Ranking Every Best Picture Oscar Nominee Of The 21st Century

100. “Frost/Nixon” (2008)
Arguably the most forgotten film of an eminently forgettable Best Picture line-up, Ron Howard’s adaptation of Peter Morgan’s hit stage play, about the meetings of journalist David Frost and disgraced President Richard Nixon, is absolutely fine. It’s fine. It’s watchable, and fitfully funny, and is engaging particularly when Frank Langella and Michael Sheen get to do their thing. But, as tends to be the case with Howard, it never becomes anything more than fine.

99. “War Horse” (2011)
One of Steven Spielberg’s most unloved movies (yet still a Best Picture nominee), this big-screen version of Michael Morpurgo’s WW1-set children’s classic has a few sequences that are among the best thing that the director’s done in the 21st century. But its classicism too often tips into drab dullness, and Spielberg’s usual flair for casting young talent rather falls down with human lead Jeremy Irvine. The horse is pretty good, though.

98. “The Hours” (2002)
To call “The Hours” the best of Stephen Daldry’s three Best Picture nominees (his best film, “Billy Elliot,” wasn’t nominated) isn’t necessarily a huge compliment given how bad the other two are, but there’s something admirable about the ambition of it, even if the execution is off. It’s a decent fist at adapting Michael Cunningham’s triptych novel of female depression and sexuality, but it ends up investing too much in its own importance to bring much, well, life to the lives of its characters.

97. “The Aviator” (2004)
People were so desperate to give Martin Scorsese an Oscar in the early-00s that they nearly did it for this, a film that makes a good argument for being his most disappointing. HIs Howard Hughes biopic, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, has moments of inspiration and brilliance (particularly Cate Blanchett’s Katherine Hepburn), but by trying to do too much, it becomes something of a shapeless slog, weighed down by stunt casting and familiar biopic beats.

96. “Avatar” (2009)
The biggest film of all time is one that it’s oddly hard to find people that love it these days, as if Na’vi fever briefly swept the world but made people feel ashamed after. James Cameron’s megahit is far from his best film — it’s indulgently long and, Zoe Saldana aside, sort of weakly cast. But it has real vision and wonder, the effects still stand up, and the action is as solid as ever. Four sequels still seem excessive, though.

95. “Milk” (2008)
Anyone hoping that Gus Van Sant’s return to queer subject matter might see him return to the energy of early work like “My Own Private Idaho” were likely disappointed by the conventional nature of “Milk,” which takes a mainstream-friendly, somewhat sexless docudrama approach. But it’s fairly engaging as far as that sort of thing goes, with a fine Dustin Lance Black script that’s unafraid to show the flaws of its hero (Sean Penn, just about keeping this side of stereotype) and the humanity of its villain (Josh Brolin).

94. “Midnight In Paris” (2011)
The 2000s had felt like a particularly drab time for Woody Allen fans, with his output ranging from the bad (“Match Point”) to the extremely bad (all the other films). So that “Midnight In Paris” was unquestionably his best film in many years isn’t necessarily a wholehearted recommendation. It certainly has a lot more to recommend it than most — Owen Wilson as one of the best Allen surrogates, Corey Stoll stealing the whole film as Hemingway, the lovely Parisian locations — even if the whole ends up feeling rather slight and inconsequential.

93. “The Queen” (2006)
The film that birthed the Broadway play (“The Audience”) and the Netflix series (“The Crown”), Peter Morgan’s obsession with Queen Elizabeth II began here, with a film that also serves as the middle part of Morgan’s Tony Blair trilogy. It’s a solid film, one that benefits from the relative smallness of its story, revolving entirely around the aftermath to the death of Princess Diana, but it remains caught between a cozy love letter and something more savage.

92. “Django Unchained” (2012)
Quentin Tarantino’s third Best Picture nominee isn’t quite the filmmaker at his most indulgent, thanks to the existence afterwards of “The Hateful Eight,” but it definitely bears the mark of a filmmaker who could have killed a few more darlings. His Western about a vengeful former slave has spots as entertaining as anything he’s done, but the blend of deeply serious subject and comic-book violence comes off as queasy, and it misses the melancholy of the best of the genre.

91. “Gangs Of New York” (2002)
Fifteen years on, there’s little doubt that “Gangs Of New York” would have been a TV series rather than a movie (indeed, one is in the works), but even making it feel a little less overstuffed wouldn’t have solved all its problems. The world the period epic creates is a fascinating one, there’s some pleasingly meaty writing from Kenneth Lonergan and having a performance as scenery-chewingly awesome as Daniel Day-Lewis’s elevates it above “The Aviator” on its own, but the story it tells is ultimately too familiar, and the miscasting of some of the leads just make it feel like a missed opportunity.

90. “The Green Mile” (1999)
Frank Darabont’s second feature, and second Stephen King prison movie, is a classic case of second album syndrome: some bold ideas and great elements, but wildly overindulged in most respects. Adapting King’s Depression-era serialized novel about an African-American giant with magical powers on Death Row (Michael Clarke Duncan) and the prison guard (Tom Hanks) who befriends him, it has great performances and some powerful moments, but is literally an hour too long and is working from material much more problematic than “The Shawshank Redemption.”

89. “The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button” (2008)
Based on a high-concept short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, starring megastar Brad Pitt, featuring pioneering special effects and directed by bonafide modern filmmaking giant David Fincher, perhaps the most illuminating fact about “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” is that of its 13 Oscar nominations it only won three — Art Direction, Make-up and Visual Effects. Instead of a stirring, epic love story, it’s a technical achievement so grand it obscures its heart.

88. “The Artist” (2011)
A silent movie made seemingly to congratulate viewers who’ve never watched a silent movie on their broadmindedness, the chief issue with Michel Hazanavicius‘ “The Artist” is that its gimmick is mainly a distraction tactic from the fact that its story is terminally slight (and a lot less involving and complex than that of many actual 1920s silent movies). It’s perfectly amiable, but its quintuple win, including Picture, Director and Actor for Jean Dujardin, seems wildly excessive.

87. “The Big Short” (2015)
Adam McKay‘s attempt to inject humor and pizzazz into a righteously indignant explanation of the banking crisis was a noble endeavor but it fails for much the same reason that its most memorable scene does: we can all remember its trappings — the starry cast (Steve Carell, Brad Pitt, Ryan Gosling, Christian Bale) and breezy tone — without actually recalling what it was trying to communicate. It is the Margot-Robbie-in-a-bubble-bath-explaining-subprime-mortgages of movies.

86. “Bridge Of Spies” (2015)
It’s probably safe to say at this stage that Steven Spielberg can’t make a bad film, craftsmanship-wise, but he can make a curiously uninvolving one, even when he has such innate sympathy-generators as Tom Hanks and Mark Rylance fronting it. His Cold War spy story is handsome to look at, consummately well-acted (especially by Rylance, doing so much with so little), and very watchable. But for a film so damp with foggy Berlin atmospherics, it has inexplicably little sustain.

85. “Chicago” (2002)
Rob Marshall, as he has proved consistently after his Oscar-winning debut, can’t really direct a movie. But like a stopped clock, “Chicago” fed enough into his skillset that it still worked out fairly well. Bringing Kander & Ebb’s terrific musical to the screen, it makes something of a virtue of Marshall’s staginess while also getting fine work from a cast who can be a bit hit and miss. It’s not as good as “Cabaret,” but what is?

84. “Atonement” (2007)
The biggest stumbling block in Joe Wright‘s “Atonement” is a cheat/revelation inherent in the Ian McEwan novel, so it’s hardly the film’s fault. But even without that, the soapy over-investment in the central love story, between Keira Knightly and James McAvoy and some show-offy filmmaking gets in the way of subtler work done by MVP Saoirse Ronan (who we know is the same character that Romola Garai and Vanessa Redgrave play because her entire life she wears her hair exactly the same length, clipped to the right with a barrette).

83. “The Revenant” (2015)
Leonardo DiCaprio ate raw bison liver during his Oscar-winning stint in the wilderness shooting Alejandro Gonzalez Innaritu‘s epic, did you know that? The bison liver was raw, and he ate it. As in, it was the uncooked internal organ of a bovine mammal species indigenous to North America, and he ingested it, as in put it in his mouth, masticated and then swallowed it! What times we live in. Anyway, “The Revenant” is a very boring film that Emmanuel Lubezki made look kinda cool.

82. “Moulin Rouge!” (2001)
Baz Luhrmann‘s jukebox musical is one of those Marmite films that people either love or loathe, but unlike Marmite (a deliciously savory spread made from yeast extract), if you like “Moulin Rouge!” you are completely wrong. Haha, jk, sorrynotsorry. A paper-thin plot and performances from Nicole Kidman and Ewan McGregor that are lost, like their reedy voices, amid the sequinned kerfuffle of Lurhmann’s maximalist visuals, the only thing to recommend it is that at least he wasn’t plundering a classic of American literature as he would next, with “The Great Gatsby.”

81. “The King’s Speech” (2010)
In between highbrow art movies and lowbrow blockbusters–both of which have their charms–there’s the far less interesting middlebrow, and parked right in the middle of that middlebrow is Tom Hooper’s “The Kings Speech.” A likably fusty period yarn about a speech therapist (Geoffrey Rush) helping future King George VI (Colin Firth) not to stutter, it’s not as egregiously terrible as Hooper’s “Les Miserables” (above) but its valiant attempt to give the story of an aristocrat with a speech impediment life-or-death stakes is pretty daft.