Oscars Retrospective: Grand Hotel (5th Academy Awards Review)
Main Title~Grand Hotel - uncredited Grand Hotel is a bit of an outlier when it comes to Best Picture winners (or Outstanding Production as it was still called at this time). If you go down the catalogue of winners and look at their plots, they’re usually about an outcast who has something to prove (e.g. On the Waterfront (1954), Rocky (1976), Braveheart (1995)), a war movie (e.g. The Bridge on the River Kwai (1957), Patton (1970), Braveheart (1995)), sweeping film epics (e.g. The Godfather (1972), Gladiator (2000), Braveheart (1995)) or a true story about someone who did something amazing (e.g. Gandhi (1982), Schindler’s List (1993), Braveheart (1995)). Grand Hotel is about some people who stay at a hotel at the same time and, yeah, that’s about it. The film was still revolutionary though. Not in the sense that it had some new camera techniques or had a story that’s never been seen before, no, instead it proved the raw potential of star power in Hollywood. Before this...