Best Picture Winners

1.The Godfather

Francis Ford Coppola's 1972 adaptation of Mario Puzo's novel about a New York Italian crime family. Three Academy Awards including Best Picture; the film by which post-1970 American filmmaking is often measured.

2.The Godfather Part II

Francis Ford Coppola's 1974 epic, both prequel and sequel to The Godfather (1972). Cuts between Vito Corleone's rise from Sicily to early-twentieth-century New York and Michael Corleone's slow collapse in 1958. The first sequel ever to win Best Picture.

3.Schindler's List

Steven Spielberg's 1993 black-and-white drama about Oskar Schindler, the German industrialist who sheltered over a thousand Jewish workers from the Holocaust. Seven Oscars and the seed funding for the USC Shoah Foundation.

4.The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King

Peter Jackson's 2003 finale to his Lord of the Rings trilogy. Eleven Academy Awards, the highest fantasy gross in cinema history at the time, and the most successful adaptation of Tolkien ever filmed.

5.Parasite

Bong Joon Ho’s precisely engineered tragicomedy follows a struggling Seoul family whose entry into a wealthy household exposes the architecture of class inequality.

6.Forrest Gump

Forrest Gump is Robert Zemeckis's 1994 picaresque about a sweet-natured Alabama man drifting through three decades of American history. It won six Oscars, made nearly $700 million, and has been argued about ever since.

7.One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest

Milos Forman's 1975 adaptation of Ken Kesey's novel pits Jack Nicholson's R. P. McMurphy against Louise Fletcher's Nurse Ratched in an Oregon psychiatric ward — the second film in history to sweep the Big Five Oscars.

8.The Silence of the Lambs

Jonathan Demme's 1991 thriller about an FBI trainee who interviews a cannibal psychiatrist to catch a different serial killer — the third (and most recent) film to win the Academy Awards Big Five and the only horror film ever to win Best Picture.

9.Gladiator

Gladiator is Ridley Scott's 2000 epic about a Roman general turned slave-arena fighter seeking revenge on the emperor who killed his family. It revived the sword-and-sandal genre and won five Oscars including Best Picture.

10.Green Book

Peter Farrelly's road drama fictionalizes the 1962 tour of pianist Don Shirley and driver Tony Vallelonga, using their changing relationship to explore race, class, and performance.

11.The Apartment

Billy Wilder's 1960 romantic comedy-drama follows a junior insurance clerk who lends his Manhattan apartment to his married bosses for affairs, with Jack Lemmon and Shirley MacLaine as the leads. It won five Academy Awards including Best Picture and Best Director.

12.The Departed

The Departed is Martin Scorsese's 2006 Boston crime film about an undercover cop in the Irish mob and an undercover mobster in the state police, both racing to expose each other. It won Scorsese his only Best Director Oscar.

13.Casablanca

Michael Curtiz's 1942 wartime romance about a cynical American expat in Vichy-controlled Morocco won three Academy Awards and is one of the most quoted, most rewatched films ever made — partly because it was rewritten as it shot.

14.All About Eve

Joseph L. Mankiewicz's 1950 backstage drama set in the Broadway theatre world, with Bette Davis as an aging star and Anne Baxter as the ambitious young fan who replaces her. Tied the record for most Oscar nominations (14) — still unbroken seventy years later.

15.Oppenheimer

Christopher Nolan's 2023 three-hour biopic of J. Robert Oppenheimer, the physicist who led the Manhattan Project and was later destroyed by the security hearings he agreed to attend. Won seven Oscars including Best Picture and Best Director.

16.Amadeus

Milos Forman's 1984 adaptation of Peter Shaffer's stage play frames Mozart's life through the eyes of his rival Antonio Salieri — a story about mediocrity confronted with genius. It won eight Academy Awards including Best Picture and is among the most influential films ever made about a classical composer.

17.The Sting

George Roy Hill's 1973 caper pairs Paul Newman and Robert Redford as Depression-era grifters running an elaborate long con against a New York mob boss. It won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and put Scott Joplin's ragtime back into mainstream American music.

18.American Beauty

Sam Mendes' 1999 Best Picture winner — a suburban father has a midlife crisis after becoming infatuated with his teenage daughter's friend. A film with one of the most complicated afterlives in American cinema.

19.Lawrence of Arabia

David Lean's 1962 epic about T. E. Lawrence, the British officer who led Arab forces in the Hejaz revolt of 1916-18. Shot in 70mm in the Jordanian desert, it runs 228 minutes, won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture, and is often cited as the most visually accomplished film ever made.

20.The Deer Hunter

Michael Cimino’s 1978 epic follows three Pennsylvania steelworkers whose friendship and community are permanently altered by the Vietnam War.

21.Million Dollar Baby

Clint Eastwood's boxing drama follows an aging trainer and a determined fighter whose hard-won bond is tested by catastrophic injury and an agonizing choice.

22.No Country for Old Men

Joel and Ethan Coen adapt Cormac McCarthy's borderland novel into a spare thriller about chance, violence, and a lawman's fear that the world has moved beyond him.

23.Braveheart

Mel Gibson's 1995 historical epic about the Scottish warrior William Wallace. Five Oscars including Best Picture, gorgeous battle work, and a famously loose relationship with actual history.

24.12 Years a Slave

Steve McQueen's adaptation of Solomon Northup's 1853 memoir portrays the kidnapping of a free Black musician and his twelve years enslaved in Louisiana.

25.Unforgiven

Clint Eastwood's 1992 revisionist Western — directed by and starring him alongside Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris — strips the genre of its myths. It won Best Picture, Director, Supporting Actor, and Editing at the 65th Academy Awards.

26.Gone with the Wind

The 1939 epic remains a landmark of Hollywood scale and performance whose romantic vision of the antebellum South requires direct engagement with racist mythology and production history.

27.Titanic

James Cameron's 1997 historical romance set aboard the doomed liner, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet. Eleven Academy Awards, $2.2 billion at the worldwide box office, and the film that taught Hollywood the modern blockbuster could run 195 minutes.

28.On the Waterfront

Elia Kazan's 1954 longshoremen drama, with Marlon Brando's coulda-been-a-contender Terry Malloy. Eight Oscars, including Best Picture, Director, and Actor. Also Kazan's coded defence of his own HUAC testimony — context that has trailed the film for seventy years.

29.CODA

Sian Heder's 2021 family drama about a hearing daughter of deaf parents torn between fishing-boat duty and a Berklee audition. The first streaming-distributed Best Picture winner.

30.Ben-Hur

William Wyler's monumental historical epic follows a Jewish prince through betrayal, enslavement, revenge, and an encounter with the life of Jesus in Roman Judea.

31.Rebecca

Alfred Hitchcock’s first American feature turns Daphne du Maurier’s Gothic novel into a study of memory, class, and psychological domination inside the shadowed halls of Manderley.

32.A Beautiful Mind

Ron Howard's biographical drama portrays mathematician John Nash's intellectual ambition, schizophrenia, and changing relationship to the people and perceptions around him.

33.Dances with Wolves

Kevin Costner’s frontier epic follows a Union officer whose growing relationship with a Lakota community challenges the assumptions he carried west.

34.Spotlight

Tom McCarthy's 2015 newsroom drama follows the Boston Globe team that uncovered the Catholic Church's protection of abusive priests. It won Best Picture and is the rare journalism film that gets the work right.

35.Rocky

John G. Avildsen’s 1976 drama follows Philadelphia club fighter Rocky Balboa when an unlikely title shot tests his discipline, dignity, and capacity for intimacy.

36.The Bridge on the River Kwai

David Lean's 1957 epic about British POWs forced to build a railway bridge for the Imperial Japanese Army in Burma. Adapted from Pierre Boulle's 1952 novel, it won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture and is often cited as the film that made the British war epic.

37.It Happened One Night

Frank Capra’s fast, road-bound romantic comedy pairs a runaway heiress with a broke reporter and helped define the rhythms of screwball cinema.

38.Rain Man

Barry Levinson's 1988 road movie pairs Tom Cruise with Dustin Hoffman as estranged brothers — one a self-absorbed car dealer, one an autistic savant. Best Picture winner whose representation of autism is now seriously contested.

39.Platoon

Oliver Stone’s 1986 Vietnam War drama places a young volunteer between two sergeants whose opposing moral codes divide an infantry platoon.

40.All Quiet on the Western Front

Lewis Milestone’s 1930 adaptation of Erich Maria Remarque’s novel strips World War I of patriotic glamour through the experience of young German soldiers.

41.The Best Years of Our Lives

William Wyler’s 1946 drama follows three American servicemen returning to the same town and discovering that homecoming demands another difficult adjustment.

42.The King's Speech

A future monarch’s work with an unconventional speech therapist becomes an intimate drama about fear, trust, and the public burden of a voice.

43.Slumdog Millionaire

Danny Boyle’s kinetic drama links a Mumbai teenager’s game-show answers to a life shaped by poverty, chance, violence, loyalty, and lost love.

44.The Sound of Music

Robert Wise’s 1965 musical brings Maria, the von Trapp children, and their widowed father together as Austria approaches Nazi annexation.

45.Everything Everywhere All at Once

Daniels' 2022 multiverse drama starring Michelle Yeoh as a laundromat owner pulled between every version of the life she didn't live. Won seven Academy Awards including Best Picture.

46.Annie Hall

Woody Allen’s nonlinear romantic comedy dissects a failed relationship through memory, direct address, fantasy, and the contradictions of its narrator.

47.In the Heat of the Night

A Philadelphia detective and a Mississippi police chief investigate a murder while confronting the racism embedded in their uneasy partnership and the town around them.

48.The Lost Weekend

Billy Wilder’s uncompromising drama follows an alcoholic writer through four days of deception, craving, humiliation, and fear in New York City.

49.Kramer vs. Kramer

A father’s sudden responsibility for his young son develops into a tender domestic drama and a bruising courtroom dispute over care, work, and identity.

50.The Last Emperor

Bernardo Bertolucci traces the life of Puyi from ceremonial ruler of imperial China to prisoner and ordinary citizen across decades of political upheaval.

51.Gandhi

Richard Attenborough’s large-scale biography follows Mohandas Gandhi’s development of nonviolent resistance and his role in India’s struggle against British rule.

52.Midnight Cowboy

A naïve Texan and a sickly New York hustler form an improvised friendship amid the loneliness and economic desperation of late-1960s Manhattan.

53.You Can't Take It with You

Frank Capra’s ensemble comedy sets an eccentric household devoted to joyful living against a powerful financier determined to buy their block.

54.The French Connection

William Friedkin’s abrasive police thriller follows two New York detectives pursuing an international heroin shipment through surveillance, obsession, and dangerous improvisation.

55.My Fair Lady

George Cukor’s lavish musical transforms a phonetics experiment into a battle over class, language, authorship, and Eliza Doolittle’s right to define herself.

56.Marty

Ernest Borgnine and Betsy Blair bring uncommon tenderness to a modest Bronx romance about two lonely people resisting the judgments of family and friends.

57.Patton

George C. Scott’s commanding performance anchors an epic, deliberately contradictory portrait of American general George S. Patton during World War II.

58.Ordinary People

Robert Redford’s restrained family drama examines grief, guilt, and emotional avoidance after a surviving son returns home from psychiatric care.

59.The Artist

Michel Hazanavicius’s largely silent black-and-white film uses the transition to sound cinema to tell a playful, melancholy story about pride and reinvention.

60.Birdman

Alejandro G. Iñárritu’s backstage tragicomedy follows a former superhero star risking his money and identity on a Broadway adaptation that may not save either.

61.Hamlet

Laurence Olivier’s concentrated screen version of Shakespeare’s tragedy turns Elsinore into a shadowy psychological maze governed by grief, suspicion, and delayed revenge.

62.Mutiny on the Bounty

The 1935 maritime epic dramatizes the clash between Captain Bligh’s brutal command and Fletcher Christian’s rebellion aboard HMS Bounty.

63.Moonlight

Barry Jenkins's 2016 three-act portrait of a Black gay man growing up in Miami, told in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood — and the first Best Picture winner with an all-Black cast.

64.A Man for All Seasons

Paul Scofield’s Thomas More defends conscience and law against Henry VIII’s demand for obedience in Fred Zinnemann’s austere historical drama.

65.How Green Was My Valley

John Ford’s Welsh mining drama remembers a close community through the joys, conflicts, labor, and losses of the Morgan family.

66.One Battle After Another

Paul Thomas Anderson’s volatile political thriller follows a former revolutionary forced back into danger when the consequences of an old conflict reach his daughter.

67.Argo

Ben Affleck’s suspense drama reconstructs the CIA’s audacious use of a fabricated science-fiction production to extract six Americans from revolutionary Iran.

68.From Here to Eternity

Military discipline, forbidden desire, and private rebellion converge among soldiers and civilians in Hawaii during the months before Pearl Harbor.

69.The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq War drama follows a bomb-disposal team whose new leader’s fearlessness may be expertise, addiction, or a danger to everyone nearby.

70.Driving Miss Daisy

Over twenty-five years in Atlanta, a Jewish widow and her Black chauffeur develop trust within a relationship structured by race, class, age, and employment.

71.The Shape of Water

Guillermo del Toro's 2017 dark fairy tale about a mute cleaning woman who falls in love with the amphibious creature being held in the Cold War government lab where she works.

72.Wings

The first Academy Award winner for Outstanding Picture combines aerial spectacle with a triangle of friendship and love among American flyers during World War I.

73.Crash

Paul Haggis’s intersecting Los Angeles drama follows a network of strangers whose fear, prejudice, power, and vulnerability collide over thirty-six hours.

74.West Side Story

Leonard Bernstein, Stephen Sondheim, and Jerome Robbins’s musical reimagining of Romeo and Juliet turns New York streets into a charged space of dance, rivalry, and doomed love.

75.Nomadland

Chloe Zhao's 2020 adaptation of Jessica Bruder's nonfiction book about older Americans living out of vans after the 2008 crash. Frances McDormand anchors a film cast mostly with real nomads playing themselves.

76.Out of Africa

Sydney Pollack’s romantic epic follows writer Karen Blixen’s effort to build a life in colonial Kenya and her bond with the independent Denys Finch Hatton.

77.The English Patient

Anthony Minghella’s nonlinear wartime romance reconstructs identity, desire, and betrayal through the memories of a burned man sheltered in an Italian monastery.

78.Terms of Endearment

James L. Brooks’s family comedy-drama follows the loving, combative bond between Aurora Greenway and her daughter Emma across marriage, distance, disappointment, and illness.

79.Chicago

Rob Marshall’s screen musical turns murder, celebrity, and courtroom manipulation into dazzling vaudeville numbers imagined by aspiring performer Roxie Hart.

80.Mrs. Miniver

William Wyler’s wartime drama places the upheaval of World War II inside the routines, relationships, and resilience of an English middle-class household.