The 88th Academy Awards will take place on Sunday night. And while there’s nothing we enjoy more than arguing over who the winners will be, who will get robbed, and who shouldn’t even be allowed in the Dolby Theatre this weekend, it can get a little exhausting. So we asked Rob Huebel of Childrens Hospital, Wet Hot American Summer: First Day of Camp, and about a hundred other projects to tell us about his favorite Best Picture winner of all time.
I think we can all agree that the best Best Picture winner was, of course, Silence of the Lambs, which won the award back in 1992. And if you don’t agree then I will make a skin-suit out of your fat body. Cool? Too much? Sorry.
Listen carefully to me now, Clarice. Silence of the Lambs is still the only horror film to ever win Best Picture, and I’m almost positive it’s the only Best Picture winner in which someone says, “it rubs the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again” (but someone please fact-check that for me).
This movie is such a scary ride, and it’s so haunting. And somehow it makes a cannibal/serial killer kind of likable—or at least charming—so that by the time he slices off the face of one of his prison guards and wears it on top of his own to escape, I was like “Of course! That’s what I would do in that situation!”
Now don’t get me wrong. I hope I’m not in that situation. I hope I don’t ever eat someone’s liver with fava beans and a nice Chianti. I hope I don’t end up in the Baltimore State Hospital for the Criminally Insane with cellmates that jerk off and throw it at people. I hope I don’t have to listen to your boring stories about the slaughtering of the spring lambs so that I can eventually point you to the Senator’s daughter being held hostage down in a well under a house. And I really hope you don’t have a dog named Precious because if you do I will have to tell you to “PUT THE FUCKING DOG IN THE FUCKING BASKET!!!”
But look back for a second. This is not your ordinary Best Picture. There is no feel-good montage in this movie. There is nothing uplifting. No life lesson. No musical numbers. No romance on a sinking ship. And yet that year, it beat Beauty and the Beast, Bugsy, JFK, and The Prince of Tides. Bananas, right? Want more bananas? It won all five top categories that year: Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. Oh, and also, Chris Isaak drops by as a S.W.A.T. commander for two seconds!
By the way, I can tell you that if you do that thing in the movie where you pull your dick back between your legs and spread your arms out wide and look into a mirror saying, “Would you fuck me? I’d fuck me,” they will throw you out of Target, like really fast. Just a heads-up. FL
