Every Oscar Best Picture Winner, Ranked. How

This story first ran in 2019 and has been updated to reflect Coda’s Oscar win.

Every year starting in late August and ending sometime around late February — well, except in this pandemic-scarred year — Hollywood is consumed with winning an eight-and-a-half-pound gold trophy. Even in a world overrun with awards shows, the Oscars remain the grandest prize, and a Best Picture victory cements filmmakers and actors’ place in history. It also means that, for the rest of time, a lot of people will complain that your movie wasn’t that great and should have lost to some other movie they felt was eminently more deserving.

It’s very easy to second-guess the Academy on its Best Picture picks, but while putting together our ranking of every winner, we decided that, all in all, there aren’t that many terrible choices. Sure, mediocrity rules the roost, but for the most part this list is littered with good movies — sometimes very good, occasionally incredible, but largely good-enough movies. That becomes a Best Picture winner’s cross to bear — the fact that a particular film won’t stand up over time, and may actually look pretty terrible in retrospect — but, honestly, we’re pretty sure most Oscar recipients don’t much mind what the rest of us think. After all, they have an Academy Award, and we don’t.

So here it is: our ranking of all 94 Best Picture winners. You’ll probably disagree with us. That’s what the Academy Awards are all about.

94. The Broadway Melody (1928)

Widely considered the first real “Hollywood musical,” to be honest, that’s just about the only thing going for it. Its clichés, silliness, and abundant amount of cheese might have seemed somehow new in 1928 — though we doubt even that — but it’s difficult to sit through today. Its only real appeal at the time (look, there’s dancing and singing … in a movie!) has, uh, lost a considerable amount of its novelty today. We’re not even sure it would make a list of the top 200 musicals of all time. Think of it sort of like basketball before they replaced the peach baskets with actual hoops.

93. Cimarron (1930)
The poster looks like a book cover with Fabio on the front, and all told, we might have liked that theoretical bodice ripper more than this. We’ll try not to play Problematic Cop with this list, but it’s impossible not to note how truly ugly some of the Native American stereotypes are in this film. (Even worse, the movie thinks it’s on the good side!) Somehow, this was the last Western to win Best Picture until Dances With Wolves. Fair to say the Academy missed a few over those 60 years.

92. Crash (2005)
What the “Crash sucks” crowd rarely acknowledges about Paul Haggis’s lament about racial disharmony in Los Angeles is that, on a technical level, it’s pretty impressive. J. Michael Muro’s cinematography is quite beautiful, and Mark Isham’s score can be effective. And there are good performances in this ensemble drama, including Don Cheadle as a weary detective and Michael Peña as a hardworking father. But the confidence and craftsmanship invested in Crash are, ultimately, the problem, because the infuriatingly contrived screenplay and hushed seriousness conspire to produce a risible portrait of complex social issues reduced to glib plot points. The expertness of the disastrous execution remains astonishing.

91. The Great Ziegfeld (1936)
If it feels almost churlish to have this magnificently mounted, absurdly extravagant movie musical — with William Powell, Myrna Loy, and even Fanny Brice as herself — this low on this list to you, trust us: You haven’t tried to sit through it. The costumes look great, and you admire how much effort was put into the whole thing, but hoo boy, at nearly three hours, this thing is a near-impossible sit. What might have seemed epic at the time is mindlessly bloated today; you’ll find yourself verrry sleepy.

90. The Greatest Show on Earth (1952)

The penultimate film directed by Cecil B. DeMille, who died in 1959 at the age of 77, The Greatest Show on Earth is spectacle with a capital-S. It’s also cheesy with a capital-C. This is the movie where Jimmy Stewart plays a clown with a dark past. (Bob Hope and Bing Crosby both provide cameos, and a pre-superstar Charlton Heston is mildly magnetic as the man trying to keep this circus afloat financially.) This is also the movie where DeMille recruited actual members of Ringling Bros. to give this ensemble drama authenticity. Not surprisingly, the king of blunt showmanship loved the circus. “There are 20 languages spoken under that big top,” he once said. “Like a League of Nations in operation.” The movie is not very good, but the trailer sure is.

89. The Artist (2011)
French filmmaker Michel Hazanavicius had collaborated with actor Jean Dujardin on a pair of goofy, slight James Bond spoofs before they teamed up for this far more ambitious and romantic salute to the silent era. A creamy confection and little more, The Artist reaffirmed the power of movies, the resilience of love, and plenty of other musty clichés, all of which were shot in yummy black-and-white and delivered with Dujardin’s coy, self-mocking charm. Eh.

88. Cavalcade (1932)
This adaptation of Noël Coward’s play is more mawkish and sentimental than Coward would have liked, which allowed him to have the experience that so many playwrights would have after him: Hollywood mucking up their work, but hey, the checks still cash. This takes place over 40 years, which is right in the strike zone of Oscars ever since, but the makeup hadn’t quite made the leap yet. This is very classy and straightforward and rather dull and defanged.

87. Driving Miss Daisy (1989)
When you go through this many movies from this many years, you have to forgive a certain amount of historical ugliness; not all eras are as tuned into cultural sensitivity as ours, for better or worse. But it’s easier to forgive 1939 than it is, say, 1989, and this Bruce Beresford drama feels dipped in amber and toned in sepia. Its insistence on being “old-fashioned” gave the illusion of some sort of permanence, and its affectations haven’t aged particularly well over the last 30 years. Even the Morgan Freeman performance feels dated now, a glimpse of what he’d do much better later than anything particularly uniquely crafted. Also, never forget that this film got Dan Aykroyd a Best Supporting Actor nomination.

86. A Beautiful Mind (2001)
What a damp, dull slog A Beautiful Mind is. Based on the life of John Nash, a genius mathematician overcome by paranoid schizophrenia, Ron Howard’s movie is precious to a fault, despite Russell Crowe’s attempts to bring grit and authenticity to the role. A Beautiful Mind tries its best to dramatize Nash’s mental deterioration, which allows Howard to engage in some paranoid-thriller filmmaking, but the sogginess of the inspirational storytelling makes this the epitome of the prestige-picture, awards-bait drama.

85. Wings (1927)
The first-ever Best Picture winner — and the only silent film to ever win, unless you’re counting The Artist, and you really shouldn’t count The Artist. Wings’ flying sequences, revolutionary at the time, still hold up today: It was shot on an Air Force base in San Antonio, and while it’s not, say, Dunkirk, its realism still gets you. The movie itself is still a bit clunky, and the love story a bit overheated — it reportedly got Howard Hughes angry just talking about it — though if the fact that it’s the first Best Picture winner ever didn’t secure its place in film lore, the fact that Gary Cooper and Clara Bow had an affair on set certainly would.

84. Dances With Wolves (1990)

Forever known now as “The Movie That Beat Goodfellas,” Dances With Wolves aches with good intentions. Kevin Costner, practically America’s golden child after Bull Durham and Field of Dreams, wanted to make a film about the plight of Native Americans, a worthy subject. What we got was an overlong Western in which a disenfranchised Civil War soldier learns how to feel by hanging out with indigenous people. Dances With Wolves was the template for so many Oscar contenders — the white man playing the hero for a marginalized community — and the best you can say about it now is that Costner at least tries to be humble and earnest in his aims. The worst you can say is that it begot The Postman — oh, and that Goodfellas got robbed.

83. Green Book (2018)
In the past several years, the Academy has worked hard to expand its membership, inviting more women and people of color to give its voting body a broader, more inclusive makeup. And while the 91st Oscars will be remembered as a ceremony that honored diversity in many categories, it will also be forever known as the year when Green Book won. A benign salute to tolerance and racial unity, the film features a genuinely lovely performance from Mahershala Ali as Don Shirley, a deft black pianist who, in the early 1960s, hires an Italian bouncer (Viggo Mortensen) to be his driver and muscle as he does a concert tour across the Deep South. The big, goofy sweetness that director and cowriter Peter Farrelly reliably provided alongside his brother Bobby in gross-out classics like There’s Something About Mary is here wielded as a blunt, reassuring instrument, arguing that, no matter our racial divisions, we can all learn to get along, apparently while sharing a bucket of fried chicken and a hearty chuckle. It’s a nice sentiment but also an antiquated, naïve one, and Green Book’s win suggests that, no matter how much progress the Academy has made, there remains a weakness within the group for the kind of predictable, simplistically feel-good pabulum that this movie lays on thickly. You can’t deny the sincerity of the filmmakers’ intention, but you sure as hell can wonder why they’re so willing to act as if the very real ills they’re chronicling are quarantined to a nostalgic past. Green Book is based on a true story, but it doesn’t feel very real.

82. The Life of Emile Zola (1937)
Much has been written about the film’s wishy-washiness with how it dealt with Fascism and anti-Semitism — the movie seems to nod in awareness of the growing Nazi Party without ever tackling it head-on — but the real issue is that it even bothers being about Emile Zola at all. The movie should probably just be entirely about the Dreyfus Affair, which led Zola to write his famous “J’accuse” letter, but instead we get a sleepy half an hour of building up Zola’s biography before getting into the meat of it. The Dreyfus Affair would have probably been a better movie, and would have forced some more difficult choices that would age better today.

81. Oliver! (1968)
Oliver! isn’t that bad, we suppose. Ron Moody is the perfect Fagin — Peter Sellers and Dick Van Dyke turned down the part — and the movie has a big, cheerful vibe. (It just wants to be vast, accessible entertainment for all ages.) There is often not enough credit given to supersized productions like this that are able to achieve exactly what they set out to achieve. But none of that really matters. What really matters is that Oliver! somehow beat 2001: A Space Odyssey for Best Picture, and, thus, that’s all anyone will ever remember about this movie, until the end of time. As well they should.

80. Slumdog Millionaire (2008)
In films like Shallow Grave and 28 Days Later, Danny Boyle has often focused on humanity’s darker tendencies. Big surprise that, for his Oscar triumph, he found a little room for hope. Slumdog Millionaire stars Dev Patel as Jamal, a poor teen in Mumbai who, on the verge of winning the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, has to explain how he knows so much. Jamal’s explanation comes in the form of a series of flashbacks, which focus on his love for Latika (Freida Pinto), a fellow street kid. Boyle wields his usual bag of eye-popping cinematic tricks for this feel-good story, the soundtrack’s electric, and the leads’ chemistry is palpable. But we’ll confess that we prefer Boyle when he’s ornerier.

79. American Beauty (1999)
Overrated at the time — when it comes to dysfunctional-family comedy-dramas, we’ll take The Ice Storm — American Beauty is now probably properly rated. It’s a perfectly solid, overly ponderous slab of suburban misery peddling profundity it doesn’t possess. And yet, the film has a pretty expert ensemble — Kevin Spacey won the Oscar, but Annette Bening was even more deserving — and Conrad Hall’s photography captures all the shiny surfaces that contrast with the characters’ anguished inner worlds. Take American Beauty as seriously as it takes itself and you’ll be disappointed. If anything, it now feels like a decent pilot for a peak-TV series you may or may not stick with over a season.