As mentioned previously, I’ve seen every Academy Award winner for Best Picture from Wings to The Artist, retaining varying degrees of recollection. I’ve also seen every Best Picture nominee from 1997 to the present, and have embarked on a slow, low-priority, extra-long-term quest to see how far backwards in time I can extend that date. Right now I’m stalled on 1996 because the DVD version of Secrets & Lies is out of print, secondhand copies are priced much higher than I’d prefer, and I’ve never caught it airing on a cable network. Someday I’ll overcome that obstacle and continue down the line in reverse order.

I watched a lot of those winners and nominees on cruddy VHS copies, many recorded from Turner Classic Movies at EP speed for maximum storage conservation, and therefore suffered subpar A/V quality and the dreaded pan-‘n’-scan method that ruined countless widescreen films for the sake of home video as it existed back then. I wouldn’t mind revisiting some past winners and nominees in upgraded formats as time and funding allow. (Tonight, for example, I watched The Sound of Music on Blu-ray, my first time seeing the original widescreen presentation with the composition and gorgeous Alpine scenery intact. Massive difference.)

The following list is a sampling of Best Picture nominees that not only lost the Oscar, but also lost me when I did my best to stomach them, and won’t entice me to an encore presentation, not even as a thrifty Blu-ray with myriad extras.

The loser nominees are:

* Chocolat. The citizens of an all-Catholic town who’ve apparently never studied the Bible find themselves easily tempted away from their convictions during Lent when a dismissive heathen outsider opens a chocolate shop and mocks their fasting. I can see the groundwork laid here for a meaty Stephen King novel, if we modify Act Two so that the lady turns out to be an underworld minion whose Satanic powers manifest in the form of evil bonbons. Call it Needful Things 2: Day of the Truffles. Alas, no, the lady is typical and the self-righteous moral of the story is snacks are better than God. Though the town has other underlying problems that sugar somehow cures, my diagnosis would be that the town merely needed a more competent minister to guide and edify that particular flock.

* The Reader. My wife doesn’t share my quixotic quest and is consequently under no obligation to see films against her will. If I think a film has merit, I’ll regale her with a précis of the better parts, spoilers and all. Some films, I really don’t want to summarize. No loyal husband wants to confront the innocent question of “How was the movie?” with an answer like “It was basically Kate Winslet having lots of wild sex with a teenager.” In the theater I tried to stay focused on her character’s role as a gruff German guard who may or may not have been a Nazi war criminal. I lost that focus completely when her deep, dark secret — which I predicted several minutes in advance — reminded me of the “Oscar Clip” scene from Wayne’s World. After my little flashback, I couldn’t stop laughing all through her deadly serious court trial. So that ended poorly.

* The Cider House Rules. From the director of Chocolat comes a period-piece drama in which Tobey Maguire trains with an ether-addicted Michael Caine in the fine art of abortions. I attended an early weekday showing at the same time as a dozen or so senior citizens. I’m not sure whether or not they were still around for the climax, in which Maguire saves the day by performing one final heroic abortion, but by the time the credits rolled, I was the only viewer in the house, and I felt sad for those princes of Maine, those kings of New England.

* The Hours. The movie follows three timelines: one starring Nicole Kidman as Virginia Woolf, author of a famous novel called Mrs. Dalloway; one with Julianne Moore as a 1950s Mrs. Dalloway fan; and one with Meryl Streep as a modern woman who bears an attitudinal resemblance to Mrs. Dalloway. Perhaps it was unwise on my part not to spend days researching the life and works of Mrs. Woolf before entering the theater. I walked in with zero context; I watched the whole thing; I left with zero curiosity. Maybe you just had to be there.

* Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. What I wrote at the time, with light editing:

Parts of it were brilliant and hard to watch (in a good way) once it dawned on me that the kid’s an unreliable narrator. Much of the movie was filtered through his fractured psyche, which was cause enough for psych testing even before 9/11 happened. He was more grating than Adam Sandler until that part clicked for me. Then I was fascinated with his performance for awhile, especially when mute Max von Sydow became his tagalong squire.

The problems arose from all the things kept hidden throughout the movie, most of them lame. One guilty party is easily pegged if you’re good at recognizing fairly-known supporting actors. One clue is hidden in a place that requires brick-thick stupidity for the kid to overlook, and would’ve shaven 90 minutes off the film’s run time if he’d had a brain in the right scenes. One secret is so blatant that the kid does pick up on it quickly, but its presence is swiftly dismissed from the movie before it has a chance to hold any weight. One revelation is an ostensibly soul-crushing confession, but the act requiring contrition seems so in-character that it’s easily forgiven and dismissable. And one hard-to-swallow whopper of a post-climax “Aha!” I can only describe loosely as The Usual Suspects by way of Lifetime.

…it’s an ultimately uplifting tear-jerker custom-made for people who don’t watch movies too often — possibly the Academy’s considerable senior-citizen demographic, maybe even the same crowd of 80-year-olds who helped make the Emmys lame while they were in their 60s.

Maybe the book is better. Wouldn’t know.

* Heaven Can Wait. My mom made me sit through this Warren Beatty comedy remake at the Westlake Drive-In when I was six years old. The scenes with angels were neat ’cause they looked like modest magical fantasy, but mostly it was all about grown-ups standing around in offices and talking and talking and talking. I might appreciate it more as an adult, but six-year-old me still holds a grudge against it.

* Deliverance. Most revolting monster movie ever.

Honorable mention: I’ve tried to sit through A Clockwork Orange at least three times in my life, maybe more. Every attempt stopped at the exact same point, the scene wherein Our Villains stage a home invasion on a well-to-do art-collecting couple and begin doing hideous things that include but aren’t limited to bludgeoning one of them to death with a giant erotic sculpture. If I ever live long enough and devise enough free time to watch all several hundred Best Picture nominees in cinema history, I imagine that one will still be at the back of the line for a very long time.