Comingsoon.net can’t believe how many great films have never won Best Picture. Check out our favorites in the gallery below!
If there’s one thing that remains abundantly clear in the nearly 100 years since the invention of the Academy Awards, it’s that an Oscar doesn’t always mean the winning movie is any better than a losing movie. In fact, with plenty of distance between now and when these films listed below had their big loss, it’s clear to see that—quite often, in fact—the losers are much better than the winners. Whether they were simply misunderstood at the time of the ceremony or they were flat-out robbed, there are countless iconic films that were robbed of the grand prize at the biggest awards ceremony in the industry.
Mob movies, cult classics, gripping dramas, sci-fi epics, even pitch-black comedies—the injustices aren’t limited to any one genre or any one particular director. Quentin Tarantino, Martin Scorsese, even Orson Welles himself—with a list like this without a single Best Picture among them, there’s just no denying it. More often than not, the best movie of the year never even received the highest honor at the Academy Awards. The bigger honor is losing, because it means you go down in history as the one who got away.
Best Picture losers
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Apocalypse Now (1979)
Placed up against All That Jazz and Kramer vs. Kramer, it might be obvious who deserves Best Picture of the three—unfortunately, Francis Ford Coppola lost to Kramer vs. Kramer.
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Brokeback Mountain (2005)
As it turns out, Best Director, Best Original Score, and Best Adapted Screenplay doesn’t equal Best Picture. It’s too bad, because Ang Lee’s Brokeback Mountain lost to Paul Haggis’s Crash—the movie many consider to be the worst Best Picture winner of all time.
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Citizen Kane (1941)
Orson Welles made the transition from stage to screen with Citizen Kane, which many film scholars and fans alike consider to be the best film ever made. Oscar voters thought otherwise back in the early 40s—How Green Was My Valley took home Best Picture instead.
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Fargo (1996)
The Coen Brothers aren’t going anywhere anytime soon—they’re just too good at their job. Fargo got a Best Picture nomination for their efforts, but The English Patient was the big winner that year.
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Goodfellas (1990)
Martin Scorsese is one of a few kings of the mob movie, and Goodfellas is one of many examples that proves this to be true—still, it wasn’t enough to take Best Picture away from Kevin Costner’s Dances with Wolves.
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Pulp Fiction (1994)
Despite winning eight major awards, Quentin Tarantino’s biggest hit never took home the top prize—it went to Forrest Gump instead.
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Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)
Chariots of Fire or Raiders of the Lost Ark? The answer, according to Academy voters in the early 80s, was the former.
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Star Wars (1977)
Regardless of what this franchise has become, just think about Star Wars on its own for a second. Technically innovative, creatively inspired, and expertly made, it deserved to win Best Picture without a doubt. It lost to Annie Hall. At least George Lucas can rest easy knowing he never married his adopted daughter.
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Taxi Driver (1976)
That’s right—Martin Scorsese has been robbed more than once. In 1976, his seminal drama Taxi Driver lost Best Picture to Rocky (which is undoubtedly a great film equally as deserving of the high honor).
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The Social Network (2010)
David Fincher has proven on multiple occasions that biopics don’t have to suck. His profile on Mark Zuckerberg, The Social Network, is a perfect movie that inevitably lost Best Picture to another biopic—The King’s Speech.
