1950 was one of those frustrating years where a number of classic films were released, any one of which would have been Best Picture had it been released the year before. Born Yesterday, The Gunfighter, Father of the Bride, The Asphalt Jungle, and the British-made The Third Man were all superior to anything Hollywood came out with in 1949. But in 1950, the race went down to two enduring masterpieces: All About Eve and Sunset Boulevard. Both films boasted brilliant casts (especially in the Best Supporting Actor category, where George Sanders' Oscar winning turn as an urbane drama critic and Erich von Stroheim's classic performance as a mysterious butler create unforgettable characterizations) and wonderfully inventive screenplays that make having to select a "best" between these two wonderfully entertaining and enduring films a painful chore.

But the staff of the Hindsight Awards doesn't shy away from such dirty work, and the film that passes test of time far more successfully is Sunset Boulevard. This may be in part because All About Eve seems more dated because it gives a contemporary view of a Broadway that is now a bygone era, whereas Sunset Boulevard is looking back on a world that was already dead when the film was made. Over time the self-consciously witty dialogue of All About Eve's self-absorbed characters become more and more annoying, whereas the timeless Sunset Boulevard becomes fresher with each new viewing. Wilder brilliantly cast Gloria Swanson as the fallen idol Norma Desmond (after Mary Pickford, Pola Negri and Mae West turned it down) because he knew that more current actresses couldn't capture the style of the silent era with the authenticity of someone who had been active in it. Swanson responded with an extraordinary, unique performance that is really unlike any other in the history of film (it is unfortunate that she did her greatest work in such a competitive year for female performances).

Our memories of the 1950s are best displayed in TV sitcoms of the period like Leave It to Beaver, Make Room for Daddy and Father Knows Best. They represented a well-ordered world of easy answers and self-assured authority figures who had everything under control. In reality, the US of the 1950s was at one of its most intensive pressure points, with the paranoia of McCarthyism and the constant threat of nuclear war looming over everyone's head. In such troubled times, people wanted to believe in easy answers and welcomed the seeming simplicity of a repressed life. In such a world, the torrid sexuality of A Streetcar Named Desire was a disquieting revelation. Dismissed by many as smut (critic George Jean Nathan dubbed it Glands Menagerie after playwright Tennessee Williams' earlier play The Glass Menagerie), most discerning audiences immediately recognized it as the intense work of art that it was. Even the oppressive Hollywood censors of 1951 couldn't rob it of its white-hot effectiveness. And with the groundbreaking work of the brilliant Marlon Brando as Stanley Kowalski, everyone knew that A Streetcar Named Desire was not only the best film of the year, but it opened the door to a new honesty about sexuality that could only be hinted at in the past.

All that is immaterial when selecting the Academy Awards. Like Citizen Kane before it, Streetcar couldn't be named Best Picture because of things that had nothing to do with its qualities as a motion picture. In such troubled times, a conservative institution like the Academy could no more give an agitator like Tennessee Williams the Oscar than a Hollywood studio could give a blacklisted writer screen credit. And in a decade when films like Rebel Without a Cause, The Blackboard Jungle and Salt of the Earth were forcing us to reconsider the individual's place in society, the Academy was giving Oscars to escapist drivel like Around the World in 80 Days and Gigi.

Its easy to understand why a film like An American in Paris was selected as Best Picture in 1951. Considered a major upset when it won the award (which was expected to go to George Stevens' flawed and depressing tragedy A Place in the Sun), An American in Paris was actually very much in the Academy Award vein: an impressive though ultimately unchallenging big budget film made by high pedigree talent that the main thing anyone remembers for is winning the Academy Award. An American in Paris manages to be both pretentious (through its overly stylized ballets that are far less entertaining than what Kelly did in the `40s) and trivial (through its almost nonexistent story, where Kelly and Leslie Caron display no chemistry at all and one doesn't care in the slightest if they get together at the end or not) at the same time. Nobody really thought An American in Paris was the best film made in 1951, but at least no one was made to feel uncomfortable at its selection.

The biggest box office hit of 1952 was This is Cinerama, a travelogue that showed off the new widescreen, three-camera process of Cinerama. Its phenomenal success sent a clear message to Hollywood; that in order to combat the coming of television, the greatest weapon at its disposal was size. Films didn't have to be good in order to succeed. They had to be big. The Academy chose not to honor the best film of 1952, but the biggest: Cecil B. DeMille's gargantuan tribute to life under the big top, The Greatest Show on Earth. Frequently derided as the worst film to win the Best Picture award, DeMille's Oscar winner is a tired soap opera that rises above its hackneyed material only by virtue of its size. But in 1952, size is exactly what movie audiences wanted, so it is difficult to fault the Academy for selecting it any more than it is difficult to fault them for voting for The Broadway Melody in 1928/29. Had a more objective panel been voting for the award, the Oscar probably would have gone to High Noon. But there was a backlash against that film because its Oscar nominated screenwriter Carl Foreman was under investigation by the McCarthy committee; so right-thinking Academy members naturally assumed that it had some underlying Red sentimentalities even though it starred All American Gary Cooper. Fortunately for the security of the United States, Foreman was eventually blacklisted; although he (and fellow blacklistee Michael Wilson) did later win an Oscar for The Bridge on the River Kwai, using the novel's original author, Pierre Boulle, as a front.

With all this going on, it is a shame that the film universally regarded as the year's best slipped through the cracks. Singin' in the Rain was selected by the American Film Institute as the 10th best film ever made and is frequently named as the definitive movie musical. It was appreciated in its own time as well, winning the award from the Writers Guild as Best Written American Musical and a nomination from the Directors Guild for Outstanding Directorial Achievement in Motion Pictures for Stanley Donen and Gene Kelly. But it didn't get much respect from the Academy in the year that it came out, receiving a paltry two Oscar nominations (for Best Supporting Actress for Jean Hagen and Best Scoring of a Musical Picture). The most likely explanation of the snub is that the Academy didn't want to honor another Gene Kelly musical so soon after giving An American in Paris the top prize. Another example of a film not being named Best Picture for reasons that had nothing to do with its artistic quality.

Fred Zinnemann's film of James Jones' best-selling novel From Here to Eternity was the perfect film to select for Best Picture in 1953: A well-acted drama that created controversy for its steamy sex scenes (without being too controversial or too sexy). It is an enjoyably elaborate soap opera, with wonderfully memorable performances by Burt Lancaster, Deborah Kerr, Donna Reed, Frank Sinatra and particularly Montgomery Clift as the tortured Private Robert E. Lee Pruitt, that tied the record for the most Oscar wins with eight and won many of the other year-end awards as well, including those from the New York Film Critics and the BAFTAs. But there is no question that movie standards of the day toned down the torrid sexuality of the novel considerably, and there are lapses in the logic of the story (Clift's devotion to the army after being horribly mistreated during his service makes no sense at all).

By contrast, a film where logic and raw sexuality are transcended by effervescent romance is William Wyler's delightful Roman Holiday, which introduced a fresh new talent named Audrey Hepburn to the screen (not counting the few minor parts she had already played in some European films, including a nonspeaking role the Ealing Studios 1952 classic The Lavender Hill Mob), who won the role only after original director Frank Capra (who would have made it with Elizabeth Taylor and Cary Grant) allowed his option to pass on it. Fresh is exactly the word for Roman Holiday: a breathtaking romantic comedy that makes one believe in love. It's a rare thing when the Academy gives its top prize to a romantic comedy, and with Serious Drama like From Here to Eternity, Shane and The Robe in the running, it never had a chance. But Roman Holiday has a singular evergreen quality about it: despite spawning more derivitive imitations than perhaps any film ever made, it is as affecting, charming and amusing now as the day it premiered. The next time it's playing on television on a rainy afternoon, check it out and see if you don't wind up falling a little in love yourself.

At first glance, the Academy's selection of the modest, low-budget Marty was their way of apologizing for naming the behemoth The Greatest Show on Earth as Best Picture in 1952. But Marty was a revelation in 1955, winning all of the major film awards handed out that year and universal acclaim for the performance of Ernest Borgnine in the title role of a butcher who spends his free time hanging around with his buddies asking the eternal question "Whattayoo wanna do tonight?" Prior to Marty, Borgnine was best known as a villain in films like From Here to Eternity and Bad Day at Black Rock, but his sensitive performance won him a brief period of stardom in somber dramas like The Catered Affair and The Rabbit Trap before returning to his true calling in supporting roles in films like The Dirty Dozen and The Poseidon Adventure. But for all the sensation Borgnine created as Marty Piletti, it's difficult to understand what the fuss was about. Based on Paddy Chaevsky's 1952 teleplay, the film frankly looks like a TV show and Ernest Borgnine's bland performance as a bland butcher now comes off as, well, bland.

Although generally regarded as a weak movie year, there were numerous films released in 1955 that are now considered infinitely superior to Marty. A Rebel Without a Cause is usually pointed to as the most influential film of the year, but its influence seems to come more from James Dean's landmark performance than from the film as a whole. And Charles Laughton's Night of the Hunter is much beloved by film students, but the movie that everyone else loves seems to be Mister Roberts. Despite its problematic filming (director John Ford was fired after punching Henry Fonda in the jaw, and many of the scenes Ford shot were redone by the play's Broadway director Joshua Logan, who harshly criticized the finished product), it's a delightful retelling of the stage play. Even the Academy enjoyed it, giving a rare Best Picture nomination to the comedy, although they were sparse in any other recognition, nominating it only for Best Sound and Best Supporting Actor (deserved winner Jack Lemmon) in other categories. The charming wartime film warranted nominations for Fonda in the title role and for its clever screenplay as well, but the Academy had to be careful in how much praise it handed out to the comedy. After all, if something is funny, it can't be artistic too; right?

After selecting two small-scale films for the Best Picture Oscar in 1954 and 1955, the Academy went back to the "bigger is better" line of thinking, selecting the widescreen extravaganza Around the World in 80 Days. It was a popular choice that received most of the other year-end awards as well, although now the film seems like little more than an overlong travelogue without any real entertainment value or dramatic resonance. The other nominees were the epic soap opera Giant, the enjoyably outlandish Biblical super-productionThe Ten Commandments, the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical The King and I, and William Wyler's gentle drama about a Quaker family, Friendly Persuasion. The latter blew the lid off the award when blacklisted writer Michael Wilson was nominated, violating the new Academy rule that prevented accused Reds of receiving nominations so that the official Academy roles listed the film as being nominated, but decreeing that "writer Michael Wilson was ineligible under Academy bylaws." Wilson didn't receive credit on another motion picture screenplay for ten years, although he did win an Oscar for the script of The Bridge on the River Kwai (with co-writer Carl Foreman) in 1957 using Pierre Boulle, the writer of the original novel, as a front.

The Academy might have saved themselves some trouble by nominating some vastly superior films that weren't so steeped in controversy. Akira Kurasawa's The Seven Samurai was the finest film released in the US, but it never had a chance for the Best Picture Oscar (it would still be another thirteen years before the Academy broke the precedent it had set with a nomination for a foreign film with La Grande Illusion), although it did receive nominations for black and white art direction and costume design. The other great masterpiece of 1956 was John Ford's The Searchers, which strangely did not receive a single nomination despite its spectacular cinematography and the greatest performance of John Wayne's career. Overlooked in its own time, The Searchers is now considered one of the greatest films in the history of the cinema.

MGM commisioned the lavish film musical Gigi from the creative team that crafted the most popular stage musical of the 1950s, My Fair Lady. The result was another suptuous Pygmalion story of a young woman who balks at being forced to fit into a mold in order to make her way in polite society. The film was a smash hit and won a record number of Academy Awards in 1958 (9 - a record that would stand for exactly one year), and its easy to see why. Elaborately produced with high pedigree talent, it excelled in all the areas that the Oscars recognize. But as skillfully made as it is, viewing the film does leave one with a somewhat empty feeling; sort of like receiving an impeccably wrapped gift that contains a present you don't find terribly interesting. A better choice for Best Picture among the nominees would have been Stanley Kramer's powerful though heavy-handed plea for racial equality The Defiant Ones or Richard Brooks' sanitized film of Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, featuring a brilliant supporting performance by Burl Ives as Big Daddy that was mistakenly classified in the Best Actor category so that it didn't get the recognition it deserved (the Academy made it up to Ives by naming him Best Supporting Actor for playing a similar role in The Big Country).

But the most enduring film of 1958 came from the Master of Suspense Alfred Hitchcock: Vertigo. Hitchcock was never taken seriously enough to win the Best Director Oscar (his Rebecca was named Best Picture of 1940, but the Best Director Oscar went to John Ford for The Grapes of Wrath), but his films of the 1950s (Strangers on a Train, Rear Window, North by Northwest) are among the most memorable of the decade. Vertigo, the mind-numbing tale of a San Francisco detective suffering from acrophobia who becomes obsessed with the object of his investigation, topped them all, featuring one of James Stewart's finest performances and the best work of Kim Novak's career. It was, regrettably, the final collaboration of Hitchcock and Stewart when the director unfairly blamed his star for the film's poor box office showing and refused to work with him again.

Ben Hur won more Academy Awards than any other film and although its record total has since been equaled by Titanic and The Lord of the Rings, the Return of the King, its stranglehold on the movie prizes in 1959 is understandable - it's just so big a presentation that it just seems like the best the year had to offer. With its cast of thousands and epic production values, it is as dazzling now as when it first premiered despite such curious casting choices as Welshman Hugh Griffith as an Arab and ulta-WASP Charlton Heston as Judah Ben Hur (whose most famous roles as Ben Hur and Moses depict the two most non-Jewish Jews in cinema history), both of whom won Academy Awards for performances that can be charitably described as self-indulgently theatrical. But what Ben Hur lacks in subtle humanity, it makes up for in spectacle, with its celebrated chariot race being justifiably canonized as one of the most exciting action sequences ever filmed. It can be argued that The Diary of Anne Frank or Anatomy of a Murder carry more dramatic punch or that Some Like It Hot or the unnominated North by Northwest are more entertaining, but few films are as impressive for the shear spectacle of their presentation as Ben Hur. Anyone who has seen the film only on television might yawn at the choice; but seen on the big screen, Ben Hur continues to impress.