Every Best Picture Oscar Winner Ranked Worst To Best
The best and worst of the Academy's highest honour.
Every year, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets together to vote on what they believe are the greatest cinematic achievements of the previous twelve months. They hand out awards for writing, set design, music, acting and sound, all of which lead to the biggest and most prestigious honour of the night: Best Picture.
A constantly controversial award, the Best Picture statue has been bestowed to over ninety movies since the Oscars began back in 1929, and has often alienated critics and general audiences alike by going to completely the wrong film far too often.
That's not to say all the Best Picture winners have been poor, though. In fact, the vast majority of them have been very good indeed, with the best winners easily ranking as some of the greatest movies ever made, and therefore perfect recipients of the highest honour in the award circuit.
With that in mind, now that the 2022 Oscar race is finally over, and with almost a century of cinema history to explore, here's every Best Picture winner ranked worst to best.
94. Cimarron (1931)
Ninety years after becoming the first Western to win Best Picture, Cimarron has not aged well. Between its offensive portrayals of Native Americans, jumbled tone, and general sluggishness, there’s nothing worth noting here except the strong lead performance of Irene Dunne.
Many older Oscar winners haven’t aged well - that much is a given - but even so Cimarron is the worst of the bunch, and hard to forgive. Also, no Western would win Best Picture for another sixty years, making its landmark victory all the more baffling.