Every Best Picture Oscar Movie Winner Of 21st Century Ranked Worst To Best

Since the turn of the century, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has given awards to a variety of deserving projects, from gangster flicks to westerns, coming-of-age dramas to fantasy epics, and historical deep dives to devious dark comedies.

Of all the Academy's honours, the most prized is Best Picture, the last and most prestigious award it bestows. Since 2000, Academy voters have given Best Picture to a host of radically different films, and, for the most part, those celebrated have been worthy winners.

But that's not always been the case, and the Academy has a long history of making bad calls.

From controversial tales of racial injustice to long-overdue directors finally getting their flowers for projects long in the making, the features showered in glory over the last two decades haven't always gone over well with critics and audiences, but the question remains - just how many of them hold up?

With that in mind, from the fails to the masterpieces, the forgotten gems to the forgettable duds, here's every Best Picture winner of the 21st century ranked from worst to best.

What should have won: Roma.

Peter Farrelly's Green Book is a competently made, good-looking road movie that's also thematically flimsy; a big issues drama with minimal tact and artificial emotions guiding it forward. 

A film in which legendary pianist Don Shirley (a redemptive, Oscar-winning Mahershalla Ali) plays second fiddle to his casually racist bodyguard (Viggo Mortensen) so the white guy can Listen and Learn Things about his ignorant prejudices, Green Book tracks the mismatched pair as they glide through the Deep South. 

With all the nuance of an anti-racist ad from the '90s, it creates a friendship that never becomes any more than surface (perhaps because the real pair were never as close as the film wants us to believe), and it staggers through its superficial profundity without ever finding anything new or perceptive to say about cultural differences or racism in the Jim Crow era; its conclusions thin and sentimentality naive. 

In a year where two insightful films about race - BlacKKKlansman and Black Panther - were nominated but lost the top prize, Green Book's unimaginative Best Picture win only feels that much more egregious.