I heard Dr. Sleep was a prequel to The Shining or something, so I was expecting something of that quality. I was terribly disappointed, and should have realized that without Stanley Kubrick we weren’t going to get anything comparable to The Shining.
The last really popular movie to get the Best Picture Oscar was what? One of the Lord of the Rings flicks (2004)? The Departed (2007)? No Country for Old Men (2008)? Maybe Slumdog Millionaire (2009)? The King’s Speech (2021) and Twelve Years a Slave (2014) were talked about, but did a lot of people see them? Everything else nobody really saw or heard of when they got the award.
But Hollywood isn’t making pictures like Dr. Zhivago or Lawrence of Arabia any more, or if they are, it’s usually a cable TV series, not a stand-alone film.
That would have been The Return of the King. I have always thought that the number of categories, including Best Picture, that LOTRs won that night was actually reflecting the total number of movies. Return of the King represented the entire trilogy.
I thought The King’s Speech was great!