B&W Best Picture

The most recent black and white movie to win Best Picture was 1993's Schindler's List. (Good job, Angie from Cinema Obsessed!) The last black and white film before that to win the award was The Apartment, in 1960. The film also won that year's awards for Best Director (Steven Spielberg's) and Best Adapted Screenplay (Steven Zaillian), and was nominated for Best Actor (Liam Neeson) and Best Supporting Actor (Ralph Fiennes).

The film is, as I'm sure you already know, the story of Oskar Schindler, a greedy factory owner who seeks to earn millions by exploiting Jewish slave labor in World War II Germany, but who ends up becoming a humanitarian and using his factory to sabotage the war effort and save the lives of 1100 Jews who would otherwise have been killed in the concentration camps. Schindler starts out caring about nothing but money, amassing a huge fortune because of the outbreak of the war, but by the end of the film he has spent the entire fortune on bribing Nazi officials and ensuring that his munitions factory does not produce a single artillery shell that could help the German war effort.

Neeson was spectacular in the role of Schindler, and it would be unthinkable that he did not win the Oscar if the award had gone to anybody else that year other than Tom Hanks for Philadelphia. Schindler is the type of character whose change of heart is so total that it could easily become unbelievable if not handled just right. (Though the film does make him a bit more of a saint than he actually was, failing to mention that there was bribery involved in getting one's name onto Schindler's list.) Ralph Fiennes was chilling and thoroughly believable in his role as Amon Goeth, a Nazi official and concentration camp commander, a homicidal madman made all the more chilling by the fact that he commits his acts of brutality not with maniacal glee, nor even with cold calculation, but rather with casual disinterest. He kills Jews not because he wants to, not because he needs to, but because he gives the act no more regard than one might give to swatting a fly. In a film full of horror and brutality, perhaps the most terrifying sequence is the one in which Fiennes' character briefly stops his acts of random brutality, testing the concept suggested to him by Schindler that true power comes through forgiveness or pardon rather than through violence and the ability to kill without warning. As he pardons several of his prisoners for minor offenses for which he would normally kill them, the viewer sits watching, breathless with horrified anticipation, waiting for him to give up the pretense of humanity and start shooting again. Fiennes certainly had a flashier and more attention-grabbing role, but I had to wonder how Ben Kingsley's performance as Itzhak Stern, Schindler's accountant, the driving force behind his change of heart, and the humanizing face of the plight of the Jews in this film, did not warrant a nomination as well.

This film, earning Spielberg his first Oscar as Best Director, was also the sign of his coming into true maturity as a film director. Fascinated by the story, Spielberg bought the film rights to it in 1982, but fearing that he did not have the maturity as a director to do the film justice, he shopped it around Hollywood for 10 years. After being turned down by several directors, including Sidney Lumet, Roman Polanski, Billy Wilder, and Martin Scorsese, Spielberg finally decided he was ready to do the film himself - with the condition that he had to do Jurassic Park first, because if he didn't finish that one first, he felt he would be unable to do it after Schindler. The end result of the extra decade of waiting was most likely a better film than Spielberg could have made in 1983 - let's face it, Raiders of the Lost Arc and E.T. are certainly great films, but they just don't show the emotional complexity that Schindler's List required.

Movie trivia question: The only true tie in any of the major categories in Oscar history occurred in 1969, when these two women both took home the statue for Best Actress.