"gandhi"

The 2014 Oscar nominations are just out, and once again, this year’s Best Picture nominees demonstrate the connections that great movies have to each other. To illustrate, here’s a list of the current nominees matched with previous winners that share some common themes.

I’ll never forget the segment on “60 Minutes” a couple of years ago, when Morley Safer interviewed our most famous living historian, David McCullough.

It was gratifying, if not particularly surprising, to see Cillian Murphy capture the Best Actor Oscar this year. He’d just starred in the year’s most critically acclaimed film, “Oppenheimer,” which also took Best Picture. It was a big performance in a very big movie.

The old quip goes that we and our English cousins are separated by a common language, but there's little doubt that the movies have actually brought us together.

Lord Richard Attenborough, the architect of a monumental screen career that began in 1942, passed away Sunday at the age of 90. Had he only been known as an actor, we'd be marveling at the way he played everything from serial killers to Kris Kringle. But he also enjoyed a successful career as a director, culminating in 1982 when he picked up Best Director and Best Picture Oscars for "Gandhi." His passion for history led to his directing biopics of such diverse characters as Charlie Chaplin, Winston Churchill, and Apartheid activist Steve Biko. But Attenborough was hardly a drab old historian; he also lent his distinctive flair to comedies, thrillers, and war dramas. He even helmed the romantic tearjerker "Shadowlands" (1993), which happened to hit screens the same year as "Jurassic Park," the blockbuster film that introduced Attenborough to a new generation of moviegoers.   Attenborough's role as the kindly theme park owner in Steven Spielberg's blockbuster was a rarity for him. He wasn’t acting anymore at that stage, preferring to work behind the camera, but the mutual admiration between Spielberg and Attenborough brought them together for this colorful story of dinosaur cloning. Spielberg's hunch that Attenborough would be "the perfect ring master" was spot-on. How could anyone not love this bearded little man with the bright eyes, who smiled so warmly at the sight of a dinosaur egg hatching? 

With this year’s Oscars just days away, in the media and around the water cooler we engage in the recurring debate about which films deserve to win, and which, in fact, will.