Ninety-seven Best Picture winners and counting. Our ranking of the ones that have stood up — and a frank note on a few that haven't.
The Academy has been giving out Best Picture awards since 1929. The category has, over time, accumulated a complicated reputation: it sometimes recognises the year's best film, sometimes the year's most-lobbied-for film, and occasionally a film that has not aged especially well.
We've picked the fifteen winners that have, in our reading, most-clearly earned their place. We've also noted, briefly, a few winners that history has reconsidered.
Some Best Picture winners look less defensible from twenty or fifty years later. Crash (2005) beating Brokeback Mountain is the most-discussed example of recent decades; the consensus has moved against it. How Green Was My Valley (1941) beating Citizen Kane is the most-discussed example of the older era; almost no one defends the choice today.
Other films won and then quietly faded: The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), Cimarron (1931), Around the World in 80 Days (1956). The category has favoured, throughout its history, the comfortably middlebrow, and the records reflect that.
What's striking about the 21st century is that the Academy has gotten progressively braver. Parasite, Moonlight, Everything Everywhere, Nomadland — all unimaginable as winners in the Academy of, say, 1990. The expansion of the Academy's membership in the last decade has measurably changed what wins.