Oscar fever is in the air, with the 86th Academy Awards being held this Sunday, March 2. For 86 years, the Oscars have rewarded the best films with golden statues that immortalize their quality and importance to the history of cinema. While there are certainly some Best Picture recipients that plenty of people would take issue with, there are even more movies that are undeniably deserving of the Academy’s highest honor.
To celebrate our excitement for Oscar Sunday, we thought we’d take a look at the Top 30 Best Picture Winners of all-time.
In an era when Hollywood was still blossoming, All Quiet on the Western Front showcased the artistic and historical possibilities of the cinema, creating one of the most realistic depictions of war on film at the time. The movie has been immeasurably influential on the works of later filmmakers (Steven Spielberg has credited the movie as an inspiration for Saving Private Ryan) let alone the genre of war films itself. It caused some controversy internationally, but domestically, the movie was rewarded with Best Picture and Best Director Oscars.
It was among the first time that the horrors of war were depicted on screen, and was even re-released by Universal in the early days of World War II as a reminder of what wars did to the soldiers that fought in them.
Featuring one of the most memorable villains of the last decade, the Coen Brothers’ No Country For Old Men is a complex and expertly-crafted thriller. Everything from the sound design to the performances to the tight editing to the script (which is uncharacteristically faithful to Cormac McCarthy’s novel) adds to the complexity of the movie, resulting in what is arguably the best picture the duo have ever produced.
The plot, however, is deceptively simple, featuring a sheriff following a case of missing drug money, but it’s in the complexity of the characters and the themes they are used to explore that makes the movie such a high mark in the Coens' careers.
Though the movie is set during the Vietnam War, The Deer Hunter is more about the three characters in the film that are caught in terrible circumstances. The setting is somewhat irrelevant (though the movie did face some criticism for its exploitation of the Vietnamese), and is more about human response to extreme circumstances and pressure. A bulk of the controversy surrounding the movie was about the Russian roulette sequences, which serve as the primary metaphor of the entire film.
Regardless of the controversies and criticism, The Deer Hunter is an achievement in character and intensity, and earned itself a slew of Academy Awards in addition to Best Picture.
Whatever your favorite LOTR movie might be, it’s hard to see The Return of the King’s Best Picture win as anything but an acknowledgement of the trilogy as a whole. It cleaned up the Oscars that year, winning every award it was nominated for. In any case, Return of the King is as epic as fantasy movies get, featuring a boatload of massive battles, gigantic sets, an emotional ending(s), and pure cinematic wonder.
Movie trilogies often suffer in their third installment, but in the case of LOTR, it just might be the strongest effort. Perhaps the best thing to say about the series is that whether you consider this a Best Picture win for Return of the King or for the entire trilogy, it’s justified.
Inspired by his own experiences in Vietnam, Oliver Stone’s Platoon has a certain authenticity to it that other films on the subject are hard-pressed to match. Centered by the Oscar-nominated performances of Willem Dafoe and Tom Berenger, Platoon’s exploration of the loss of innocence as a result of the horrors of war is admittedly difficult to watch.
While there are other accounts of the Vietnam War that were turned into effective movies, there’s no doubt that Stone’s personal experiences helped give Platoon an edge in relaying the terrors of that experience to general audiences.
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