Can you ace this Academy lesson?
In honor of the 85th Academy Awards, airing tonight at 7 on ABC, British graphic artist Olly Moss was commissioned to design a puzzle poster of every Best Picture winner, which you can see by clicking on the links below.
Each film is represented by an Oscar statuette tailored to a plot point or actor’s performance. We’ll give you this one to start: last year’s winner was “The Artist,” the silent film represented here in black-and-white.
“The hardest one was ‘Gentleman’s Agreement. “We never heard of the movie,” explains Jensen Karp, co-curator of the California-based Gallery 1988, which oversaw the project.
“Agreement” stars Gregory Peck as a reporter who pretends to be Jewish in order to cover a story on anti-Semitism. We’ll leave you to figure out how the film is represented—and the year it won.
What will fill in the 2012 Oscar statue? The nine best picture nominees are “Lincoln,” “Life of Pi,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” “Amour,” “Argo,” “Les Miserables,” “Silver Linings Playbook,” “Beasts of the Southern Wild” and “Django Unchained.” We’re scared what an Osama bin Laden Oscar might look like.
If you’re stumped by the statuettes, the answers are:
1927-28: “Wings”; 1928-29: “The Broadway Melody”; 1929-30: “All Quiet on the Western Front”; 1930-31: “Cimarron”; 1931-32: “Grand Hotel”; 1932-33: “Cavalcade”; 1934: “It Happened One Night”; 1935: “Mutiny on the Bounty”; 1936: “The Great Ziegfeld”; 1937: “The Life of Emile Zola”; 1938: “You Can’t Take It With You”; 1939: “Gone With The Wind”; 1940: “Rebecca”; 1941: “How Green Was My Valley”; 1942: “Mrs. Miniver”; 1943: “Casablanca”; 1944: “Going My Way”; 1945: “The Lost Weekend”; 1946: “The Best Years of Our Lives”; 1947: “Gentleman’s Agreement”; 1948: “Hamlet”; 1949: “All the King’s Men”; 1950: “All About Eve”; 1951: “An American in Paris”; 1952: “The Greatest Show on Earth”; 1953: “From Here to Eternity”; 1954: “On The Waterfront”; 1955: “Marty”; 1956: “Around the World in 80 Days”; 1957: “The Bridge On The River Kwai”; 1958: “Gigi”; 1959: “Ben-Hur”; 1960: “The Apartment”; 1961: “West Side Story”; 1962: “Lawrence of Arabia”; 1963: “Tom Jones”; 1964: “My Fair Lady”; 1965: “The Sound of Music”; 1966: “A Man for All Seasons”; 1967: “ In the Heat of the Night”; 1968: “Oliver!”; 1969: “Midnight Cowboy”; 1970: “Patton”; 1971: “The French Connection”; 1972: “The Godfather”; 1973: “The Sting”; 1974: “The Godfather Part II”; 1975: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”; 1976: “Rocky”; 1977: “Annie Hall”; 1978: “The Deer Hunter”; 1979: “Kramer vs. Kramer”; 1980: “Ordinary People”; 1981: “Chariots of Fire”; 1982: “Gandhi”; 1983: “Terms of Endearment”; 1984: “Amadeus”; 1985: “Out of Africa”; 1986: “Platoon”; 1987: “The Last Emperor”; 1988: “Rain Man”; 1989: “Driving Miss Daisy”; 1990: “Dances with Wolves”; 1991: “The Silence of the Lambs”; 1992: “Unforgiven”; 1993: “Schindler’s List”; 1994: Forrest Gump”; 1995: “Braveheart”; 1996: “The English Patient”; 1997: “Titanic”; 1998: “Shakespeare in Love”; 1999: “American Beauty”; 2000: “Gladiator”; 2001: “A Beautiful Mind”; 2002: “Chicago”; 2003: “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King”; 2004: “Million Dollar Baby”; 2005: “Crash”; 2006: “The Departed”; 2007: “No Country for Old Men”; 2008: “Slumdog Millionaire”; 2009: “The Hurt Locker”; 2010: “The King’s Speech”; 2011: “The Artist.”