The Oscar for best picture goes to the best picture. Yet there’s another way to read that most defining and crucial of Oscar categories. If you look back at the best picture winners from years past, they will often tell you a great deal about what was churning around in the culture — the themes and passions and rocky incarnations of what was once called the zeitgeist.
“The Godfather” and its majestically dark sequel cast their grand shadow over the first half of the ’70s. Their dual Oscar wins for best picture expressed, among other things, a national reckoning with the idea that America had become a land of corruption. “Kramer vs. Kramer” (1979) caught the lacerating social change wrought by the age of divorce. “Chariots of Fire” (1981), with its stiff-upper-lip reverence, embodied the return to “traditional values” of the Reagan era, while “Forrest Gump” (1994) captured how history itself was becoming,…
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