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Welcome to our countdown of every Best Picture winner ever, from the Certified Fresh (Casablanca, Schindler’s List, Argo, Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, The Lord of the Rings: The Return of...
Mar 11, 2024 · From Wings to Everything Everywhere All at Once, let's take a look through Oscar history and rank all 96 Best Picture winners.
- Ross Bonaime
- Senior Film Editor
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- 'The Godfather' (1972) With violence, betrayal, drama, Marlon Brando and Al Pacino, the sprawling gangster epic is the cannoli on top of the Oscars' best picture cake.
- 'Casablanca' (1943) As Humphrey Bogart learns, you can stay neutral in war only until love and righteousness walk back through your nightclub doors.
- 'Schindler’s List' (1993) A moving, devastating Holocaust tale about hope and kindness, it's the best Steven Spielberg movie without a certain globetrotting archaeologist.
- 'On the Waterfront' (1954) Marlon Brando's New Jersey boxer-turned-longshoreman “coulda been a contender” but is definitely the champ of this stunning crime drama.
- Cimarron
- The Deer Hunter
- The Greatest Show on Earth
- The King’s Speech
- Shakespeare in Love
- Gone with The Wind
- The Broadway Melody
- Braveheart
- Crash
- Dances with Wolves
A clunking, ponderous Western family saga which reckons white people were the best thing ever to happen to America. One long yikes.
Unbearably annoying, and the wedding section’s so long you’ll find yourself praying for a barely competent local band to start parping out ‘Mr Brightside’ so you can sneak off.
Only really makes sense as an early example of the Academy’s softness for chucking a sorry-we-missed-you Oscar at elder statesmen who missed out during their golden years, in this case the 70-year-old Silent Era titan Cecille B Demille.
Shameless forelock-tugging guff, the only gag of which is a plummy Colin Firth saying “bugger orf”. So the king’s got a stutter – what are they going to do, not let him be king anymore? Plus, it’s a bit of a cheek implying Bertie’s stuttering helped win the war, when he was one of the few people in the country who didn’t have to actually do anythin...
Didn’t think it was possible, but Tom Stoppard finally managed to create a film composed entirely of odourless, flavourless gas. Not actively bad, but not really anything else either.
Great as Vivien Leigh and Olivia de Havilland are in this, it’s not revisionism to point out quite how badly this film treats Black characters – almost as soon as it was released, it was getting slated for it. It’s also only marginally shorter than the actual American Civil War.
An early landmark in the talkie takeover which was nearly immediately overtaken by more inventive musicals. There’s a fun bit where a dancer tap-dances in ballet shoes while en pointe.
This bloody, muddy William Wallace biopic is one of the most self-indulgent films ever made, and given how Mel Gibson John McClanes his way around the Highlands, this could have been called Dye Hard Woad a Vengeance. Plus, I’m all for taking the piss out of the English, but you’ve got to draw the line at the borderline homophobic treatment of Edwar...
This turns up on Worst Oscar Winners Ever lists all the time, but I’m telling you right now: it’s not as crap as Shakespeare in Love.
Always gets dunked on because it beat Goodfellas, which isn’t really fair. Please, dunk instead on its bloated length and smug piety.
- tom.nicholson@hearst.co.uk
- 3 min
Mar 13, 2022 · After winning a slew of precursor awards, “Everything Everywhere All at Once” swept the 2023 Oscars with seven trophies, becoming the most-awarded best picture winner since 2008’s...
Feb 14, 2022 · From "Wings" to "Nomadland," 93 films to date have earned the Academy Award for best picture. But within that elite group, there are great movies and — yes — not-so-great ones.
Mar 11, 2024 · For nearly 100 years, the Oscars have been handing out a trophy for what the Academy votes to be the Best Picture of the year. To date, we have 96 Best Picture winners, so what better thing to do than to rank our picks for the best of the bunch.
