Best Picture Oscar Winner-List Ignores Film Named "Best Artistic Quality of Production" at First Academy Awards

Jack Nicholson had the unenviable task of introducing a montage of the 79 previous Best Picture Oscar winners at the 80th Academy Awards. It seemed to be the same boring montage trotted out each year (with one new addition at the end; next year, No Country for Old Men will join the medley), starting out with a clip of the egregious Wings. The winner of the first Best Picture Oscar, Wings beat out Howard Hughes' potboiler The Racket and the masterpiece Seventh Heaven. As created by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, Best Picture was meant to be a popular award, recognizing the best "Picture," not the most worthy artistic "Production."

"Picture" is the catch-all term in Hollywood for "Movie," and a Best Picture Oscar was meant to honor high-grossing, crowd-pleasin' fare such as James Cameron's Titanic, not Ingmar Bergman's Cries and Whispers. For the art side of the equation, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences created the award Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production. (All "Oscars" officially are the Academy First Award for Merit.) Thus, there were two Best Picture winners at the first Academy Awards, which was held on May 16, 1929 at the Hollywood Roosevelt Hotel, Los Angeles.

The winner of the first, and so far only, Unique and Artistic Production Oscar (a.k.a. "Best Artistic Quality of Production") was the masterpiece Sunrise, which beat out Chang and King Vidor's own masterpiece The Crowd. Each year, the Oscar ceremony genuflects to the previous winners of the Best Picture Oscar, and each year, it conveniently forgets that it awarded a variation of Best Picture, the Best Artistic Quality of Production, to Sunrise.

Of the films nominated in two Best Picture categories, Seventh Heaven, Sunrise and The Crowd all are considered among the greatest masterpieces of the cinema. Wings is a curiosity, remembered only because it was the first Best Picture Oscar winner.