Ah, now we come to it, the first of the year's Best Picture nominees. It also happens to be, quite possibly, the most famous Best Picture loser of all time: Citizen Kane.
Dubbed the greatest American film of all time by the American Film Institute, inspiration for two award-winning films (HBO's RKO 291 and Netflix's Mank), Citizen Kane was the film debut of theatre and radio wünderkind Orson Welles: at 20, he had directed the famous Voodoo Macbeth for the Federal Theatre Project; at 23, he rocketed to fame thanks to his infamous radio adaptation of War of the Worlds. He started Citizen Kane when he was 24, filmed at 25, and released the very week of his 26th birthday. Its depiction of a newspaper magnate with political ambitions who tosses his wife aside for a showbiz starlet and becomes increasingly tyrannical hit a nerve with William Randolph Hearst, newspaper magnate with political ambition who maintained a long affair with showbiz starlet Marion Davies, and he used his power to knock down the film's reputation and release before it was even finished.
Still, it went on to be declared Best Film by that year's National Board of Review and the New York Film Critics' Circle and garnered nine Oscar nominations. And, of course, won out in the end, historically. But it did not just show up all by itself one May morning. Here's what surrounded it:
