Making money always helps. Jackson’s trilogy not only earned more than some nations’ Gross National Products, but he paved the way for Hollywood’s highly lucrative, effects-heavy focus on franchises, adaptations, and cinematic universes. At the same time, Jackson showed how special effects could be used to enhance and modernize that most hallowed of Hollywood genres, the now all-but-extinct Sweeping Historical Epic; take out the wizards and orcs and The Lord of the Rings films aren’t that far from treasured widescreen tales such as Lawrence of Arabia.
It also helps that Jackson’s film was legitimately great, filled with top-notch acting, story points that paid off in satisfying ways, and emotional beats that made a world of golems and wraiths feel human. Sure, there’s a thousand endings too many, but this is big-budget, epic storytelling at its finest, and Jackson made a compelling argument that effects-heavy genre films deserved to be taken seriously.
No Country for Old Men (2007)
The Academy mostly snubbed the Coen brothers for the first two decades of their career. Classics such as Miller’s Crossing and Raising Arizona were ignored, Barton Fink received only a handful of smaller nominations, and Fargo lost to The English Patient, which is just absurd.
Clearly, the Best Picture prize for the Coens’ adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old Men was a case of the Academy making things right and finally recognizing the most innovative American directing team of the past three decades.
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But this award was no mere consolation prize. The film introduced one of cinema’s all-time most chilling villains with Javier Bardem’s Anton Chigurh and rebooted Josh Brolin’s career, and the scene where the two try to out-maneuver each other through a hotel vent is a marvel of tense editing and sustained tension.
Most impressively, the Coens stayed true to McCarthy’s bold, unconventional ending, which ignored audiences’ expectations in favor of driving home the author’s philosophy on moral rot. Reasonable people can argue about whether this film is superior to Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, which was also nominated in 2007, but no one can reasonably argue that the Coens didn’t finally earn the trophy for one of their best.
The Hurt Locker (2009)
The Academy has snubbed auditoriums worth of visionary creators. And until seven years ago, it also snubbed an entire gender, which is an impressive feat of short-sightedness for a voting block keen to pat itself on the back for its progressive beliefs. With The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow finally broke the glass ceiling, becoming the first (and still only) woman to win both Best Director and to helm a Best Picture.
The Hurt Locker is famously the lowest-grossing film to ever win Best Picture, and also managed to beat Avatar, the highest-grossing picture of all time. How did it pull it off? By turning the Iraq War into a surprisingly intimate chamber drama. Many talented filmmakers stumbled when trying to tell stories about What Iraq Means, whereas Bigelow explores the toll the war has on one man (a revelatory Jeremy Renner), and why he can’t seem to bring himself to say no to fight, despite the family he has back home.
Bigelow is a master of the action film, and the explosions and battle scenes are as intense as anything you’ll ever see, but what lingers in your mind is the climactic look of both shame and relief on Renner’s face when he finally accepts his mortality and runs for safety rather than dying in a blaze of glory. This wasn’t just a film about war — this was a film about why men fight it, and that’s why it stood out.
