Today's question comes courtesy of Lance McMillian (pictured), an associate professor at Atlanta's John Marshall Law School. Readers following our "Oscar Countdown" may have noticed that Lance knows a thing or two about Oscar trivia!
Lance's question: Name the four movies to win the Oscar for Best Picture that featured a lawyer in the lead role.
Kremer vs. Kramer
Chicago
A Man for All Seasons
and
Crash? (It's an ensemble movie, and I guess Brendan Fraser's DA could be considered one of the "leads," but I'm guessing that there's another movie I'm missing)
Would "Inherit the Wind" be the fourth?
(1) A Man for All Seasons is one.
(2) I don't think either Kramer was an actual lawyer. I know he was an advertising exec. I cannot find anything through a quick search as to her profession.
(3) I didn't count Chicago because I considered the lead roles to be Roxy and Velma, with Billy in more of a supporting position. But that is a matter of interpretation on which reasonable minds can disagree. If you count Chicago, the count would be five.
(4) Simiarly, echoing Colin's point, I wouldn't consider the Brendan Fraser character the lead role in Crash.
(5) Inherit the Wind didn't win best picture and surprisingly wasn't even nominated.
(6) Here's another hint: in the other three films, the lead's status as a lawyer is not necessarily central to the plot. Indeed, in one of the films, it is the screen treatment, not the actual movie itself, that informs us that this person is a lawyer.
I'm guessing "Philadelphia" is one, and possibly "Adam's Rib."
Philadelphia wasn't nominated for Best Picture.
What about All the King's Men?
(1) All the King's Men is one, as Willie Stark was a lawyer before entering politics.
(2) For the last two, you need to think outside of the box (way outside in one case).
Gandhi was a lawyer, no?
Gandhi sound right to me. And is Chariots of Fire the fourth?
(1) Gandhi is right.
(2) And it appears that Chariots of Fire is right, too, which is not one that I had counted. I blame wikipedia, which does not discuss in its description of the movie the fact that Abrahams was a lawyer (you have to go to his real life bio for that). My research goes for naught. I think there is a lesson here. So there are five films then that qualify, six if you count Chicago.
(3) The last film (maybe) is the one alluded to above. It is the screen treatment, not the actual movie itself, that informs us that this person is a lawyer.
It looks like Matt Damon's character was taking night classes at Suffolk Law School in The Departed:
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0407887/trivia
Is that the answer?
(1) The Departed is not the answer.
(2) Another hint: the character appears in one of the most iconic, beloved movies of all-time. The answer really does qualify as "trivia."
I will go ahead and reveal the answer: CASABLANCA!
Rick’s lawyer past cannot be discerned from watching the film, but a screen development for the movie describes Rick as a “famous criminal lawyer” before the “abandonment of [his] career and flight into oblivion.” See Rennard Strickland, Bringing Bogey Out of the Closet: Law and Lawyers in Film, in SCREENING JUSTICE – THE CINEMA OF LAW: SIGNIFICANT FILMS OF LAW, ORDER, AND SOCIAL JUSTICE xxi-xxii (Rennard Strickland, Teree E. Foster, & Taunya Lovell Banks eds., 2006).
I stumbled across this tidbit when writing my paper, Tortured Souls: Unhappy Lawyers Viewed Through the Medium of Film:
http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1154178
Apparently, lawyers opening bars is a frequent motif in fiction and real life. One of the lawyers discussed in depth in my paper, Michael Clayton, follows Rick's lead and opens his own bar. Clayton's business partner: his alcoholic brother. Things end poorly.