Turner Classic Movies to Feature Marathon of Best Picture Oscar Winners in February

The Academy Awards used to be held in March, a month with 31 days. And so it made perfect sense for Turner Classic Movies to turn March in a 31 Days of Oscar marathon. Then the Academy Awards ceremony was moved into February, the Mickey Rooney of the calendar year. And yet still Turner Classic Movies will be offering 31 days of Oscar, spanning two months, just like Mickey Rooney's reign as box office king spanned two decades, from 1939 to 1941.

I'm not a big fan of Turner Classic Movies channel's 31 days of Oscar. For one thing, the number of black and white movies undergoes a substantial decrease during this celebration and for another there just aren't as many good movies on because in order to qualify, any movie shown during 31 Days of Oscar has to have been nominated for Oscar. In other words, Lord Love a Duck won't be shown during February, but Men in Black will. The simple fact is that more good movies never even got a nomination than bad movies that did, but those bad movies get air time during 31 Days of Oscar while the good movies don't.

This year, however, Turner Classic Movies is doing something that I consider really interesting. Not necessarily enlightening or entertaining, but it's almost certainly got to be unparalleled in the history of television. From February 22 through February 25, Turner Classic Movies will be showing a marathon of almost thirty Best Picture Oscar winners, ranging from the 1930 anti-war masterpiece All Quiet on the Western Front to the 1999 Kevin Spacey tour de force American Beauty. Twenty-eight Best Picture Oscar winners in a row-trainspotting for Academy Award junkies. And the nifty thing is that quite a few of them are actually good. Three of four might even have deserved the honor.