Random Years Had Most Impressive Best Picture Lineups (10 items)

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  (#1) 2015 (87th Academy Awards - February 22, 2015)

  The Winner: Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance)

  The Nominees: American Sniper, Boyhood, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Imitation Game, Selma, The Theory of Everything, Whiplash

  The Race: Despite the massive box-office success of American Sniper (and the collective goodwill the Academy, and the industry as a whole, has toward Clint Eastwood), the headline-making behind-the-scenes story about how Boyhood came to be, and not one but three other psuedo-biopics that check off a number of standard Oscar boxes, it was Birdman (Full Title Not Being Indulged for the Purposes of This List) that rose to the top of the heap. Though its narrative certainly trades in Oscar-friendly tropes - backstage show business, redemption, etc. - it's also an eccentric and experimental movie with bold flourishes and an ambiguous, cryptic ending. Whether one likes the movie or hates it - and there are plenty who hated it even at the time - it doesn't play it safe in the slightest... which is exactly what makes it a tad surprising that the Academy went for it.

  Not that the Hollywood Foreign Press is necessarily a reliable precursor, but Birdman didn't even have a Best Picture trophy from the Golden Globes to show for its Oscar run-up (although it did win top PGA and SAG prizes). Nope, the Globes awarded Boyhood (drama) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (comedy). Despite overwhelming acclaim for both, the Academy still opted for Alejandro Iñárritu's sardonic meta-comedy.

  The Snubs: A pair of twisted contemporary thrillers, Dan Gilroy's Nightcrawler and David Fincher's Gone Girl, earned critical hosannas, but found little love from the Academy. Ditto Inherent Vice and Under the Skin, two theoretically daring choices that would seem to be fair game in a year that honored something along the lines of Birdman. One of the early faves coming out of Cannes, Bennett Miller's Foxcatcher, failed to crack the final selection, along with fringe contenders Interstellar, Mr. Turner, and The Immigrant.

  In Hindsight, Though... : Birdman has more than its share of haters, and comes across in retrospect as an Academy Award curiosity, especially when The Grand Budapest Hotel, Boyhood, and Selma have been much more prominently featured on best-of-decade lists. The Theory of Everything and The Imitation Game, meanwhile, have been tossed into the Generic Prestige Biopic scrapheap.
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  (#8) 2018 (90th Academy Awards - March 4, 2018)

  The Winner: The Shape of Water

  The Nominees: Call Me by Your Name; Darkest Hour; Dunkirk; Get Out; Lady Bird; Phantom Thread; The Post; Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri

  The Race: By the time one of his movies was finally in contention for the top prizes at the Academy Awards, Guillermo del Toro was already a known commodity and something approaching a household name. He made his name with both personal, historically laced genre projects like Pan's Labyrinth and The Devil's Backbone and comic-book properties like Blade II and the Hellboy movies. Then came The Shape of Water, which combined so many of his preoccupations into a single project - a romantic ode to creature features that made such a profound impression on del Toro's imagination, as well as a morally righteous parable about power and bigotry.

  It had plenty of competition en route to top honors - Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri won it all at the BAFTAs, the Golden Globes and the SAG Awards. Lady Bird won Best Picture - Comedy/Musical at the Globes. Jordan Peele's Get Out, meanwhile, made the biggest cultural dent of any movie in competition. And that's to say nothing of Dunkirk, the WWII epic that both made bank at the ticket stands and earned plaudits from even many of Nolan's critics.

  The Snubs: Many expected The Big Sick to ride the goodwill it had garnered since its Sundance premiere to award-season prominence, but a number of other movies wound up leapfrogging it. Netflix had a chance to get on the board with Mudbound, but it was a year early for the streaming giant. A pair of well-reviewed superhero films, Wonder Woman and Logan, had their share of advocates for BP consideration, but nothing came of it. The Florida Project and Blade Runner 2049 missed out, as well. 

  In Hindsight, Though... : It's hard to imagine anything in this group having the enduring pop-culture legacy to match Get Out, nor the technical accomplishment of Dunkirk. Three Billboards' reputation took a hit after its early praise, but with more hindsight, we'll see. Paul Thomas Anderson's Phantom Thread seems primed to be remembered as one of the classics of the era. Lady Bird will only continue to gain fans now that Greta Gerwig has established herself as a bona fide auteur. The Shape of Water may not endure the same way Pan's Labyrinth, for example, has, but only more time will tell.
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  (#4) 2014 (86th Academy Awards - March 2, 2014)

  The Winner: 12 Years a Slave

  The Nominees: American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyers Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena, The Wolf of Wall Street

  The Race: After his previous efforts Hunger and Shame failed to attract the Academy's glances, Steve McQueen finally broke through at the 86th Oscars. His brutal but inspiring true-story adaptation 12 Years a Slave became the first Best Picture winner to be helmed by a black director. (Three years later, Moonlight became the second.) The split between this year's Best Picture and Best Director winners encapsulated the competition, with 12 Years a Slave and Alfonso Cuaron's Gravity running neck and neck for much of the campaign season. Cuaron wound up winning Best Director, while McQueen's film won top honors. The cases for both were, of course, wildly different; for McQueen's film, it was simply a great story that shined a light on a devastating chapter of American history; Cuaron's film, on the other hand, was praised first and foremost as a groundbreaking technical achievement, embodying the pure spectacle of big-budget Hollywood filmmaking in a unique (and 3D-optimized) way.

  Of course, those weren't the only two heavyweights in contention. In fact, David O. Russell's Amerian Hustle matched Gravity for most total nominations with 10, but it went home emptyhanded. Martin Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street had five of its own, but too much controversy - in some cases, outright hostility - doomed its chances.

  The Snubs: Despite the Coen Brothers having a handful of Oscars to their name already, their cinematic folk ballad Inside Llewyn Davis wasn't quite to the Academy's liking. Richard Linklater's third entry in the Before series, Before Midnight, was also overlooked despite a rapturous reception. And a few more low- to mid-budget critical faves - among them Fruitvale Station, Blue Jasmine, and All Is Lost - didn't quite have the support, either.

  In Hindsight, Though... : Though uncompromising dramas about the realities of the Antebellum South - or any savage historical era or institution, for that matter - aren't typically the types of movies that become rewatchable favorites, 12 Years a Slave's reputation still remains strong. Gravity, meanwhile, hasn't endured in quite the same way. The Wolf of Wall Street has only grown in acclaim since its release, with Jordan Belfort becoming a practical embodiment of the dark side of American capitalism.
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  (#2) 2016 (88th Academy Awards - February 28, 2016)

  The Winner: Spotlight

  The Nominees: The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Mad Max: Fury Road, The Martian, The Revenant, Room

  The Race: Were it not for the nature by which the following year's winner was announced - i.e., the infamous Warren Beatty/Faye Dunaway Moonlight/La La Land fiasco - top honors going to Spotlight would have gone down as the biggest Best Picture surprise of the decade. By the time the final award of the night was set to be announced, it seemed as though it was going to go one of two ways: BP was either going to the preordained winner The Revenant (which had emerged as the favorite despite earning, to put it mildly, a decidedly mixed reception) or the popular favorite Mad Max: Fury Road, which had already been bestowed a better-than-expected six Oscar trophies.

  And then came the announcement: Spotlight. Tom McCarthy's journalistic procedural about The Boston Globe uncovering the Catholic Church's abuse scandal was, to be sure, a broadly well-regarded movie. It just wasn't expected to take the whole thing.

  The Snubs: Though the Academy nominated animated features for Best Picture in both of the first two years of its expanded field, Inside Out failed to make the cut this time around despite virtually unanimous praise. For many, Todd Haynes's Carol was an even more conspicuous omission, to say nothing of Sicario, Ex Machina, Creed, or 45 Years. And then there were two big-ticket items with Oscar written all over them: Steve Jobs, directed by Oscar-winner Danny Boyle and written by Oscar-winner Aaron Sorkin, and The Hateful Eight, written and directed by two-time Oscar-winner Quentin Tarantino.

  In Hindsight, Though... : No one really has anything against Spotlight, per se - except perhaps for the Catholic Church - but Mad Max: Fury Road is that rare film that catapulted to classic status almost right away, and deservingly so. The pros ranking the best movies of the decade certainly think so.
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  (#9) 2019 (91st Academy Awards - February 24, 2019)

  The Winner: Green Book

  The Nominees: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Roma, A Star Is Born, Vice

  The Race: Where to begin with this one? If one were being charitable, one could consider this Best Picture race a simple matter of old distribution methods vs. newer ones. A widely released crowd-pleaser (Green Book) vs. a Netflix movie that got a limited release (though much wider than most other Netflix-distributed films) and wound up almost immediately on the streaming service. Steven Spielberg himself even publicly called out Netflix, saying a movie like Roma shouldn't be eligible for the Oscars.

  Then there's the other aspect of the race - the one about race. The one in which many cringed at the possibility that a movie like Green Book would be considered the height of the cinematic art form, let alone a relevant comment about race relations. The campaign was nasty, and Green Book wound up winning what seemed like a toss-up between it and Roma. On the same night that Spike Lee - whose seminal Do the Right Thing was infamously snubbed for Best Picture consideration at the 62nd Oscars, a year in which Driving Miss Daisy won it - finally won a long-overdue Oscar (Best Adapted Screenplay), Green Book took Best Picture honors over not just Roma, but Lee's BlacKkKlansman.

  As a whole, the field of nominees ran the gamut, with a few widely liked movies (i.e., A Star Is Born and The Favourite) being joined by baffling choices, namely Bohemian Rhapsody and Vice, that were hit with poor reviews yet wound up making the cut anyway.

  The Snubs: With Bohemian Rhapsody fulfilling the Oscar's musical biopic quota despite poor reviews, critics could point to the likes of First Reformed, If Beale Street Could Talk, Eighth Grade, Burning, Leave No Trace, or even Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse as far more deserving of a Best Pic nod.

  In Hindsight, Though... : The Green Book victory is unlikely to age any better than Driving Miss Daisy's victory nearly three decades earlier.
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  (#6) 2013 (85th Academy Awards - February 24, 2013)

  The Winner: Argo

  The Nominees: Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Les Misérables, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

  The Race: The odds-on favorite became the overlooked underdog, and that overlooked underdog roared back to win the whole damn thing. Riding a wave of strong reviews out of the Toronto Film Festival, Ben Affleck's Argo emerged as the movie to beat, its combination of period-specific political urgency, old-fashioned suspense thrills, and a true-Hollywood-story veneer charming critics right out of the gate. Audiences showed up, too, to the tune of $136 million. Even with the specter of end-of-year prestige releases hovering, Argo seemed like it was sitting pretty.

  And then the end-of-year prestige releases showed up and pushed Argo to the background - to the extent that, despite nominating Argo for Best Picture in a nine-movie field, Affleck was left out of the directing category, typically a sure sign that Best Picture chances are more or less out of the question. Steven Spielberg's tailor-made-for-Oscars Lincoln was one of those prestige releases, earning some of the highest marks of Spielberg's late-career output. And then there was Kathryn Bigelow's Zero Dark Thirty, which had not only Bigelow's recent Oscars success in its corner but also a ripped-from-the-headlines narrative. That, and terrific reviews. And then the controversy started over whether it was condoning torture, or how truthful it really was, amid a whole host of other politically thorny controversies. And suddenly, the bloom was off the rose for that Best Picture contender... which brought it all back around to Argo, which took home the prize.

  Popular and critically acclaimed hits like Silver Linings Playbook, Django Unchained, and Lincoln seemingly had an opening, but the Argo comeback story was just too hard to resist. Affleck's Iran hostage crisis drama became the sentimental favorite.

  The Snubs: Coming a few years after the Oscars success of There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master didn't make the same impression with the Academy, although the film did earn three acting nominations. Meanwhile, PTA's surname-sharing colleague Wes Anderson was overlooked for Moonrise Kingdom. And a pair of popular genre hits, Skyfall and Looper, were in the Oscar conversation before fading out of it. This was also the year of the runaway hit The Avengers and the divisive The Dark Knight Rises, but neither the critical acclaim nor box-office receipts for those two superhero efforts were enough to sway the Academy.

  In Hindsight, Though... : Argo's real-life story was a good one, its Oscars comeback was a good story, and that's basically where Argo's own story ended - a footnote in the annals of the Academy's award history. While the controversy surrounding Zero Dark Thiry has endured in some fashion, Les Misérables has become a punchline, and Beasts of the Southern Wild has been quietly tossed aside, the likes of Lincoln, Django Unchained, and Silver Linings Playbook have maintained their popularity and/or esteem. It seems odd, given the Academy's tendencies, that something like Lincoln didn't clean up.

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