By Given how few of this year's Academy Award nominees were available to watch anywhere ahead of the ceremony itself, you could be forgiven for feeling a little bit short-changed this Oscars season. Still, there is a very handy and cheap way to work yourself up into an Oscars fever: dig into the deep back catalogue of past winners, and do it without spilling a penny.
Obviously, as we said in our other big round-up of great films you can watch for free, you should support your local cinema when they eventually open up again. If you've got an indie near you, make sure you get some pick and mix and a drink too.
But now that the Oscars have been around for nearly a century, you can watch a lot of the early winners for free with complete moral impunity as they've fallen out of copyright, and the BBC has stuck a loaf of RKO's old classics on the iPlayer. A lot of the more recent winners of the shortform categories have been put on YouTube by their creators too.
Suspicion (1941)
Alfred Hitchcock's only Best Picture win came with Rebecca in 1940, but Joan Fontaine's Best Actress-winning performance as Lina McLaidlaw was the only time a performance in a Hitchcock film took an award. In this psychological thriller, Cary Grant is deeply sus playboy Johnnie, who Lina realises only after they've married is also an inveterate gambler and scrounger. But is he a murderer too?
Logorama (2009)
Loads of the best short animated film winners are on YouTube, and this one's a belter. In a world made entirely out of corporate mascots and logos, everything seems to be ticking along as usual until Ronald McDonald turns up and takes a hostage in a Pizza Hut. Constantly surprising and inventive, and the man from the Pringles can is voiced by David Fincher.
The Private Life of Henry VIII (1933)
When Charles Laughton took the Best Actor gong for his booming, larger-than-very-large-life portrayal of Henry VIII, this became the first non-American film to pick up an Oscar and started a long lineage of Oscar-winning British historical dramas which runs right up to Darkest Hour and The King's Speech. We start with the aftermath of Anne Boleyn's execution and run to the end of the king's life, via a brilliantly disgusting bit where Henry smashes up a roast chicken.
Cavalcade (1933)
This Best Picture winner is a fascinating thing. It's a Noel Coward-written family saga covering 1899 to 1933, in which we follow the well-to-do Jane and Robert Marryot and their family as they orbit around all the big events of the first third of the 20th century: the Second Boer War, the death of Queen Victoria, the sinking of the Titanic, the Great War, and so on. It's a bit mawkish, but it is at least heartening that the Oscars appear to have always valued a big, string-yanking weepie.
When We Were Kings (1996)
In 1974, three years after Muhammad Ali had been dropped by Joe Frazier, he and the younger, heavier-hitting George Foreman squared up in Zaire for 'The Rumble in the Jungle'. If you want to know about Ali's mystique, watch this: it took Leon Gast 22 years to gradually piece his retrospective of Ali's last, greatest win together, but it's the definitive statement on one of the sporting events of the century.
Citizen Kane (1941)
A mysterious, reclusive mega-wealthy newspaper proprietor dies alone in his gigantic mansion. But who was he? The life of Charles Foster Kane as told by Orson Welles was nominated for nine Oscars but only won one for Best Screenplay. But, you know, it's since become quite well-regarded.
Bachelor Knight (1947)
Known in the US as The Bachelor and the Bobby Soxer, this is the kind of knockabout romantic comedy Cary Grant could do in his sleep, and he's hardly stretching himself as urbane artist Richard. Shirley Temple is 17-year-old Susan, who falls for a deeply disinterested Richard, who's after her sister, who's also the judge who's trying him for scrapping in a nightclub. It's not on the same level as Bringing Up Baby and His Girl Friday, the screwball comedies Grant made with Howard Hawks in the Thirties, but his easy charm greases the wheels very nicely.
Creature Comforts (1989)
Nick Park's first Oscar came in the animated short film category for this, which perfected the technique Aardman had been playing with on their 'Conversation Pieces' series. But where before plasticine was used to dramatise real people's everyday chatter fairly straightforwardly, Park put people's words in the mouths of zoo animals. Majestic.
The Man Who Skied Down Everest (1975)
On 6 May 1970, Yuichiro Miura started skiing down Mount Everest's South Col, 26,000 feet above sea level. Six years previously he'd set a world ski speed record of 108 miles per hour, but this was the big one. Staggeringly stupid idea which unnecessarily risked – and claimed – the lives of seven sherpas, or a wildly romantic quest? It's the first one. This one won Best Documentary in 1976.
Der Führer's Face (1943)
In the fight against fascism every helping hand was welcome, even if that hand was actually the wing of an anthropomorphic duck. This short is quite a thing: it opens with an oompah band made up of Goebbels, Goering, Himmler and Mussolini stomping through Donald Duck's nightmarish Nazi town, where he's forced to make artillery shells and gradually goes mad. Give that duck a Best Animated Short Oscar.
If You Love This Planet (1982)
This anti-nuke Best Documentary Short winner is structured around a lecture by Dr Helen Caldicott, president of Physicians for Social Responsibility in the USA, about exactly the threat humanity faced then and continues to face now. It's distinctly non-cheery but it is still extremely urgent, with hints of Adam Curtis' eye for an ironic juxtaposition of sound and archive footage.
OJ: Made in America (2016)
This isn't one for a lazy Sunday afternoon – it's knocking on for eight hours long, though split into five parts on iPlayer – but it is an absolutely staggering accomplishment. This is the complete document of the life and times of OJ Simpson, from quicksilver running back for the University of Southern California to the hollowed-out convict he'd become by the mid-noughties, as told by the people who were around him.
The Cat Concerto (1947)
Probably the best Tom and Jerry short of them all. Tom's trying to play Franz Liszt's Hungarian Rhapsody No 2 at a fancy concert hall recital, but Jerry's snugly tucked up among the hammers of his piano and he really doesn't take kindly to being woken up. Hilarity and wildly unrealistic ultraviolence ensue.
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