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Best Picture Oscar Winners of the 21st Century, Ranked

From ‘Gladiator’ to ‘Oppenheimer’ — our rankings of every film to take home the top Oscar since 2000, from worst to best

By DAVID FEAR
Illustration of Best Picture Oscar winners

Left to right: 'Moonlight,' 'Parasite,', Everything Everywhere All at Once,' 'Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King,' 'Chicago.'

A24, 3; WARNER BROS, EVERETT COLLECTION, ALBERT WATSON/ASMP,6

The Oscars have been around for almost 100 years now, celebrating a medium that was born in the last few years of the 19th century, became the art form du jour of the 20th century and continues to flourish in the 21st century. When we entered the new millennium, we all wondered how the movies would change and evolve — and if the ceremony that handed out “Hollywood’s biggest honor” every spring would change with it.

The answer is… yes. And no. And sometimes, kinda. And, as in so many of the previous century’s editions: WTF, Oscars!? We’ve gone back and rewatched every Best Picture winner since the year 2000, and the result has been eye-opening. Some films have aged poorly, some have surprisingly stood the test of time, some have reminded us that when Oscars gets it right, it can get it really right — and some movies will forever be cursed with being Crash. Our ranked list, from worst to best.

10

‘Gladiator’ (2000)

The very first Best Picture winner of the 21st century was a throwback to a long-retired 20th century movie staple — the sword-and-sandal epic — and damned if Ridley Scott didn’t restore voters’ faith in a genre left for dead. Russell Crowe was at the peak of his Movie Star phase when he played Maximus Meridius, a Roman general who’s betrayed by self-proclaimed new-emperor-in-town Commodus (Joaquin Phoenix, in what feels like an early warm-up for his nutty Napoleon) and ends up fighting in the gladitorial arena. There are bloody showdowns involving spears, battle-axes, chariots and angry tigers, and to answer the rhetorical question Maximus asks: Yes, we were entertained! What’s surprising is how moved we also were by warrior-turned-widower’s quest for vengeance, which has a lot to do with Crowe’s moody matinee-idol performance and Scott’s balance of big spectacle and human-sized drama. Voters likely rewarded it for the nostalgia factor as much as they did for its scale and ambition. Yet it’s aged surprisingly well.

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9

‘Oppenheimer’ (2023)

Christopher Nolan cashed in a lot of chips to make this three-hour biopic on J. Robert Oppenheimer, the scientist who helped create the atomic bomb and later found himself hounded by the American government. That alone might have been a hard sell to a studio in the age of superheroes and cinematic universes, but instead of diluting his vision, the writer-director doubled down: There would be chronologically skewed competing timelines, half of it would be shot in black and white, and though he had half of Hollywood in his cast, the lead would be played an Irish actor arguably best known — by American audiences, at least — as the dude from Peaky Blinders. Talk about a gamble that paid off! (And that was before it officially become coronated as one half of the most unlikely cinematic coupling in the history of the movies.) Nolan’s sprawling portrait of the Man Who Would Be Destroyer of Worlds benefits from a depth-charge of a performance by Cillian Murphy and the filmmaker’s determination to go big or go home; it harkens back to the sort of complex, character-driven epics from Reds to The Right Stuff that used to be considered de facto Oscar fodder. Nolan’s grand statement is one of the few modern Best Picture winners that felt like it could have been a 20th century contender as well

8

‘The Hurt Locker’ (2009)

Kathryn Bigelow’s stunning ride-along with an Army Explosive Ordinance Disposal in Iraq feels less like a typical “war movie” and more like a wartime procedural, eschewing pro or con Op-Ed viewpoints in favor focusing on the how-to details of defusing I.E.D.s in active combat zones. Just how authentic the film’s depiction of such missions has been debated, yet it remains a nerve-jangling watch, even if you know that the wild-card staff sergeant (Jeremy Renner, in his big pre-Hawkeye breakout role) will make it through a number of near-fatal vignettes. Adrenaline has always been Bigelow’s drug of choice, and her facility for consistently ratcheting the tension up while chronicling both grace and chaos under pressure is what makes the film work. The Hurt Locker will always be a landmark Best Picture win simply for the fact that it became the first movie directed by a female filmmaker to take home the prize. But it’s also the sort of disciplined, go-for-broke type of work that you wished was rewarded by the Academy way more often than not.

7

‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ (2022)

Even two decades-plus into a century that’s been nothing if not disruptive, it’s still crazy to think that this gonzo, bonkers film from the duo known as the Daniels actually took home an Oscar — much less the Academy’s big-kahuna prize! Not that their tale of a laundry-owning mother and housewife named Evelyn Wang (take a bow, Michelle Yeoh), who discovers that she’s the only thing standing between the collapse of life, the multiverses and everything, doesn’t deserve every single statuette it took home. It’s simply that, after so many years of the Best Picture awards going to stuffy, stolid and/or totally safe films, the fact that the Academy recognized what a unicorn this anything-goes mix of late ’90s Absurdism, 21st century superhero cinema, martial-arts madness, surreal comedy and Sundance-style character study was speaks volumes. A batshit ride through genres that crossed over into the mainstream and took over the zeitgeist is one thing, but allowing it entry into the same hallowed halls as Chariots of Fire and Gandhi and The English Patient was a welcome step forward. (Bonus points for kicking off Ke Huy Quan’s second showbiz act as well.)

6

‘The Departed’ (2006)

Martin Scorsese switches from Italian-American wise guys in New York to Irish-American gangsters in Boston, and reminds you that it takes more than a slight geographical switch-up to throw him off his Shakespearean crime drama/dark comedy game. There are those who will tell you that this remake of the Hong Kong cops-and-crooks thriller Infernal Affairs was given the gold statuette to make up for the head-scratching Oscar losses our greatest living American filmmaker has suffered over decades (don’t get us started on the whole Goodfellas vs. Dances With Wolves thing). They’re not wrong, exactly. But that theory gives Scorsese’s reimagining of a tale of two deep-cover moles — Leonardo DiCaprio is the cop who’s infiltrated Jack Nicholson’s mob, Matt Damon is leaking precinct news back to his kingpin patron — short shrift. This is a Scorsese picture in every sense, from the film references to the whipcrack energy to the emphasis on betrayal, which has been one of the director’s obsessions from the jump. It also features some of the best work from its two leads, a few crack supporting turns (Ray Winstone! Vera Farmiga!! Mark Fawkin’ Wahlberg!!!) and the last great Jack performance. And the ending is perfect. This won the grand prize on its own merit, people. Act accordingly.

5

‘No Country for Old Men’ (2007)

Joel and Ethan Coen took what’s arguably Cormac McCarthy’s weakest novel and turned it into a sunbaked noir, complete with missing cartel loot, a gruff everyman hero, a wizened old lawman, and one of the most memorable psychopaths ever to grace a screen. Javier Bardem’s singularly odd turn as the hit man Anton Chigurh is probably the first thing you think of when you think of this Best Picture winner — his weapon-of-choice cattle gun and that WTF pageboy ‘do are second and third, respectively — yet the brothers’ whipcrack thriller is way more than offbeat haircuts and nihilistic business as usual. It’s a deceptively deep genre film, as much an end-of-empire Western as it is a crime flick; the way that Tommy Lee Jones’ sheriff doubles as a moral conscience or the cynical manner in which criminality is a corporate affair behind the carnage suggests a sun setting on a romanticized version of America’s final frontier. The Coens knew exactly how to goose McCarthy’s gothic prose while still retaining the stark, elegiac poetry of it, and the pairing felt like a match made in heaven even before that last Academy envelope was opened. If this ain’t a deserved win, it’ll do until the real one gets here.

4

‘Spotlight’ (2015)

Folks were tripping over each other to dub director-cowriter Tom McCarthy’s drama about the Boston Globe’s series of exposés on the Catholic Church’s cover-ups of sexual abuse the “new All the President’s Men” before this took home the Best Picture Oscar. It seemed slightly hyperbolic at the time. See it again today, however, and the comparison could not be more apt. This patient, no-frills examination doesn’t just dig into a “local” scandal that would be revealed as part of a global epidemic; like its cinematic ancestor, it’s also an ode to the fourth estate that refuses to be sentimental or maudlin in an attempt to score easy audience points. More importantly, Spotlight shines its own high beams on the hard work and perseverance it takes to make such investigations happen at all, from the bureaucratic road blocks to the initial reluctance of people going on the record. The trio of reporters played by Mark Ruffalo, Rachel McAdams and Brian d’Arcy James keep knocking on doors and working leads, while Michael Keaton’s steadfast editor keeps egging them on. It may be depressing to witness such shoe-leather heroes in an age in which well-funded newsrooms and editorial ethics feel rarer than comet sightings, but this is one of those Oscar victories that — like the movie itself — seem to get better and better as years go by.

3

‘12 Years a Slave’ (2013)

To read about “that peculiar institution” of slavery in history books is to think of this plague on our nation as something from the very distant past. British filmmaker Steve McQueen’s adaptation of Solomon Northup’s memoir, however deals with the subject in such a visceral, urgent way that it’s impossible to simply relegate the horrors of an enslaved life as a “once upon a time…” phenomenon. It remains, for better or worse, the standard for how you treat the dramatization of subjugation in 19th century America without diluting the pain, the terror or the sensation of one’s humanity being forcibly taken away on screen. The “It’s time” campaign that accompanied the film’s steady march to the Oscars podium may still seem cringeworthy in retrospect, but McQueen’s extraordinary, immersive work of art — not to mention the performances of Chiwetel Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o, and Michael Fassbender — are bigger and more significant than a trite marketing slogan. This would be a masterpiece even if Academy voters had not recognized the film as the Best Picture of the year. But thank god they did.

2

‘Parasite’ (2019)

A legion of critics, arthouse habitués and internationally savvy film geeks had already recognized that Bong Joon Ho’s scathing social satire — about a working-class family slowly infiltrating an upper-class household, and finding out just how thin and brittle the dream of upward mobility really is — was a genuine masterpiece before the 92nd Academy Awards announced their nominations. And the more cynical among us assumed that even though this landmark of South Korean cinema had nabbed the Best International Feature and Best Director awards earlier in the evening, both of these wins could be viewed as we-love-you-but-stay-in-your-lane victories. (We said we weren’t going to relitigate ceremonies, but it pays to remember that Roma also won those two awards in 2018, but when it came to the top prize, well… you know.) So when the last envelope was opened and Parasite‘s name was read out loud, there was more than just the relief that at least year, the Oscars got it right. It felt like you were watching history in the making. A non–English-language movie had slipped past the barriers — the same cultural one that continually frustrate those of us whose moviegoing habits have no boundaries or biases against subtitles — and become the sort of crossover hit that delighted every demographic. Then it went on to win an award that insured that even more people would see it. You suddenly felt that the Oscars recognized a world outside its own Tinseltown gates. Maybe it was a dream that an Oscar win for Parasite would make the so-called “other” a little less otherworldly to viewers, and that it would make the movies seem a little less “local” and far more global to those in the industry. But what are the movies for, if not to inspire you to dream?

1

‘Moonlight’ (2016)

Forget about the brouhaha that happened around the Best Picture announcement that night — a snafu that will forever be a footnote to both of the films involved. (Neither this movie nor La La Land, Damien Chazelle’s callback to the MGM musicals of yesteryear, deserve to be associated with confusion, chaos or someone’s backstage fuck-up.) Remember, instead, the first few moments that you meet “Little,” the earliest incarnation of the protagonist in Barry Jenkins’ singular charting of a boy named Chiron becoming a man, one bumpy step at a time. Remember the kindness of Mahershala Ali’s character, a father figure who gives Chiron a role model to look up to and also sells drugs to the kid’s mother, because every person in this movie contains multitudes. Remember the intimacy between the teenage Chiron (played by Ashton Sanders) and his best friend, and the two acts of violence that punctuate the tragic second act. Remember Trevante Rhodes introducing us to “Black,” a.k.a. the adult Chiron, and the look on his face when first sees his first love again in a restaurant a decade later. Remember every bright-to-bruised color of the Florida landscapes, every composition, every cut. Remember that penultimate shot, a much-deserved moment of healing that brings on the waterworks no matter how many times you’ve seen it.Moonlight remains a textbook example of marshaling every aspect of cinema in the name of creating not just a personal statement but an absolutely transformative experience, and the high-water mark for not just Best Picture Oscar winners but American movies of the 21st century overall. A poetic look at a young Black man coming of age and coming to terms with the unstable world around him, this work of sound and vision rightfully announced Jenkins as a major artist. Yet it also suggested that the Oscars were capable of broadening their horizons, and could recognize films that didn’t necessarily stick to the traditional templates of big, “important” prestige projects that so often dominated the awards season as a whole. On its surface, Jenkins’ sensitive, soulful, sometimes agonizing and sometimes ecstatic look at a life that doesn’t always get a proper spotlight isn’t the kind of movie that usually wins Oscars. It’s simply the type of movie that should win Oscars more often. And for once, when Jenkins finally did go up and accept that Best Picture statuette, you felt like anything was possible. You felt like the phrase “Best Picture” had been more than earned.

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