Best Picture Winners
You get a year and four films. All four were nominated for Best Picture that year, so there is no giveaway option to cross off, and one of them went home with it. 97 ceremonies to draw from, in a different order every time.
The questions that come up every March
How many films have won Best Picture?
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Ninety-seven, one for each ceremony from the first in 1929 through the awards for the 2024 film year. The very first ceremony handed out two top prizes, Outstanding Picture to Wings and Unique and Artistic Production to Sunrise, but the second category was dropped straight away and only Wings is counted in the line of winners.
Which film has won the most Oscars?
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Three are tied on eleven: Ben-Hur in 1959, Titanic in 1997 and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King in 2003. The Return of the King is the only one of them that went undefeated, winning all eleven categories it was nominated in.
Has a film not in English ever won Best Picture?
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Once. Parasite won for 2019, ninety-two years after the first ceremony. Grand Illusion had been the first non-English nominee back in 1938, and Roma, Amour, Life Is Beautiful and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon all got there and lost.
Which films won the big five?
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Picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay in one night has happened three times: It Happened One Night in 1934, One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest in 1975 and The Silence of the Lambs in 1991. Forty-one years separate the first two and sixteen the last two, and nothing has come close since.
Has a sequel ever won Best Picture?
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Twice. The Godfather Part II in 1974, which is also the only time a film and its sequel have both won, and The Return of the King in 2003, the third part of a trilogy whose first two instalments were nominated and lost.
Has an animated film ever won Best Picture?
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No. Three have been nominated: Beauty and the Beast in 1991, then Up and Toy Story 3 once the field was widened past five. The Academy created a separate Best Animated Feature category in 2001, which is generally where animated films have gone since.
Why do the earliest years carry two dates?
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The first six ceremonies judged a season that ran across two calendar years, so the winner for 1927/28 is Wings and the winner for 1932/33 is Cavalcade. The Academy switched to whole calendar years from 1934, and the awards have followed the calendar ever since.
The years that changed what the award is
19 of the 97 ceremonies are worth knowing for something other than the film that won: a rule that was written or scrapped that year, a barrier that took ninety years to fall, or a result that is still cited as the one the Academy got wrong.
The ballot changed shape twice
The award did not start as one prize and has not always had the same number of nominees. Both changes came from a specific year going wrong, eighty years apart.
1927/28
Wings
The first ceremony gave out two top prizes. Wings took Outstanding Picture and Sunrise took Unique and Artistic Production, a category the Academy then abolished. Only Wings counts as a Best Picture winner today.
Going My Way
From here until 2008 the ballot held exactly five nominees.
Slumdog Millionaire
The last year with only five nominees. The Dark Knight missing the cut is the reason the field was widened.
The firsts that took most of a century
The Academy is old enough that its milestones read as a record of what it would not do for decades at a time. A film in a language other than English was nominated in 1938 and did not win until 2019.
Hamlet
The first film made outside the United States to win, and still the only Shakespeare adaptation to do it.
The Hurt Locker
Kathryn Bigelow became the first woman to win Best Director, beating her former husband and Avatar, the highest-grossing film ever made.
12 Years a Slave
The first Best Picture winner from a Black director.
Parasite
The first film not in English to win Best Picture, ninety-two years after the first ceremony.
CODA
The first film from a streaming service to win. It was nominated three times and won all three.
The losses people still argue about
Five results where the film that lost is now better known than the film that won, or where a heavy favourite went home with nothing.
How Green Was My Valley
The result people reach for whenever the Academy gets one wrong. Citizen Kane went home with a single Oscar, for its screenplay.
The Best Years of Our Lives
It's a Wonderful Life lost every category it was nominated in and lost money in cinemas. Television built its reputation two decades later.
A Man for All Seasons
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? was nominated in every category it was eligible for, which no other film has managed, and it still lost this one.
Out of Africa
The Color Purple was nominated eleven times and won nothing, and Steven Spielberg was not among its nominees.
Crash
Brokeback Mountain had won nearly every precursor award. This is the upset that gets cited whenever a frontrunner loses.
Records, and the ones that only happened once
Sweeps nobody has matched, a winner nominated in no other category, an X certificate, and the only man to turn the thing down.
1931/32
Grand Hotel
The only Best Picture winner nominated in no other category at all.
It Happened One Night
The first film to sweep the big five: picture, director, actor, actress and screenplay. Only two films have managed it since.
Ben-Hur
Eleven Oscars, a haul only Titanic and The Return of the King have equalled.
Midnight Cowboy
The only X-rated film to win Best Picture. The rating was revised to R two years later without a frame being cut.
Patton
George C. Scott refused his Best Actor award, calling the ceremony a meat parade.
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Eleven nominations and eleven wins, the only clean sweep at that scale, and the only fantasy film to take Best Picture.