The Best and Worst Oscar Best Picture Winners Ever

The Oscars are the unofficial conclusion to a year of movies. Yes, a calendar year technically ends on December 31. But for cinephiles, the year is not done until the thousands of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have their say, and name the winners of their annual awards. Only then can we all collectively move on to the new year’s crop of movies.

But history gets the true final word on any and every film, not the Academy. Just because a title wins Oscars — even if a title wins the prize for Best Picture of the year — doesn’t mean it will graduate to canonical masterpiece status. In some cases the film everyone remembers from a certain year turns out to be its Best Picture winner. In a lot of cases, it doesn’t. And sometimes a film becomes infamous for winning Best Picture over a more deserving alternative that winds up becoming a consensus classic in spite of getting snubbed by the Academy.

Today we’re looking at both examples: The best movies to win the Oscar for Best Picture and the worst movies that somehow campaigned and cajoled their way to a dubious sort of immortality. Keep them in mind before you get too excited or too upset about any of this year’s Oscar winners or losers. The Academy comes to one conclusion, but time can still come to a different one.