Best Picture Oscar Winners of the 21st Century, Ranked

Ross Bonaime revisits every Best Picture winner of the 21st century, from 2000’s Gladiator through 2025's One Battle After Another, and ranks them with the benefit of hindsight. He opens by noting the Oscars are inherently silly—Hollywood awarding itself—yet also useful for raising the profile of smaller or more complicated films.

Time, he argues, is the ultimate arbiter, so he went back and ranked the winners and picked, for each year, the film he thinks should have won instead. The list mixes wholehearted praise for some victors with clear-eyed criticism of others, treating the award as both a celebration and an imperfect cultural gauge.

Some winners land awkwardly in retrospect. Crash, ranked lowest, is called an embarrassing footnote next to Brokeback Mountain.

USA, Hollywood

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