Boyhood lost Best Picture at the Oscars last night, but that’s okay. Most years the best movie doesn’t win.
When it comes to picking Best Picture, The Academy just isn’t very good. In fact, as I was browsing through the list of winners this weekend, I realized that only one time in the past 20 years did I agree with the film The Academy anointed the best film of a given year. Which film was that? The 2007 film to win Best Picture was No Country for Old Men, and that was the best film that year.
The following gallery of films that should have won Best Picture but didn’t only features films in the last two decades. There are more for sure, but this was a good stopping point.
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The point of this article is this: even if you don’t agree with my selections for each year, it’s painfully obvious to me that the best film of a given year is often not the recipient of Best Picture. The winner of Best Picture is always a film that ran a good campaign and appealed to a not that diverse group of voters. Yes, Birdman won Best Picture last night. No, that doesn’t mean it’s the best film of 2014 (though if you think it is, that’s fine!).
But please hear me on this. If you don’t watch a lot of movies before the awards are handed out, don’t just watch Birdman because it won Best Picture. Look further. Watch the Boyhood, Whiplash, The Grand Budapest Hotel, and Selmas of a given year. Find the good films that weren’t even nominated for Best Picture because they didn’t run as successful campaigns like Nightcrawler, Calvary, We Are the Best!, and The Double because winning Best Picture really doesn’t say that much about a film’s quality.