In the middle of 2014, my brand-new boyfriend Noah and I hatched an idea. We'd just met that year, we both liked movies, and we were frustrated at the number of films we'd meant to see but had never made the time to watch. What if, we said, we made the time? A project of going back to the beginning and watching all of the Best Picture winners in order? No skipping a movie no matter how much we hate it, and no watching out of order so we can see the progression of the craft over time?

The Oscar Project was born.

Along the way, as we talked about what won and what didn't, we wondered how frequently a Best Picture winner also picked up one of the writing awards.  We noticed overlap, but it was hard to tell how much, given that the writing awards have changed over time, and no page existed that clearly laid out the winners in the categories that interested us.

• Text with a blue background indicates movies we've not yet watched.
• Best Picture winners whose names are bolded won at least one of Best Story, Best Original Screenplay, or Best Adapted Screenplay.

We thought watching the Best Picture winners would be a fairly short project. It wasn't. It took us two years, and we got married shortly thereafter. 

We couldn't have done even round 1 of this project without access to Movie Madness, the amazing movie rental store (84K titles!) that we can walk to from our home. As part of the 2017 Kickstarter to save Movie Madness and turn it into a nonprofit, we donated accordingly, in thanks. Our donation level meant we got unlimited rentals for a year, which caused us to start round two in January 2018. For round two, we watched all of the screenplay winners in order, though we chose not to re-watch any screenplay winner that also won Best Picture. We've seen and discussed all of those movies since 2014, after all.

We completed the Oscar Project on February 29, 2020, with takeout Chinese food and a big hug, as we prepared to celebrate our third wedding anniversary. The only movie that remains unwatched is Ernst Lubitsch's The Patriot, which is lost.

The movies

• Best Picture, on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/amyq/list/oscar-project-best-picture/
• Best Story, on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/amyq/list/oscar-project-best-story/
• Best Original Screenplay, on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/amyq/list/oscar-project-best-original-screenplay/
• Best Adapted Screenplay, on Letterboxd: https://letterboxd.com/amyq/list/oscar-project-best-adapted-screenplay/

Sources

• Wikipedia, Best Picture
• Wikipedia, Best Story (pre-1957) and Best Original Screenplay (post-1940)
• Wikipedia, Best Adapted Screenplay