Academy Award for Best Picture

• 1. The Wrong Envelope

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  The Academy Award for Best Picture changed hands on live television on the 26th of February 2017. Presenter Faye Dunaway read La La Land as the winner. She and Warren Beatty had been handed the duplicate envelope for the Best Actress in a Leading Role award. La La Land's producers were already mid-speech when producer Jordan Horowitz noticed the error. He held up the correct envelope and told the audience that Moonlight had actually won.

  That moment illustrated something about Best Picture that no other Oscar can claim. It is the only category in which every Academy member may both nominate films and vote on the final ballot. It is announced last. The entire ceremony builds toward it.

  Since the award's debut on the 16th of May 1929, 621 films have been nominated and 98 have won. The rules governing who receives the trophy have changed multiple times. So has the number of films allowed into the race. And the Academy's choices have provoked some of the most public disputes in Hollywood history. Answering all of these requires going back to the very first ceremony, when the Academy handed out not one top prize but two.

• 2. Two Prizes, One Name

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  Wings won at the 1st Academy Awards in 1929, but it was not alone at the top. The Academy presented two equivalent honors that year. Outstanding Picture went to the war epic Wings. Unique and Artistic Picture went to the art film Sunrise. Each award was designed to recognize a different dimension of excellence in filmmaking.

  The Jazz Singer presented a problem neither category could absorb. Its use of synchronized sound made it incomparable to the silent films in both categories. The Academy disqualified it from competition. It received an honorary award instead.

  In 1930, the Academy reversed itself. It declared retroactively that Wings had held the higher honor and dropped the Unique and Artistic Picture category. The field opened to films with synchronized sound. What had been presented as two equal prizes became, overnight, a single hierarchy.

  From the 1929-30 ceremony through 1940, the award was called Outstanding Production. It became Outstanding Motion Picture from 1941 to 1943, then Best Motion Picture from 1944 through 1961. The name Best Picture, which the award carries today, was adopted in 1962.

  The Grand Staircase columns at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood display the full lineage of winners from Wings onward. That venue has hosted the ceremony since 2002. For the award's first twenty-two years, though, the trophy did not go to a filmmaker at all. It went to a representative of the studio that made the film.

• 3. Producers, Records, Rules

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  Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer collected five Best Picture wins during the era when the award went to production companies. With forty nominations, it was the dominant studio in the field. In 1950, the Academy changed the rule so the award went to credited producers instead.

  In 1999, five producers of Shakespeare in Love all accepted awards following its win. The Academy responded by imposing a maximum of three recipients per film. Exceptions have been made. Anthony Minghella and Sydney Pollack were posthumously included among the four nominees for The Reader in 2008. The Academy described the exception as a "rare and extraordinary circumstance."

  Steven Spielberg holds the record for most nominations at fourteen, with one win. Kathleen Kennedy has received eight nominations without winning once. Among individual wins, Sam Spiegel and Saul Zaentz each claimed three prizes, more than anyone else in the award's history.

  Columbia Pictures and United Artists share the all-time studio lead with twelve wins each. The Academy has recognized films from 20th Century Fox sixty-four times, more than any other company. Eight of those nominations became wins.

  Of the 98 films that have won Best Picture, 71 were also awarded Best Director. Six films have won Best Picture without receiving a Best Director nomination at all. They range from Wings in 1927-28 to CODA in 2021, with Grand Hotel, Driving Miss Daisy, Argo, and Green Book among them.

• 4. From Five to Ten

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  On the 24th of June 2009, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced an expansion of the Best Picture category. Starting with the 82nd Academy Awards, the number of nominees would increase from five to ten. The Academy cited the practice of the 1930s and 1940s, when eight to twelve films were regularly nominated.

  The Dark Knight and WALL-E, both released in 2008, had generated strong public expectation that they would compete for Best Picture. Neither received a nomination. Many commentators connected the omissions directly to the expansion.

  AMPAS President Sid Ganis said the expansion would let voters recognize films squeezed out of the Best Picture race. "I can't wait to see what that list of 10 looks like when the nominees are announced in February," he added. Alongside the expansion, the Academy switched from first-past-the-post to instant runoff voting, also called preferential voting.

  In 2011, the Academy revised the rule again. Rather than a fixed ten, the number of nominees would vary between five and ten. Films needed to earn five percent of first-place rankings to qualify. Academy executive director Bruce Davis said: "A Best Picture nomination should be an indication of extraordinary merit. If there are only eight pictures that truly earn that honor in a given year, we shouldn't feel an obligation to round out the number."

  That flexible system ran until 2021, when the Academy returned to a fixed number of ten nominees. That rule has applied from the 94th Academy Awards onward. The eligibility period has been extended only once in the award's history. The COVID-19 pandemic led the Academy to push the 2020 deadline to the 28th of February 2021.

• 5. Languages and Frontiers

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  Twenty-one non-English language films have been nominated for Best Picture. The first was the French production La Grande Illusion in 1938. Since then, the list has included films in Swedish, Italian, Korean, Japanese, Mandarin Chinese, German, Portuguese, Norwegian, Mixtec, and Korean Sign Language.

  Parasite, the Korean-language film produced in 2019, became the first film not in English to win Best Picture. It was financed entirely in South Korea.

  Ten Best Picture winners were financed wholly outside the United States, and eight of those came from the United Kingdom. That run stretches from Hamlet in 1948 through The King's Speech in 2010. France financed a ninth winner, The Artist in 2011, and South Korea financed the tenth, Parasite.

  Beauty and the Beast in 1991 was the first animated film nominated for Best Picture. Two more followed after the Academy expanded its nominee pool: Up in 2009 and Toy Story 3 in 2010. None of the three has won. The Best Animated Feature category, created at the 74th Academy Awards, drew criticism that it effectively steered animated films away from the main race. DreamWorks CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg campaigned for Shrek to be nominated for Best Picture in 2001. The film received a Golden Globe nomination, a BAFTA nomination for Best Film, and a Critics' Choice Award nomination for Best Picture. It was not nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars. WALL-E in 2008 received six Oscar nominations, tying Beauty and the Beast as the most nominated animated film in Academy history. It won Best Animated Feature.

  Two Korean-language nominees, Minari in 2020 and Past Lives in 2023, were ineligible for the Best International Feature Film prize because both were American productions.

• 6. Disputed Verdicts

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  The 25th Academy Awards produced what Time would later rank among the ten most controversial Best Picture races in the award's history. The Greatest Show on Earth beat High Noon for the prize. Retrospectively, The Greatest Show on Earth has been considered by many to be among the weakest films ever to win Best Picture.

  In 1999, Saving Private Ryan was widely expected to win. It lost to Shakespeare in Love. DreamWorks executives, including Terry Press, accused Miramax and producer Harvey Weinstein of running a campaign against Saving Private Ryan rather than promoting their own film. Press said Weinstein "tried to get everybody to believe that Saving Private Ryan was all in the first 15 minutes."

  Brokeback Mountain's loss to Crash in 2005 produced accusations of a different kind. Critic Kenneth Turan publicly accused Academy members of homophobia for choosing Crash over a film about a gay relationship. The other nominees that year included Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote, and Munich, each tackling heavy subjects including McCarthyism, homosexuality, and terrorism. Presenter Jack Nicholson was caught on camera mouthing the word "whoa" after Crash was announced as the winner.

  From 2018, the Academy made a formal effort to add more younger, female, non-white, and non-American voters to its membership. It also created a non-voting "emeritus" status for members who had not worked in the industry after a set period of time.

  The Academy Aperture 2025 initiative formalized these aims as written eligibility requirements, taking effect with the 96th Academy Awards. A film must satisfy two of four criteria: on-screen representation and narratives, creative leadership and project team, industry access and opportunities, and audience development. These standards apply only to the Best Picture category.

  Emilia Pérez entered the 2024 awards season as the year's most nominated film. Its lead actress, Karla Sofía Gascón, accused the team behind fellow nominee I'm Still Here of running a smear campaign. The accusation included I'm Still Here's lead actress, Fernanda Torres. The Academy prohibits such conduct, and the charge was found to be baseless. Shortly afterward, a series of racist and Islamophobic posts by Gascón were uncovered by Canadian journalist Sarah Hagi. Most Oscar observers concluded that these discoveries had ended Emilia Pérez's chances of winning.