Why the Academy Museum Is L.A.’s Best Film School

Everybody knows one of the best perks of living in Los Angeles is access to movies. This is a film lover's paradise, a town where every corner is somehow shaped by Hollywood. So, consider this reason number 101 why L.A. is the only city to live in if you love movies: on any given weekend, you can walk into the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and watch an Oscar-winning director present one of their favorite films.

That's exactly what happened a few weekends ago, when Guillermo del Toro presented a series of his favorite Alfred Hitchcock films, complete with a lecture on why specific moments from those films matter, both to his own work as a director and to cinema history at large.

Del Toro, director of The Shape of Water and most recently Frankenstein, summed up Hitchcock's work with the simplicity only a master of the craft can pull off: "Comedy, melodrama and suspense." And while breaking down the "logic of a dream" in the legendary crop duster sequence from North by Northwest, in which Cary Grant flees a gun-equipped plane through remote farmland (arguably one of the most famous scenes in film history), del Toro humanized the moment in the most practical way possible, describing Hitchcock racing the fading daylight: "The sun doesn't care if you're Orson Welles or Ed Wood.”

Part of what makes the Academy Museum's programming so worthwhile is that it's treated as proper education, not just a fan event. (It just happens that the guy teaching is right up there with Hitchcock among the most visionary directors in cinema.) Del Toro made the case for this kind of programming, and for an institution like the Academy Museum, in the most direct way possible: "We need to learn to read cinema like this," he said.

And for those of us lucky enough to call L.A. home, we get to read these films on the regular, taught by the masters themselves.