Ranking Every Best Picture Oscar Nominee Of The 21st Century

40. “Munich” (2005)
Perhaps the most atypically angry and darkly complex film of Steven Spielberg’s career, “Munich” is also among the best things he’s done in recent years. Detailing the Mossad attempts to take revenge for the attack on Israeli athletes at the 1972, it’s a sprawling, unruly film, morally murky and infused with the spirit of 1970s Le Carre and other spy thrillers, but with Spielberg’s usual sense for a great set piece. It lets you down at the last a bit, but is otherwise a gripping work that’s only become more relevant with time.

39. “Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue Of Ignorance)” (2014)
It’s only now, two years on, that we can really appreciate what a weird winner of Best Picture “Birdman” is. A sort of magic-realist dark comedy character study, like Terry Gilliam doing Cassavetes’ “Opening Night” if it starred Bojack Horseman, it’s a world away from the miserabilist movies that Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu had made earlier, but with the director’s sensibility still very much in place (and his vision, too: the one-take conceit might not be that rigorous, but it helps to meld the line between film and theater beautifully).

38. “Life Of Pi” (2012)
Adapting Yann Martel’s best-seller was a job that had thwarted M. Night Shyamalan, Alfonso Cuaron and Jean-Pierre Jeunet, but trust the (usually) reliable Ang Lee to be the one to take a tough bit of material — an allegorical tale of a boy trapped on a raft with a tiger — and make it sing. Lee captures, and arguably improves on, the wonder, spirituality and beauty of the book and makes it into thrilling, faultlessly made popular entertainment. It’s a film that, despite the awards it was laden with, sometimes feels underappreciated somehow.

37. “The Pianist” (2002)
We all contain multitudes, and Roman Polanski more than most: holocaust survivor, sexual abuser, grief-stricken husband, sexual abuser, master filmmaker, sexual abuser. You can be horrified by the man (and the Academy giving him a Best Director Oscar), and still be moved and awed by “The Pianist,” the director’s best film in many years. Drawing on both the story of Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) and Polanskis’ own upbringing in the Warsaw ghetto, it’s a wrenching, clear-eyed, deeply human film.

36. “The Departed” (2006)
Let’s be honest, “The Departed,” Martin Scorsese’s remake of Hong Kong thriller “Infernal Affairs,” is not the most substantial thing that the director has ever made, and a win for “Raging Bull” or “Goodfellas” or even “Silence” might have been more fitting for his first Oscar. But let’s be honest, “The Departed” is also (its dumb final shot aside) almost unfathomably entertaining: as funny as any comedy, driven by a freewheeling rhythm and a brace of tremendous performances.

35. “Toy Story 3” (2010)
Pixar had made an inroad to the Oscars almost immediately thanks to a Screenplay nod for “Toy Story,” but it took until the third instalment for Buzz & Woody to crack the Best Picture race. We’d still argue that the last film is the weakest of the trilogy (Spanish Buzz feels like a bit of a repetition, for one), but it’s a near-perfect trilogy so it’s a relative term: this is still exemplary animation work, particularly when it comes to the gorgeously executed ending. Oh, and Mr. Pricklepants.

34. “Whiplash” (2014)
So far, Damien Chazelle’s displayed a particular gift for taking tiny stories and making them big. He’ll likely win at least one Oscar this weekend for a little indie romance dressed as a big musical, and a couple of years ago found success with his second feature, which takes the clash between a talented young jazz drummer (Miles Teller) and his despotic conductor (J.K. Simmons) and blew it up to almost mythic levels. Thrillingly made, nervy and deeply smart about what makes people great, it’s one of the more remarkable breakthrough films of recent years.

33. “Lost In Translation” (2003)
“The Beguiled” looks like a welcome change of pace for Sofia Coppola, but maybe part of the reason we’ve found diminishing returns in her last few poor-little-rich-girl/boy narratives is that she near-perfected that particular story with “Lost In Translation.” It’s still pretty questionable in its treatment of the Japanese characters, but it’s woozily beautiful and deceptively incisive when it comes to the quasi-romance between Bill Murray’s depressed movie star and Scarlett Johansson’s lonely young bride.

32. “Brokeback Mountain” (2005)
“Crash” beating Ang Lee’s sensitive, wrenching adaptation of Annie Proulx’s same-sex cowboy love story is maybe the best-known it-was-robbed Best Picture story since “Ordinary People” beat out “Raging Bull,” but over a decade on, we know which film retains a place in the history books for the right reasons. Anchored by a pair of mighty performances (and an often overlooked and somewhat unlikely supporting cast including Anna Faris and Anne Hathaway), it’s become iconic in a way that few love stories nowadays do.

31. “Boyhood” (2014)
Plenty of the films here were years in the planning, but only Richard Linklater’s was literally in production for over a decade. But the wait was worth it in the end: his coming-of-age story to end all coming-of-ages stories, shot once a year for twelve years, is something of a miracle. A film with a vision that stretches far beyond its conceit, it’s a wise, utterly moving, unexpected film that truly deserved to be the one that saw Linklater finally embraced by the Academy.

30. “Capote” (2005)
It’s impossible to divorce from Philip Seymour Hoffman‘s Oscar-winning turn as the title character, but Bennett Miller‘s film about Truman Capote’s relationship with the killers who would inspired his docu-fiction hybrid novel “In Cold Blood,” is more than just a single stellar turn. Giving a rich glimpse into the mixture of self-doubt and self-aggrandizement that powered Capote, Dan Futterman‘s whipsmart screenplay also provides an unforgettable portrait of creative compromise, and the moral price of greatness.

29. “The Lord Of The Rings: The Fellowship of The Ring” (2001)
Some of us may be those irritating “second album” people who find our favorite of Peter Jackson‘s original Tolkien trilogy to be the second, “The Two Towers” (see above) but even we have to admit that when it comes to simplicity of structure as well as the shock of the new in just how unexpectedly good it was, his first ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie takes some beating. Taking the massive sprawl of the book and distilling it into this thrilling motley-team-on-a-quest story, while also creating an indelible middle earth, makes it the one ‘Lord of the Rings’ movie to rule them all.

28. “The Wolf Of Wall Street” (2013)
Apparently troubling to people who can’t tell the difference between satirizing excess and glorifying it, for those of us not so challenged, ‘Wolf of Wall Street’ was an absolute blast, showing the genius Martin Scorsese back on exuberant, dizzying form after the relative stateliness of “Hugo.” Now that he’s stopped the throttle right down again for the austere “Silence,” we should be even more grateful for this glimpse of the sheer ostentatious filmmaking brio of which he is still capable.

27. “La La Land” (2016)
Already in some circles, admitting you like Damien Chazelle‘s bittersweet whirlygig musical has become like saying you agree with “Crash“‘s win over “Brokeback Mountain” or think that “Driving Miss Daisy” was, in fact, the best film of 1989. Well, screw the haters, we’re still entirely on board with Chazelle’s charmingly inventive, modernized homage to the musicals of yore, and if it’s not our favorite of the 2017 nominees, it certainly won’t be a travesty when it, in all likelihood, wins.

26. “Manchester By The Sea” (2016)
Kenneth Lonergan has made three movies and all three have been completely terrific, so it can only feel like long overdue, hard-earned justice that “Manchester by the Sea” has been so embraced by the Academy. Earning six nominations, all in major categories, it’s a powerhouse performance showcase for Casey Affleck, Michelle Williams and Lucas Hedges, but more than that it’s a vindication of Lonergan’s painfully insightful and deeply felt writing and directing skills.

25. “Arrival” (2016)
If Amy Adams was overlooked for a Best Actress nomination on account of how understated and quietly modulated her performance is, we can only be thankful that the same fate did not befall Denis Villeneuve‘s expansively wonderful, but also elegantly restrained sci fi film in general. Eric Heisserer’s sensitive adaptation of Ted Chiang‘s short story has also deservedly been nominated, along with Villeneuve as director, and if it feels like showier fare may ultimately prevail in many of the 8 categories in which it earned nods, still we can be glad that such a cerebral, thoughtful film has been given this much shine.

24. “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon” (2000)
Ang Lee’s wonderful wuxia epic — for a long time the highest-grossing foreign-language film in the U.S. — performed a service not just in delivering a beautifully directed and acted love story.action movie to our screens, but in opening up a whole genre of film to the wider stateside audience it deserved. Lee had already proven himself equal to practically every disparate genre under the sun, but when the Taiwanese director went back to his roots he turned in a film that might well stand as his masterpiece.

23. “The Grand Budapest Hotel” (2014)
Wes Anderson‘s films are so minutely detailed, and have such care lavished on every hem and every hat, that they often make their intimate stories feel epic. But with “The Grand Budapest Hotel” the story is epic too, spanning time frames and fictional countries and classic film genres in far more ambitious manner. The result is mildly, melancholically dazzling, as a best-ever Ralph Fiennes embodies the archetypal gentleman out of his time while the fabulously imagined world grinds relentlessly on around him, and his beloved hotel.

22. “In The Bedroom” (2001)
A devastatingly raw drama about what happens behind closed doors, Todd Field‘s withering “In the Bedroom” won none of the five Academy Awards for which it was nominated, yet feels like one of the most evergreen films on this list, mainly due to performances so true and precise they could blister the paint off the walls. Tom Wilkinson and Sissy Spacek especially attain a such a degree of truthfulness in their portrait of a long marriage strained to snapping point by grief, that it’s borderline unbearable. In a must-see sort of way.

21. “Moneyball” (2011)
We’ve said it before but Bennett Miller‘s “Moneyball” has simply no business being as gripping as it is: it’s about goddamn sabermetrics, for heaven’s sake, who cares? But of course, the Brad Pitt-starring drama is about so much else other than baseball scores, with Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin‘s talky but thrilling script, coupled with Miller’s restrained but expansive direction, working this tiny story into a grand, complex and uniquely American story of fall and rise.