Welcome this month to the 20th edition of TCM's 31 Days of Oscar® extravaganza, the longest-running (and most popular) extracurricular franchise we have on Turner Classic Movies, something we launched in March of 1995, which was just 11 months after the channel itself first went on air on April 14, 1994.

Speaking of TCM franchises, for those who like to keep track of such things, it was six months after that initial 31 Days of Oscar® jamboree that we aired our first Private Screenings interview on Sept. 5, 1995, then called Reel to Reel, with Jane Powell our initial interviewee. Further: we began our Essentials series in 2001, with Rob Reiner hosting; it was two years later in 2003 that we held our first all-August long Summer Under the Stars party, saluting a different star for 24 hours each day of the month. It was in 2005 that Bill Cosby became our very first Guest Programmer; five years later we tried something else new which was quickly embraced: the first TCM Classic Film Festival, initially held in Hollywood in 2010, the opening night attraction being a newly restored print of Judy Garland's monumental version of A Star Is Born (1954), then, 20 months later our first TCM Classic Film Cruise set sail in 2011, and I'm happy to say that all these extracurriculars are still with us and still going strong.

As for this year's 31 Days of Oscar® jamboree, we've never had quite as exciting a lineup of films as the ones we're able to offer you this year from Feb.1 through March 3. Once again, every film we show will have Oscar® credentials attached-- either an Academy Award® nomination or win (and that also goes for the short subjects we'll be showing).

In the daytime hours throughout these 31 days we'll be saluting Academy Award®-winning-and-nominated films according to genres, for example: adventure films with Oscar® credentials on Feb. 1, melodramas on Feb. 2, spy stories on Feb. 3 and sports films on Feb. 4. Later our daytime focus goes to swashbucklers, sci-fi stories, Westerns, biographies, film noir and other genres touched by Hollywood's favorite golden boy.

Meanwhile, in the primetime hours, we'll concentrate (with a few exceptions) on Best Picture winners (35 of them) and nominees, going basically in chronological order so that we start on Feb. 1 with the first four Best Picture AA winners: Wings, The Broadway Melody, All Quiet on the Western Front and Cimarron and finish on March 3 with three of the most recent Best Picture champs, in what will be their TCM premieres: 2007's No Country for Old Men, 2010's The King's Speech and 2011's The Artist.

And sprinkled throughout the month, we'll be premiering 14 other films we've never shown before on TCM, among them 1998's Academy Award® winning Best Picture Shakespeare in Love with Judi Dench as Queen Elizabeth I; 2006's The Queen with Helen Mirren as Queen Elizabeth II and our first-ever showing of all three of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy. For even more razzle dazzle, try Chicago (2002) on March 1.

As the Gershwin brothers, George and Ira, queried in their iconic song, "I Got Rhythm": "Who could ask for anything more?"

by Robert Osborne