25 movies that should have won the Oscar for Best Picture

We’ll start with the classic example of “fixing Oscar mistakes” people talk about. Orson Welles’ film angered the wrong people, and it was mostly kept at bay by the Academy voters. In the end, “How Green Was My Valley” won Best Picture for 1941. It’s a good movie, to be honest. “Citizen Kane” is a great, influential movie, and it is still considered one of the best ever made. It’s absolutely the choice for Best Picture here.

For 1944’s film, the Oscars trimmed the Best Picture nominees down to five, which of course stood for a while. The winner was “Going My Way,” a pleasant romantic comedy starring Bing Crosby. “Double Indemnity” is, to this day, in the discussion for the quintessential film noir. That genre was consistently ignored by the Academy, but not by us.

Were it the winner for MOST Picture, we’d give it to “The Greatest Show on Earth.” However, Cecil B. DeMille’s circus drama (yes, really) is all spectacle and no substance. Gary Cooper won Best Actor for the taut, real-time Western “High Noon,” but the film should also have won Best Picture in 1952.

An adaptation of “Around the World in 80 Days” won Best Picture in 1956. We’re replacing it with another lengthy epic. Yes, George Stevens’ “Giant” is over three hours long, but it earns the spectacle. It looks great, and it has a cast featuring the likes of Rock Hudson, Elizabeth Taylor, and, in his final role, James Dean.

We’re not saying the Oscars nailed Best Picture every year from 1957 through 1967, but it was close enough each time that we didn’t feel the need to change things up. The five nominees for 1967 featured four modern, influential movies, and then “Doctor Dolittle.” The next year, the Best Picture winner was essentially a “Doctor Dolittle”- type movie. “Oliver!” won, but another British period piece should have won. “The Lion in Winter,” which stars Katharine Hepburn as Eleanor of Aquitane, is old-timey, but an example of that style of film done right.

“Rocky” is good. It’s one of the better sports movies, but it’s also arguably not even the best movie in that series. “Network” is great, though. Not only that, it’s “important,” such as it is. The movie is prescient and substantive, and should have won Best Picture over a well-made underdog sports movie.

Francis Ford Coppola risked his health, his sanity, and his career to make “Apocalypse Now,” and frankly, his career never really recovered. While he already had two Best Picture winners, he merited a third. This is the best Vietnam movie, at least the best made by Hollywood, and it is certainly better than the domestic drama “Kramer vs. Kramer.”

“Ordinary People” is also a domestic family drama, so apparently Oscar voters were in a certain mood at the turn of the decade. We’re getting Martin Scorsese his Best Picture early and removing a lot of handwringing for the ensuing decades. Plus, we removed one boxing movie from the Best Picture pantheon, and now we get to replace it with another: “Raging Bull.” It’s better than “Rocky,” and decidedly better made. Almost as if Scorsese is a great director.

Speaking of getting a Best Picture win out of the way for a legendary director! “Chariots of Fire” has a banger of a score, but, then again, so does “Raiders.” Additionally, “Raiders” is the best film of its ilk. It’s the best globetrotting adventure, even the best action-adventure movie. The film is just so well-done. Kudos, Steven Spielberg.

1985 was tricky, only because the nominees were subpar. “Out of Africa” is an utterly unremarkable winner, though. Not bad, but definitely forgettable. “Witness” is a good thriller, and it stars a big movie star, Harrison Ford. Also, its cultural cache is higher. This is the film about the Amish boy who witnesses a murder, and it had more legs going forward than a throwback romance movie.

It was only a matter of choosing which female-led dramedy would be our pick. “The Last Emperor” is a total snooze and it only won because Bernardo Bertolucci directed it. Ultimately, James L. Brooks’ kinetic news dramedy, centered on an indelible performance by Holly Hunter, bests Cher and Nicolas Cage in “Moonstruck” by a hair.

Obviously, we figured “Driving Miss Daisy” would be replaced, but the choices weren't great. “My Left Foot” is mostly about one performance, and if either “Dead Poets Society” or “Field of Dreams” had won for 1989, we’d have been assuming we’d be replacing it as the winner. “Born on the Fourth of July” is far from perfect, but it is also clearly the best of these five options for us.

This is not about despising Mel Gibson. After all, we kept “Annie Hall” as the winner for 1977, right? “Braveheart” isn’t a bad movie, and if we were ranking the nominees, it would be second. “Apollo 13” is decidedly a better movie, though. Ron Howard usually delivers B-movies, whether you give him C- or A-material, and a future movie of his will be replaced. This is the one time everything came together for a Howard film to be worthy of “Best Picture.”

Maybe we don’t dislike “The English Patient” as much as Elaine Benes, but it didn’t exactly wow us. “Fargo” did. It would have been an odd choice for Best Picture for the Academy in the ‘90s, sure, but we’re making the decisions, and it’s now the 2020s. “Fargo” is an excellent crime movie with some needle-threading comedy, and it’s the pick here.

People will often say, “Ugh, I can’t believe ‘Shakespeare in Love’ won Best Picture for 1998!” Part of that is because a certain criminal sleaze threw his weight around to make it happen (a brief respite from his many criminal actions, perhaps). However, let us not taint “Shakespeare in Love” with that brush. It’s a good movie! It’s just not “Saving Private Ryan.”

How quickly did “American Beauty” feel like a dated win? Five years? One year? Two weeks? The choices for 1999 aren’t great, though being “The Sixth Sense is overrated” proponents is part of that. Michael Mann’s compelling drama “The Insider” is the new selection, though with muted enthusiasm.

Russell Crowe gained a Best Picture win in “The Insider,” which is good for him because we are taking “A Beautiful Mind” off the board. That also nixes Howard’s Best Picture win from real life. The options here are even worse than 1999, especially since we don’t want to go with the first “Lord of the Rings” since in 2003 the third “Lord of the Rings” won to honor the series. “Gosford Park” gets Robert Altman an Oscar, though, and that’s cool.

In the era of the internet, “Crash” is comfortably the most reviled Best Picture winner. The complaints started that night, and they have never really stopped. We quite like “Capote,” but if we’re in a toss-up situation in our minds, we’re going to go with “Brokeback Mountain.” It hits harder as a Best Picture winner, you know?

“The King’s Speech” is quite good, but it is a throwback winner. It’s a British period piece drama, and it’s about World War II at that. “The Social Network” is perhaps the most “important” movie of the new millennium. Also, it’s really well-made. That makes this an easy call, even if “The King’s Speech” is a pleasant watch.

Sorry, Oscar voters. We aren’t letting you have “The magic of movies!” winners in a row, and “Argo” for 2012 is a better winner than “The Artist” for 2011. By this point, we were back to more than five nominees. It’s a bit surprising that a sports movie about a team’s front office is the most-compelling of the nominees from 2011, but here we are with “Moneyball.”

Maybe at the time, people felt like honoring “12 Years a Slave” was important. As a movie, though, it’s unremarkable, and time has essentially forgotten it. “Gravity” won Alfonso Cuaron Best Director, and it is a tour de force. Plus, if Hollywood wants to make the case for going to see movies in theaters, “Gravity” is an example to point to.

A lot of people loathe “Birdman.” We aren’t in that boat, but it’s not exactly Best Picture worthy, either. Generally speaking, the Oscars don’t like Wes Anderson, but there is one film that the voters seemed to grab onto. That is “The Grand Budapest Hotel,” and as Anderson fans, we’re glad to get him a win.

“Green Book” winning feels silly, but 2018 also has a rough collection of options. Clearly, it was a bad year for Oscar fodder. So, let’s go with a populist option. While this was the fourth take on “A Star is Born,” people really enjoyed it, and it was critically and commercially successful. It would thread the needle as a winner, both old-school and new-school.

We could have replaced “Nomadland,” but 2020 was such a brutal time for film that we didn’t think that was fair. Then, in 2021, we got the first of two “Nice things are nice” winners in “CODA.” While the entirety of 2022 was a “Nice things are nice” Oscars, we’ll let you have “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” “CODA,” though, is getting replaced. We’re big Paul Thomas Anderson fans, as we think “Licorice Pizza” is excellent. Plus, we aren’t taking Jane Campion’s win for Best Director for “The Power of the Dog” away from here.

That’s right, we aren’t waiting! Basically, nobody saw “Anora,” and it’s not a terribly good movie. It’s fine. “The Brutalist” would have also been a debatable winner, so we landed on two crowd pleasers. One is “A Complete Unknown,” a musician biopic that's better than most. The other is “Conclave.” Ultimately, “Conclave” felt like a better choice as a winner. It has a little more juice to it and a bit more of a “Best Picture” feel.