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Curated playlist

Best Picture Academy Award winners

  • Academy Award for Best PictureAt the 2017 Oscars, the wrong Best Picture winner was announced. Moonlight had actually won, not La La Land.
  • The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingThe Return of the King won all eleven Oscars it was nominated for. No fantasy film had won Best Picture before it.
  • Ben-Hur (1959 film)MGM bet its future on Ben-Hur, a 1959 epic whose budget more than doubled to $15.175 million.
  • Oppenheimer (film)The teaser for the film Oppenheimer, released on the 28th of July 2022, carried a live countdown to 5:29 a.m. Mountain time on the 16th of July 2023. That hour marked the 78th anniversary of the first detonation of an atomic weapon.…
  • One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (film)One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest was filmed in a working psychiatric hospital. Real patients joined the crew.
  • Gone with the Wind (film)Hattie McDaniel was barred from the premiere of Gone with the Wind by Jim Crow laws, then won an Oscar.
  • Hamlet (1948 film)Laurence Olivier's 1948 film of Hamlet split its first audiences down the middle. The critic Milton Shulman, writing in The Evening Standard, put it this way: "To some it will be one of the greatest films ever made, to others a deep…
  • Titanic (1997 film)Rather than cut Titanic, James Cameron gave up his $8 million director's salary.
  • Annie HallAnnie Hall began as a murder mystery, not a romantic comedy. Woody Allen's 1977 film dropped the murder plot.
  • The GodfatherMarlon Brando stuffed cotton balls in his cheeks to audition for The Godfather. Paramount resisted casting him.
  • One Battle After AnotherOne Battle After Another, written, directed and produced by Paul Thomas Anderson, sent about 1.5 million feet of film through its cameras. Those were VistaVision cameras, and cinematographer Michael Bauman said the system had not seen that…
  • Everything Everywhere All at OnceEverything Everywhere All at Once began as a script for a male lead, written with Jackie Chan in mind.
  • Ordinary PeopleMichael J. Fox auditioned for Ordinary People and lost the role to Timothy Hutton. Hutton won an Oscar for it at age 20.

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