First off, I swear that this year’s Academy Awards didn’t all go on to become pop culture icons. It’s just the order I’m doing it in because the movies I’ve seen before are easier to write about.

Second off, it was nominated as SORCERER’S Stone, not PHILOSOPHER’S Stone so I don’t want to hear any complaints, ok? It’s not my fault I’m used to the American title.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone is a movie that I can quote in my sleep. It is a movie whose soundtrack plays in my mind whenever I’m seeing something for the first time. It is a movie whose characters are so iconic and lifelike to me that I have personally become friends with every last one of them. I do not watch this movie, I experience it and I do not listen to it, I converse with it. What I’m trying to say is that Harry Potter and I are extremely close so it’s going to be a lot harder to look at this movie objectively than it will be most others and it will also be incredibly hard for me not to just rant about this movie in ways that are completely unrelated to the Oscars. I’m going to try with every ounce of my being to keep this focused but I do apologize if I rant for fifteen paragraphs about why it bugs me when the glass is removed and then put back in the zoo and also I’m pretty sure that Snake is supposed to be Voldemort’s so why doesn’t it look the same as it does later and also Parseltongue has never sounded like English since that scene as far as I remember.

So, Sorcerer’s Stone was up for three Academy Awards: Best Original Score, Best Art Design, and Best Costume Design. It won none of them. For a movie that’s become so ingrained in everyday life, that may be incredibly hard to fathom but at the time, it was not yet Harry Potter!, it was just Harry Potter. The locations, actors, and score that would later go on to be iconic weren’t being held at that level yet. The movie had been out for less than a year and there were no other films in the franchise. It had to stand on its own two feet.

That being said, Sorcerer Stone’s score is absolutely phenomenal. John Williams is, in my opinion as a biased honorary Bostonian, the greatest living composer. We will be revisiting his work many, MANY times during this death race so I’m not going to gush about him too much here. Instead, I’m going to say that his work on Harry Potter, both this movie and the series, is nothing short of actual auditory magic. Through the use of bells, strings and horns, John Williams has somehow made a score that perfectly captures what it feels like to be a kid who is experiencing a world of magic for the first time in his life. It switches between pure bliss, scared confusion and soft inner reflection flawlessly in a way that feels natural. It is, no pun intended, a perfect score.

Unfortunately, though, I can fully understand why it lost Best Original Score to Lord of the Rings. While I personally believe this score is far superior, Fellowship’s score was used far better within the context of the movie itself. Apart from one or two key scenes, the music seems to be thrown it at pure random instead of being written specifically for that scene. The resulting effect is that while Fellowship’s score had a truly epic feeling of scale and weight, Sorcerer Stone’s is often given the disservice of being treated as just something that’s playing while characters talk. If the award were being given for the music out of context, I do believe Harry Potter would have won. In context, however, I can sadly say that I understand Sorcerer’s Stone not winning the award as much as I disagree with the decision.

Now, Best Art Design isn’t a loss I can get behind, at least not unless Moulin Rouge! really blows me away. The Hogwarts Express is really, really cool looking, Hagrid’s hut feels nice and homey, even the Cupboard Under The Stairs has a surprising amount of detail for how little you actually see it. Don’t even get me started about Hogwarts, which if you didn’t know was filmed in an actual castle, and how amazing every last inch of it looks.

The kicker for me though is that not only does everything look gorgeous and lovingly crafted, it looks lived in. It looks real. I gushed about the designs of Fellowship of the Ring in my first ever entry but that looks incredibly fake compared to Sorcerer’s Stone (even though I know most of it’s actually just New Zealand). If someone told me that there is actually an actual wizarding world, I’d say “Yeah, it’s in Orlando” and then they’d hit me and say “No, I mean a REAL one in London” and then I’d believe them immediately. That’s how great looking this movie is. I believe the fake locations over the real New Zealand locations in Fellowship.

Finally, there’s Best Costume Design. This is a tough one for me. You remember how I talked earlier about how ingrained this movie is in pop culture? That has unfortunately resulted in Hogwarts Robes and Dumbledore Costumes popping up EVERYWHERE in both real life and in movies that are trying to be the next Harry Potter. I guess that’s a testament to how good the costumes are in this movie but to me, they don’t stand out because I am so used to seeing them by now. That’s not necessarily a good or bad thing, it’s just a true thing. I’m not sure I can accurately judge this one because of oversaturation but if I had to, I’d say this didn’t deserve the award for Best Costumes.

Unless that award was just for the hats. What is it with fantasy movies and amazing hats?

Overall, I’d say this movie still stands up as a standalone. It’s nowhere near as good as later entries in the series would ultimately be but if there were no other Harry Potter movies made after this one, I would still be rewatching Sorcerer’s Stone over and over and over to this day. It’s an enjoyable, family friendly romp full of wonder and excitement that I would recommend to anyone in a heartbeat.

10 Points to Gryffindor.