The first film to win ‘Best Picture’ at the Academy Awards
Stretching back almost 100 years, the Academy Awards is an annual celebration of the very best cinematic achievements in the past six months. Often something of an ego-stroking event, the ceremony culminates in ‘the only award that matters’, with ‘Best Picture’ being awarded to the finest film of the past year, even though it’s pretty tricky to really rank something like Denis Villeneuve’s Dune and Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza.
Still, the Academy Awards usually gets it right in a roundabout way, with the history of the awards show having praised some of the finest films of all time. Although in recent years, they may have stumbled by honouring the likes of Sian Heder’s CODA and Peter Farrelly’s Green Book, in the past, the Oscars has celebrated such classics as Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather and Billy Wilder’s The Apartment.
But we’ll have to go way back to 1929 to discover the very first winner of Best Picture, with the inaugural winner of the ceremony’s finest award going to the unlikely LGBT movie Wings.
A landmark movie for its Best-Picture status but also because it featured the first gay kiss in cinema history, William A. Wellman’s film was joined at the time by an increasing amount of progressive art that questioned the reality of current gay rights, including English author Radclyffe Hall’s lesbian-themed novel The Well of Loneliness in 1928. A romantic war drama that follows two air force pilots in WWI, each vying for the attention of a beautiful young woman whilst slowly discovering their passionate love for one another, Wings remains a progressive classic.
“You know there is nothing in the world that means so much to me as your friendship,” Jack (Charles ‘Buddy’ Rogers) utters, to which Dave (Richard Arlen) replies: “I knew it – all the time”. Referring to their love as a ‘friendship’ throughout the film, perhaps to dodge censorship regulations, it is abundantly clear that it is more of a romantic connection and one that ends with a dramatic kiss in each other’s arms.
Perhaps a subtle (or not so subtle) reference to the gay undertones of the film’s subtext, the aforementioned scene itself is a powerful one, showcasing the last moments of the two lovers’ relationship alongside a sombre stringed score.
Carefully towing the censorship line, Wellman’s silent film manages to be one of the earliest pieces of LGBT cinema, exploring the repressed desires of two men caught in both the physical conflict of WWI and the mental turmoil of a forbidden relationship.
So great was the movie that the controvertial move to include a same-sex kiss didn’t even receive much backlash, likely because the moment was contextualised in a compelling narrative and wasn’t deemed to be provocative by the standards of 1920s critics. A film of many milestones, Wellman’s film was the first film to show a gay kiss, the first (and only) silent film to win the highest honour at the Oscars and the first movie ever to receive Best Picture at all.
