I Used Every Oscar Best Picture Winner In The Form Of A Breakup Letter

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[The 86th Academy Awards air soon. Because I enjoy words, I decided to take all 85 previous Oscar winning Best Picture winners and write a poem or story, using all of them with no exceptions. To make something that makes any sense was really hard. But, I have to say, after I wrote this ridiculous thing, I genuinely felt bad for the characters I created—Rebecca Miniver-Kramer and her daughter Eve—for how badly Tom Kramer fucked them over. Then I realized that I am crazy. Enjoy.]

March 2, 2014

Mrs. Miniver-Kramer
Annie Hall, Apt. 4B
Chicago, IL 60613

Rebecca,

My Fair Lady, my little daisy flower and my American Beauty, I’ve been Around the World in 80 Days: And I’ve been everywhere. Out of Africa and over the Bridge on the River Kwai, I feel like Lawrence of Arabia, A Man for All Seasons.

But, alas, this letter bears bad news. I have decided to stay in France. I need to be Going My Way. Remember my French Connection: Gigi Argo, The Artist? Well, something happened between us.  Cliché, I know. An American in Paris falling for a Parisian artist.
I’m sorry. And I know this letter is no Schindler’s List, but at least it will save one soul. It Happened One Night In the Heat of the Night. My life felt like the Life of Emile Zola: A Midnight Cowboy at the Casablanca Grand Hotel: a Lost Weekend. Our frantic and scared Terms of Endearment felt chased by you and me: The Deer Hunter.

So I have to end it. Like Shakespeare in Love, I’m Hamlet: The English Patient—sick in the head. Or like that Gladiator Ben-Hur‘s Chariots of Fire: About to Crash. I’m lost. Kramer vs. Kramer. Me, once A Beautiful Mind, is now nothing but a Gentleman’s Agreement between Rain Man and Forrest Gump.

The Departed Cavalcade of my Braveheart Unforgivien From Here to Eternity is now a Cimarron Hurt Locker, A hopeless Mutiny on the Bounty like Gandhi vs. Patton’s Platoon.
Oh How Green Was My Valley, now No Country for Old Men.

We had a good run, though. Once it was The Greatest Show on Earth:
The Sound of Music where The Great Ziegfeld Dances with Wolves to Amadeus—a Broadway Melody. Now it’s more of a Rocky West Side Story: All Quiet on the Western Front, The Silence of the Lambs On the Waterfront.

We’re Ordinary People, where in The Best Years of Our Lives, One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, My Wings, Gone with the Wind, are now nothing but discarded feathers like wilted flowers, That are isolating a once healthy stem into dirt—Driving Miss Daisy.
After all of that, the endless, Titanic Sting that was once our love—You Can’t Take It With You. We were peasants. Now like a Lord of the Rings, it’s The Return of the King.
You reading this letter is like when All the King’s Men watched The King’s Speech about The Last Emperor—his heart. My heart is a Slumdog Millionaire to your Million Dollar Baby.

I’m sorry this happened. I hope our breaking doesn’t end up All About Eve. I don’t want us to kill each other, and she end up with her Godfather Oliver! Or even worse, her Uncle Marty (her Godfather Part II).

Hope teaching yoga is going well. By the way, you can have The Apartment.

–Tom Jones Kramer