Ranking Every Best Picture Oscar Nominee Of The 21st Century

80.” Philomena” (2013)
British director Stephen Frears has a few truly brilliant films under his belt, but as is often the case it’s not his best films (bar “Dangerous Liaisons,” which was last century) that have netted him the most recognition. “Philomena,” his account of a woman’s odyssey to find the son she’d been cruelly separated from by the nuns in the Irish convent where she’d been forced to do her penance for having a child out of wedlock, is not top-tier Frears, but with a ridiculously touching performance from an on-form Judi Dench at its heart, we’d take it over “The Queen” any day.

79. “Little Miss Sunshine” (2006)
It’s become emblematic of a certain strain of twee, Sundance-y film, but Jonathan Dayton and Valerie Faris‘ “Little Miss Sunshine” perhaps deserves a little more respect as the film that, more than any other, felt like it paved the way for smaller indies to nose their way into the Best Picture race. Also, it has Alan Arkin in it, and remembering that fact stops us from staying mad at it for any length of time.

78. “American Beauty” (1999)
Time has not been kind to the legacy of then-wunderkind Sam Mendes‘ blackly satirical swipe at middle-class American masculinity in crisis, but while there’s no doubt everyone went a little excessively cuckoo for it when it first came out, perhaps the backlash is also disproportionate. It does still boast a defining central role for Kevin Spacey, while Annette Bening and Chris Cooper (especially) are pretty great too. Always hated that up-itself plastic bag though.

77. “An Education” (2009)
Even if Lone Scherfig‘s sensitive adaptation (from a Nick Hornby script) of Lynn Barber‘s confessional memoir had only introduced us to the considerable talents of Carey Mulligan, it would have been worthwhile. But actually it does a fair bit more than that — injecting a healthy dose of unsentimental self-critique into an often overly romanced and nostalgic genre. It’s not the most urgent of stories, but it’s a surprisingly bracing and engaging little drama nonetheless.

76. “Fences” (2016)
Denzel Washington’s first two directorial features were a bit dull, but it would have been hard for him to mess up a piece of material as good (or one that he knew so well, having starred in it on Broadway) as August Wilson’s “Fences.” It’s far from the most inventive stage-to-screen translation ever, but it doesn’t matter so much when the script, and across-the-board performances (not just the Oscar-bound Washington and Viola Davis but the entire ensemble) are this good.

75. “Babel” (2006)
Now a two-time Best Director winner, Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had his first major brush with Oscar with this odd, uneven, fitfully effective film showing the interlinked shockwaves from a bullet fire across four countries. There’s really good stuff here — the Japanese section with Rinko Kikuichi is the best, and Brad Pitt’s rarely been better than he is here — but it doesn’t quite add up to a satisfying whole, and ends up feeling like a lesser cousin of “Amores Perros” and “21 Grams.”

74. “Up In The Air” (2009)
Jason Reitman’s third film isn’t quite as fresh-feeling as “Juno” was, but it’s still a comedy of rare maturity and feeling. Following George Clooney’s deliberately solitary human resources consultant (he fires people) and his young right hand woman (Anna Kendrick in a star-making turn), it’s a deceptively political, well-made movie that doesn’t completely add up, but moves and entertains while it’s going on, and has aged pretty well since release.

73. “Hidden Figures” (2016)
The term “crowd-pleaser” usually comes across as a backhanded compliment, particularly in an Oscar-movie context, but would that most crowd-pleasers pleased the crowds as effectively as “Hidden Figures.” The story of the three African-American woman whose role at NASA has long been overlooked, Theodore Melfi’s film is warm-hearted, consistently entertaining and, while not reinventing the wheel, elevated by a trio of absolutely tremendous performances by Taraji P. Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae.

72. “Slumdog Millionaire” (2008)
The curse of the Best Picture winner is that it paints a great big target on your back, and critics and cinephiles who might have otherwise had a perfectly good time with your movie become consumed entirely with hatred for it. Danny Boyle’s “Slumdog Millionaire” is one of them: a film with issues — it’s fairly disposable and formulaic, and takes a strangely glamorizing view of poverty — but also one with a dazzling energy and an often ingenious script. It’s hard to imagine a more fitting winner of the first Best Picture of the Obama era.

71. “The Sixth Sense” (1999)
The film that built M. Night Shyamalan’s career, “The Sixth Sense” was at the time, and still is, defined by its twist, which overshadows the rest of the film to a large extent. We’d argue that “Unbreakable,” “Signs” and “The Village” are all in some ways more interesting and rich films, but none are as entirely effective as this, which has a fascinating, mournful tone to its supernatural thrills, and great turns from its two leads (and arguably the best work of Willis’ career in some ways).

70. “Gosford Park” (2001)
The costume drama, in which a British stately home sets the stage for upstairs/downstairs class intrigue, murderous shenanigans and/or stifled love affairs, has always been catnip to the Academy, so it’s not surprising that when Robert Altman turned his hand to the genre, attracting a typically blistering ensemble, it picked up seven Oscar nominations. It only won for Julian Fellowes‘ screenplay, and it’s far from the greatest of the great director’s films, but it’s enjoyably intricate, even if it feels a little like a victory lap.

69. “Sideways” (2004)
Alexander Payne has released four movies this century, and three of them have been nominated for Best Picture (place your bets now on the 2018 lineup featuring his next film “Downsizing“). Of those, the most enduring and most inherently Payne-ful, is “Sideways” which features a definingly brilliant Paul Giamatti as the ultimate wine snob going on a tour of California vineyards and failing to learn very much about life and love (with Virginia Madsen) along the way.

68. “Letters From Iwo Jima” (2006)
Clint Eastwood‘s terse, serious directorial style can often feel like it lacks nuance, so it stands to reason that one of his better films would come from him deliberately positioning himself outside of his American wheelhouse. Especially compared to companion film “Flags of our Fathers” which takes the much more familiar tack, “Letters from Iwo Jima” is a surprisingly insightful and sympathetic portrait of “the enemy”: the Japanese WWII soldiers engaged in the titular campaign.

67. “127 Hours” (2010)
Danny Boyle is a remarkably flexible director, who works across multiple genres and budgets and almost always turns in something interesting in each. “127 Hours,” his single-location true story in which canyoneer Aron Ralston (James Franco) gets trapped in a chasm and ultimately must cut his own arm off to escape, is a fine example of him scaling right down and yet making a movie that is dynamic and involving, when in any other hands it could have been a thought experiment.

66. “Inglourious Basterds” (2010)
What’s that? Oh, the sound of a hundred toys being thrown from a hundred prams that we’ve dared to place Quentin Tarantino’s revisionist WWII revenge flick this far off the top spot. Well, deal with it, QT stans: while “Inglourious Basterds” might be a frequently amusing exploitation fantasy and while Christoph Waltz is so good we can almost forgive him for playing this exact same character ever since, the film is just not smart or incisive enough to earn its self-servingly cavalier attitude toward history.

65. “Argo” (2012)
The Academy loves: actors turned directors; true stories; movies about moviemaking, especially when the fimmaking process is portrayed as somehow heroic. And so “Argo,” from director Ben Affleck, telling the true story of a hostage rescue that happened under cover of a fictional film shoot, was always going to ring a lot of bells. But its Best Picture success is not just about box-ticking: it’s a well-made, engaging film that does however pose the question of what the hell happened to Affleck between this and “Live By Night.”

64. “Beasts Of The Southern Wild” (2012)
The magic realism of its premise may sit uncomfortably with some of us, but there’s no denying the effectiveness and the filmmaking verve on display in Benh Zeitlin’s post-Katrina fable, nor Quvenzhane Wallis’ absurdly stellar turn as little Hushpuppy, which feels like it could alter the course of history through sheer force of charm alone. Part social realist critique, part fantasy, part sci-fi, part messiah story, there’s no doubt ‘Beasts’ was a strikingly singular film, and an unusual, laudable pick for a Best Picture nomination.

63. “The Lord Of The Rings: The Return Of The King” (2003)
Time, and what felt like 27 subsequent ‘Hobbit’ films, has somewhat dulled the memory of Peter Jackson‘s ‘Lord of the Rings‘ trilogy, and it probably doesn’t help that the closer, ‘Return of the King’ was the one that gained the most Academy plaudits despite being the most indulgent of the bunch (see ‘Fellowship’ below). But the round-off of Jackson’s colossally ambitious take on Tolkien’s classic is still a monumental achievement, capping the single greatest rebuke to the idea of the “unfilmable” novel.

62. “Mystic River” (2004)
Sean Penn’s anguished bellow at the end of Clint Eastwood’s adaptation of Dennis Lehane‘s moody, broody “Mystic River” has become something of the Wilhelm Scream of anguished bellows, but it’s no faint praise to say that by the time we get there, the film, which also features very fine performances from Tim Robbins and Kevin Bacon, has earned its most operatic moment. A gloweringly dark tale, it’s among the most depressing films ever to get a BP nod, and in a sea of feelgood prestige pics, that’s an achievement.

61. “The Kids Are All Right” (2010)
Astutely observed family dramas that hit their moment, like “American Beauty” or “The Descendants,” are also the films that can drop off the radar as time passes and mores change. But though Lisa Cholodenko‘s “The Kids Are All Right” has suffered slightly from that phenomenon–and been somewhat supplanted in its discussion of non-traditional family units by subsequent shows and films–it’s still a fresh and funny, genuine movie, with the performances given by powerhouses Annette Bening and Julianne Moore still ranking among their finest.