The First Best Director Oscar Winner Set the Tone for Romantic Dramas

If you wanted to create a formula that would raise the chances of your film getting Oscar consideration, it isn't often you'd go wrong with a romantic drama. Many of the past Best Picture winners have fit nicely into that genre slot, from the high tides of Titanic to the tightly constructed exchanges of Casablanca, and even looking at past nominees will present you with a wide array of them. This is far from a recent trend, as the Oscars have seen fit to reward romantic dramas as far back as the literal inception of the ceremony, with 7th Heaven. A melodrama of the highest order, it's a perfect slice of the kind of high-stakes morality play that early cinema made its bread and butter off of. It's a film that has not only aged nicely as an engagingly told tale that helped define the word "epic," but it also led to two of the first-ever major Oscar wins in the Academy's storied history.