How often does the biggest moneymaker of the year win Best Picture of the Year? Rarer than you think. Wikipedia's records only go back to 1948 while the Oscars themselves date back to 1927-28; within that narrow timeframe of 76 years, only 12 times has the Academy's choice and "the people's" choice aligned. The last time it happened: 2003's The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. The first time it happened - again, according to Wiki info - was 1952's The Greatest Show on Earth! And if cinema about the circus wasn't cross-pollination among the showbiz mediums enough, it was declared the winner in the first-ever Oscars to be broadcast on television:
Yes, this was the 25th Anniversary of the Academy Awards, held at the Pantages Theatre in Hollywood. Honestly, marking those 25 years by honoring not just the year's biggest hit but one of the Academy's original founders, the greatest showman cinema saw up to that point, makes a lot of sense. It's a great honor for a man without whom the town and the industry would not be what it was - for better and worse.
The behind-the-scenes circus epic was up against four other films that found themselves in the Top 10 box office hits of the year (honestly, rare that all five would be there, but they are all entertaining). There's Ivanhoe, the Medieval romantic swashbuckler; High Noon, the Western drama about a lawman standing alone against outlaws; Moulin Rouge, a biopic of artist Toulouse-Luatrec; and The Quiet Man, John Ford's romantic-comedy about an American returning to his roots in Ireland. Presented here are my takes on them, in ascending order of how I'd rank them.
