From drunken teachers to Eternity: The Oscar Goes To ... collection

As the Academy Awards turn Tinsel Town to full twinkle once more, enjoy these previous golden statuette winners.

L-R: Raging Bull, The Father, Moonlight, Black Narcissus. Credit: SBS On Demand

Whether it’s THAT SLAP, unending chatter about snubs, presenting flubs or the red-hot carpet lewks, there’s always a hubbub on the approach to, during and immediately after the Oscars ceremony. There’s no denying its stranglehold over the annual cinematic conversation, whether you tune in or not.

And despite some folks’ tendencies to sneer at awards season, there have been some genuinely deserving wins across the decades.

Here are a handful of our faves from

The Oscar Goes To collection at SBS On Demand

Look out, too, for a special 'The Oscar Goes To' focus on SBS World Movies, kicking off with American Hustle Saturday 2 March 8.30pm and running until Saturday 30 March (see the

TV Guide

for full details of upcoming films), with titles including Pulp Fiction, A Beautiful Mind, The Quiet Girl, Drive My Car and Minari.

Moonlight

Alex R. Hibbert and Mahershala Ali in 'Moonlight'. Credit: Roadshow Films

Filmmaker Barry Jenkins was having a great night at the 2017 Academy Awards. While he may have missed out on Best Director, he picked up Best Adapted Screenplay for his luminously poetic take on Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play, telling in triptych form three key moments of a young emerging queer kid Chiron’s fractious life in Miami. Mahershala Ali won Best Supporting Actor for playing his early years mentor. What could go wrong? Well,

the least said about the La La Land imbroglio, the better

. Can we just focus on this monumental tribute to love rightfully winning Best Picture? It’s one of the finest films of this century.

Moonlight airs Sunday March 17 on SBS World Movies and will be available at SBS On Demand after it airs.

Another Round

Did you ever daydream that your high school teachers would loosen up? Well, “careful what you wish for,” plays out in spectacularly wrong fashion in Danish filmmaker Thomas Vinterberg’s increasingly unruly Oscar-winner, in which a bunch of middle-aged men working as educators decided it’s a jolly idea to start micro-dosing booze in class. Always magnificent to watch, Mads Mikkelsen gets to be the one who takes it way too far in this darkly comic tale that secured Best International feature in 2021, a fitting tribute to the team’s monumental resilience, shooting one week after Vinterberg’s daughter tragically died in a car crash.

Another Round is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Sound of Metal

Pakistani-British star Riz Ahmed

threw everything into his role as driven punk-metal rocker Ruben, willing to lose his hearing rather than give up the gig he loves in Darius Marder’s exhilarating movie about art, anger, silence and loss. That included bulking up in the gym, bleaching his hair blond and learning the drums. A profoundly soulful turn as a man testing the edges of his fraying ability, it wasn’t enough to lock in a win for his Best Actor nomination in 2021. It didn’t go home empty-handed, though, with both the film’s remarkable sound design and Mikkel E.G. Nielsen’s editing accruing a statuette. Not a bad haul for a low-budget indie.

Sound of Metal is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

From Here to Eternity

You know how people tumbling erotically in the surf is pretty much a go-to trope in fragrance ads these days? Well, Deborah Kerr and Burt Lancaster were the OG, with their salty beachside embrace in Fred Zinnemann’s 1953-released wartime epic the stuff of cinematic legend. Adapted from the novel by James Jones and hung on the bombing of Pearl Harbour, it was incendiary for its day, with Kerr’s Captain’s wife breathily announcing, “Not without an adding machine,” when Lancaster’s Sergeant Warden asks for specifics on how many men she’s been with. Nominated for 13 Oscars, it scooped up eight, including Best Picture, so even implied sex sells.

From Here to Eternity is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

The Father

Two years after winning Best Actress for her towering turn as the dithering Queen Anne in Yorgos Lanthimos’ saucily snappy film The Favourite, Olivia Coleman was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her depiction as a harried daughter trying to navigate her father’s dementia in this heart-tugger from French director Florian Zeller. While she left empty-handed, Zeller and co-writer Christopher Hampton took home Best Adapted Screenplay (it’s spun from Zeller’s play), and Anthony Hopkins caused a minor kerfuffle by taking home Best Actor in a year pretty much all the pundits had pegged the Academy would honour Chadwick Boseman posthumously.

The Father is streaming now at SBS On Demand. It will also air on SBS World Movies 8.30pm on Saturday 30 March.

Stream free On Demand

The Father

drama •
2020

Black Narcissus

Few folks are so intrinsically linked with the truly luminous power of moviemaking as British-based filmmaking duo Michael Powell and Hungary-born Emeric Pressburger. This glimmering gem from 1947 dazzles with its matte-painted Himalayan setting, as a bunch of nuns – led by From Here to Eternity star Deborah Kerr and Kathleen Ryan – tasked with transforming an ancient Indian palace into a convent are slowly driven mad with lust for David Farrar’s bureaucrat in an erotic nightmare considerably predating Ken Russell’s similarly themed The Devils. Lushly unhinged, this adaption of Rumer Godden’s novel scored Best Cinematography and Art Direction.

Black Narcissus is streaming now at SBS On Demand.

Raging Bull

The great Martin Scorsese grew up watching Powell and Pressburger’s films on his parents’ black-and-white television. Already entranced, when he finally saw their seminal classic The Red Shoes in glorious Technicolor at the Academy of Music at five years old, he was transfixed. Obsessed by how they choreographed camera and character movement, he adopted their techniques for the close camera pursuit of Robert De Niro’s angry boxer Jake LaMotta to the ring for his final fight. Pure cinema, De Niro won Best Actor, and the legendary Thelma Schoonmaker took Best Editing from eight Oscar nominations.

Raging Bull airs 8.30pm Sunday 3 March on SBS World Movies. It will also be available at SBS On Demand from 1 March.

Ida

Source: SBS / SBS Movies

Shot in black and white in the traditional Academy ratio, Polish director Pawel Pawlikowski’s bleak but beautiful reckoning with the country’s darkest days as Agata Trzebuchowska’s novitiate nun Anna has her world turned upside down on realising, thanks to the loose revelations of her hard-drinking former Stalinist enforcer Aunt (Agata Kulesza) that she is actually Jewish, and that there are skeletons in their family’s closet to reckon with, dating from the days of the Nazi occupation. While the nomination for its incandescent cinematography went by the wayside, Ida took home Best Foreign Language Film.

Ida will be available at SBS On Demand from 29 February.

You can catch more statuette-nabbing movies at

The Oscar Goes To collection here

, and on SBS World Movies during the Oscars-focussed season, 8.30pm each night 2-30 March.