Every year the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences dedicates an evening to themselves, spending four long hours wining and dining the Hollywood system, elevating celebrity personalities to the ranks of godhood and doing its very best to enforce the ideology that those very personalities are the heart and gears that make it all possible. Of course, the end result is more and more celebrity-driven piles of rubbish like We Bought a Zoo and Justin Bieber: Never Say Never being churned out each year to record profits.

Still, the occasional quality work does get through and the Academy will occasionally recognize it for the honors it deserves. Not always, but the Best Picture winner each year is usually one of the better outputs. Sometimes the Best Picture winner is a truly extraordinary work of art to be esteemed by posterity, as in the cases of Gone With the Wind (1939), Casablanca (1943), Lawrence of Arabia (1962), and Amadeus (1984). Most are generally decent while only an exceptional few are just downright bad: Cimarron (1931), Cavalcade (1933), and The Greatest Show on Earth (1952) are certainly the worst.

This year's 84th Academy Awards are set to happen on Sunday, February 26. We will spend the next two Saturdays -- February 18 and February 25 -- watching nothing but those films that have managed to claim the illustrious Oscar for Best Picture.

We will have 56 of the past 83 winners on hand. The vast majority of them are pretty good and considered classics to some degree or another, so there's relatively little concern about being saddled with a pile of cinematic stinkers. But that's all we're doing. There will not be an Oscar party on the 26th because that's just absolutely awful.