Oscars: Looking Back at 87 Years of ‘Best Picture’ Winners

The Oscars are, by and large, a loathsome, self-congratulatory affair, saved only by the continued recognition of the technical aspects of filmmaking.

If you ask me, Mad Max: Fury Road ended up being the biggest winner this year, walking away with 7 awards including editing, costume design and production design. Most people within the industry probably recognise that, in the same way that on the acting side of things, Mark Rylance’s win for Bridge of Spies will be regarded as a much bigger deal that DiCaprio ‘finally’ getting his best actor gong. For those on the outside though, Best Actor is normally the most prominent award of the night, followed closely by best actress, and then a two-way tie between the supporting roles, then best director and film.

You would think that ‘Best Picture’ would be the most important award of the night, but it usually ends up being a kind of postscript for everything else, an afterthought. Now and again a film comes along that everyone knows is going to get it, and deservedly so. When that happens, the entire tone of the ceremony transforms. A few years ago, when 12 Years a Slave won, it was framed as a triumphant moment for race representation in Hollywood (it wasn’t), and before that, it was when everyone was wondering whether The Hurt Locker or Avatar was really the standout of the year (neither of them were).

The last time in recent memory that the award meant something, and I mean really meant something, it was 2003, when it was given to Return of the King. Both of the previous Lord of the Rings films had been nominated for best film, and despite losing out on that, Fellowship won 4 awards and Towers got 2, all them technical (although it’s worth noting that Ian McKellen was nominated for best supporting actor for Fellowship). The reason the Best Picture win was so meaningful is because it was the first time a fantasy film had won it in the history of the Academy Awards, and unless you count Birdman, it hasn’t happened again since.

Plenty of fantasy, horror and science fiction films have been nominated in the past, but none have ever walked away with the award, and often their inclusion has felt more like an obligation than any kind of recognition of quality. If you go right back to the beginning, the 1929 awards (which honoured films going back to 1927) only had 3 nominees for best film – a romance, a crime drama and a historical/war drama, the latter of which, Wings, ultimately won.

Now, I and many others would argue that the most important, groundbreaking film to come out in that 3 year stretch was actually Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, which wasn’t actually nominated for anything, and in fact the most significant accolade it received at the time was some unwarranted and unwanted praise from Josef Goebbels. In fairness, there was no ‘Best Foreign Language Film’ category at this stage, which puts Metropolis out of the running, but we’ll get back to that.

It wasn’t until 1937 that a film with fantastical elements was even nominated for best film, Frank Capra’s Lost Horizon, and beyond that, even moving into Hollywood’s golden age, they rarely saw a nod. The first real technical marvel of that nature to make it into the ranks was The Wizard of Oz, and after that it was another 17 years before a film with fantastical content featured on the roster (now down from 10 nominees to 5), this time The Ten Commandments; and I’m being generous there because I imagine that a fairly large contingent of the Academy at the time regarded it as a historical drama. After that there was an 8 year gap, curtailed by Mary Poppins, but after that fantasy, sci-fi and horror nominees became more frequent, with films like Jaws, The Exorcist, A Clockwork Orange and Star Wars all seeing nods.

If you want to look at glaring omissions, though, you only need look at animated or foreign language films. Since the awards began, a mere 9 foreign films have been nominated for Best Picture, and only 3 animated ones, which is all the more unsettling when you consider that the Best Foreign Feature award has been around since 1956, and the animated feature award has been around since 2001. Yep, 2001. To put that into perspective, since 1937, 13 of the highest grossing films of their respective years have been animated. At that point, only one animated film had ever been nominated for Best Picture – Beauty and the Beast. That was in 1991.

As you might have already figured out, Best Picture almost never has anything to do with what might be regarded as the best film of that year, in terms of quality, audience reception, critical reception, anything. Even if you conclude that it is the summation of the opinion of the 6,000 or so members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, all of whom either have worked or currently work within the industry, you would think the winners would constitute a more broad spread. They don’t, though, if you read the full list of all 88 winners, a staggering majority are historical, topical, romantic or family oriented, and typically within the purview of drama, a form of bias which has given rise to the term ‘Oscar bait’.

The most recent winner, Spotlight, while a genuinely excellent, important film, is Oscar bait. It’s a historical drama starring several previously nominated actors, focused on a hot topic and it was released within the 3 or 4 month window which films gunning for the award usually aim for. In fact, the only film nominated for best picture this year that wasn’t released in that window was (sharp intake of breath) Mad Max: Fury Road. The one that had the smallest chance of actually winning, an example of a disturbing phenomenon of recent years: the oddball nod. The previous few years hadn’t seen one, but from 2009 to 2011, when the nomination pool had widened, they were 3, then 2, then only 1. 2009 had Avatar, District 9 and Up, 2010 had Inception and Toy Story 3 and 2011 just had Hugo. After that, it was back to business as usual.

Quality isn’t even any kind of common thread, either. You would think that, at the very least, any film that won would have had to be agreeably great, at the very least, but it’s not always the case. My opinion about The King’s Speech is unpopular, but most tend to agree that Driving Miss Daisy is dull and ineffectual, Out of Africa is probably Sydney Pollack’s worst film, A Beautiful Mind takes a great story and turns it into melodramatic hokum, The Greatest Show on Earth most certainly was not and Million Dollar Baby was a low point for nearly everyone involved, even Jay Baruchel. Even if the winning film isn’t that bad, there are some years where the competition was so strong that its victory becomes almost laughable, here are a few examples:

1980 – Coal Miner’s Daughter, The Elephant Man, Ordinary People, Raging Bull, Tess – Winner: Ordinary People

1994 – Forrest Gump, Four Weddings and Funeral, Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, Quiz Show – Winner: Forrest Gump

2002 – Chicago, Gangs of New York, The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, The Pianist – Winner: Chicago

2002 is the worst offender there, in the other 2 cases there’s at least one other film on the list which is even less deserving of the praise, which brings us around to 2005. 2005, 2006 and 2007 represent some of the strongest Best Picture lists in the history of the award, and in the latter two cases, the strongest film came away with the prize (The Departed and No Country for Old Men), but in 2005, the film that won was not only the worst film on the list, it was probably one of the worst films to be released that year – Crash.

We’re talking about a film so bad, that it’s supposed to be about racial equality and ends up basically being racist. Ludacris ends up giving the most convincing performance in the whole film, despite being flanked by heavyweights like Matt Dillon, Thandie Newton and Don Cheadle (who in the same year had starred in the brilliant and arresting Hotel Rwanda, 3 nominations, 0 wins). The film also features Shaun Toub, one of the greatest actors of our generation, in a role so offensively stereotypical I’m surprised he didn’t walk off the set in anger. The other nominees that year were as follows – Munich, Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote and Brokeback Mountain.

Before this year, 2005 was remembered as the most controversial Oscar year in recent memory, all because Crash won, and in part because Brokeback Mountain did not, which some have argued was down to the Academy being homophobic. That notion neatly underlines what the Best Picture award really, genuinely reflects – fear of change. The Lord of the Rings Oscar was a submissive award, emblematic of the Academy being so backed into a corner that they could do nothing else.

Despite the fact that so many people regard the Oscars as the highest possible mark of film quality (evidenced by the reliable spike in box office grossing for every film that takes the award each year), the Academy are only interested in awarding films that follow a proven formula, and crucially, act as a showcase for the performers involved, which is why even if the Best Picture winner doesn’t feature any actors nominated for their own Oscars that year, they will have almost definitely won them in the past. The only film to have ever taken the award which could be described as a horror was Silence of the Lambs, and it just so happened that both leads won awards for their performances in it.

In fact, if you look back, nearly every Best Picture winner features at least one performer who had been nominated for an Oscar in the past. There was a point in time when it seemed like all you had to do if you wanted to get your film recognised by the Academy is put Dustin Hoffman in it. Really and truly, as I’ve said many times before, having awards for an art form, especially a collaborative one like film is extremely reductive, and only more so when the award is for something as general and subjective as best film. It would be comforting to suggest that as the years go by, people are taking the Academy Awards less seriously, but I’m not sure if that’s true, certainly it’s being more openly criticised, but thanks to social media that’s true of literally everything.

With films like Spotlight, which had an important point to make, it’s understandable that they would gun for an Oscar season release, it’s a signal booster, albeit a cynical one. Fundamentally though, the thing to remember is this: for most people, the films they love are the ones that captured their imagination, and if the Best Picture award is anything to go by, the Academy’s views cannot reflect that, because they don’t have one.