Oscars: 10 Best Pictures That Actually Were The Best

9. All About Eve - 1951

Fading Broadway actress Margo Channing is perhaps screen legend Bette Davis' finest role, yet another Best Actress nomination on the way to being the first person to be a ten time acting nominee. Davis may be the star turn in Joseph L. Mankiewicz's tale of the bitchy rivalry between Channing and the ambitious but seemingly butter-wouldn't-melt ingenue Eve Harrington (Anne Baxter), but it is a film that is full of quality. An Oscar darling, All About Eve was nominated for 14 awards and won 6 including Best Picture. Other nominees: The 1951 ceremony was all about larger than life actresses past their prime and, to be honest, there's very little to choose between Eve and its leading rival Sunset Boulevard. Eve may have Davis' great role, but Sunset Boulevard gave us a brilliantly bonkers Gloria Swanson as silent star Norma Desmond. Both lost out as Best Actress to Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. While that film and fellow Best Picture nominees Father of the Bride and King Solomon's Mines were all deemed significant enough to get a later remake, it's Eve and Sunset that remain firmly ensconced in the upper echelons of the AFI's Greatest American Films list. Other deserving contenders: The inevitable American bias of the Academy Awards is on show here. While the year's two leading contenders rank high on the AFI's best film list, it's British equivalent ranks Carol Reed and Graham Greene's The Third Man as the greatest British film of them all. Expertly shot and scored, penned by one of Britain's finest writers and featuring a bravura performance from Orson Welles, The Third Man would have been a worthy Best Picture contender. Equally of note away from the States, Akira Kurosawa's Rashomon and its intriguing structure of unreliable witnesses continues to influence and be referenced to this day.