Academy Award Winning (or Not) Robot Movies Week

Robots are a staple of science fiction movies, either as a main character in the main fiction narrative or a prop in the “see how futuristic this is” science narrative. In honor of the recent Oscars, this week we’ll look at the top robot movies listed by the American Film Institute (www.afi.com) and Oscar award winning movies with robots as major characters. The Oscars started in 1929, two years after the first robot movie Fritz Lang’s Metropolis in 1927 and it wouldn’t be until 1957 when a robot movie was nominated for an Oscar (Forbidden Planet, 1956). We will start the week with a review of the original The Day The Earth Stood Still. It was ignored by the Oscars but is #5 on the AFI list of all time great science fiction movies.