Oscars: 10 Best Pictures That Actually Were The Best

8. The Apartment - 1961

The Academy has a reputation for snubbing some of the true greats. Fortunately this is not the case with Billy Wilder. Despite Sunset Boulevard losing out to All About Eve, the witty and cynical writer-director won 6 Oscars from a total of 21 nominations, making him one of the most decorated filmmakers of them all. The Apartment was Wilder's only Best Picture winner and the last winner of the black and white era (there would not be another monochrome Best Picture until 1994). The film perfectly captured Wilder's misanthropic yet romantic worldview and, along with predecessor Some Like It Hot, marked the highpoint of an enduring partnership with lovable sadsack actor Jack Lemmon. Other nominees: If anybody feels the sort of aggressive campaigning Miramax used to get their films into Oscar consideration in the 1990s was in poor taste, they need only look at The Alamo's 1961 campaign to see how it really shouldn't be done. Many blamed The Alamo's overblown, bombastic campaigning for voters turning away from it and opting for The Apartment instead, or maybe it's just that it was a bland, leaden John Wayne vehicle. Fellow nominees Elmer Gantry, Sons and Lovers, and The Sundowners were Oscar-y, but mostly forgotten. Other deserving contenders: The Academy may have been kind to Wilder down the years, but the same cannot be said for Alfred Hitchcock and 1961 was another year in which one of the Master of Suspense's suspenseful masterpieces was overlooked. Wayne's push for votes for The Alamo saw both Hitchcock 's Psycho and Stanley Kubrick's Spartacus miss out on even being nominated. Meanwhile, once more the Oscars' focus on Hollywood meant classics from overseas barely got a look in. Antonioni's L'avventura and Godard's Breathless were two of that years foreign language films that may have been worthy of consideration.