, an unlikely role model for Chiron. Their relationship forms the core of the early scenes, which makes it all the more complicated that Chiron’s mother is addicted to the same drugs that Juan peddles. Story setups like this one contribute to the complexity and humanity of this poetic character study.

The director Barry Jenkins is most responsible for the remarkably cohesive and controlled mood and tone of Moonlight. His film looks outstanding, with deep blues and blacks dominating the color palette, but it’s also the way he shoots his character’s faces that makes this work so indelible. The gorgeous lighting and the patience of his camera give the actors space to deliver natural and beautiful performances. Thanks to Jenkins, it doesn’t feel like there’s anything “put-on” about Moonlight; it all feels organic.

Did Moonlight’s Best Picture win really change anything in Hollywood for the better? That’s up for debate. However, it did prove that Best Picture is not just for conventional “awards friendly” prestige movies. Small, deeply personal works led by minorities have a chance too. I’ll never forget how Moonlight won Best Picture and what that astonishing moment signaled about the undeniable power of these silly awards.

Billy recommends…

Marty (streaming on Amazon Prime)

I needed something wholesome and sweet this week. Visiting Marty again was a welcome calm into a period of life that has been uncertain. Marty profiles a 34-year-old man named, you guessed it, Marty. He is constantly being berated for being single. Each passing minute feels like a waste when you feel left behind. Especially when it comes to relationships and Marty brings a smaller perspective that settles down an anxious heart.

There have been things in my life that could have been perceived as me falling behind, but I am an eternally optimistic person. Lack of a father growing up? “Nah, I got this.” Taking 5+ years to graduate college? “You got it done, man, good work!” Single and about to turn 30? “My gray hair is holding me back!” I don’t know how you all feel, but of the two other things listed above, the dating part should give me the least amount of anxiety, right? Maybe I feel more calm about the other two examples because there has been a finality to them. Met my dad and he is a good guy/dad, so cross that one off the list. Took a little bit to graduate, but got it done. Dating, though… no matter how certain the relationship, there is some ambiguity to it all. Therefore can create more anxiety. For me at least.

Marty takes place over what is maybe 48 hours. On a night out he meets “an unattractive school teacher” named Clara Snyder. Those are not my words, but every synopsis describes her this way. They hit it off and most of the movie is them hanging out. Both of them have the same amount of anxiety about dating. At one point they talk about how old they are! Marty, 34, and Clara, 29! Both of which, hilariously, say their age as softly as they can, thinking the other person would judge them for being too old to be single. What ensues is what anyone wants when putting themselves out there. A connection that is flirtatious and authentic.

While watching Marty you will recognize where our rom-com tropes have come from. Especially this mumblecore Joe Swanberg era of rom-com that has become all too familiar. Each main character is fumbling and inarticulate, but those traits create a powerful connection. Any successful relationship starts off with uncertainty and eagerness, but like many great movies the characters find certainty of love in the end. The movie spends 85 minutes with that uncertainty and about 5 minutes creating certainty. The result is an ending that is completely rushed. One more substantial scene with Marty and Clara was needed to complete that perfectly wrapped bow. Now, I hope you all don’t leave analyzing yourself intricately like I did above, because this movie brought me a great sense of calm and enjoyment. Connections with other people are fun and the circumstances/influences around you are what create the added pressure. No matter the stage of relationship you are in with someone, spend moments subduing that pressure and enjoy the moment. Hopefully this movie is a catalyst to remind all of us to do that more often.

Do You Like Apples

Discussion about this post