Offbeat Oscars: 10 Outside-the-Box Best Picture Winners
The Academy Awards have a well-earned reputation for playing it safe when it comes to picking their Best Picture winners, but there’s no denying that they’ve become a bit less predictable in recent years. Diversifying the kinds of movies they champion (if, frustratingly, not the kinds of people in them), the Oscars have slowly started to move away from their history of reflexively exalting lavish musicals and straightforward historical epics.
Just look at 2015’s ceremony: Sure, you could argue that directed by Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Birdman overcame its weirdness by appealing to the film industry’s self-congratulatory narcissism, but there’s really no precedent for an awards juggernaut about a telekinetic actor who’s struggling with social media and begins to caw at strangers. And then of course, there’s Oscar-winner The Shape of Water from director Guillermo del Toro — a story about a mute woman in love with a god-like fishman creature — so let’s not fool forget that the Academy has a history of flipping for quirky movies.
Still, Iñárritu and del Toro are hardly the first filmmakers who’ve ever inspired the Oscars to reach outside of their comfort zone. Here are 10 Best Picture winners that reminded the world that the Academy sometimes takes the road less traveled.
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‘Midnight Cowboy’ (1969)
Arriving at the end of a decade in which four Best Picture winners were full-throated Broadway adaptations, John Schlesinger's tale of a friendship between a con man and a gigolo woke up an industry that had been content to sing its way through the Vietnam War. The only X-rated film to ever snag an Oscar (even though the MPAA eventually forgave the "homosexual frame of reference" and downgraded it to an R), Midnight Cowboy was transgressive for its time, and its victory over Hello, Dolly! suggested the shape of things to come. Overnight, and for more than a decade to come, "nice" Best Picture winners became the exception instead of the rule.
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‘Rocky’ (1976)
Boasting two separate wins for the Godfather saga, the early Seventies was a magical time when the Academy Awards' shortlist was crowded with bleak masterpieces: Chinatown, Cries and Whispers, The Conversation. When Rocky improbably snagged Best Picture in 1976 — cementing its legacy as cinema's ultimate underdog story — its triumph over Network and All the President's Men was all the more shocking. Here was the Academy giving the grand prize to an unequivocally feel-good story, at a time when most Oscar contenders offered even fewer smiles than they did black people. Going inside the ring to think outside the box, the movie proved that the unconventional pick is sometimes the most conventional nominee.
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‘Annie Hall’ (1977)
Compared to a fellow nominee like Star Wars — or the following year's winner, The Deer Hunter — Woody Allen's neurotic classic feels as scrawny as its nebbish hero. And yet, even the biggest sci-fi fanatics would have a hard time arguing that the Oscars got this one wrong. The only non-musical comedy to win Best Picture between Tom Jones in 1963 and Driving Miss Daisy in 1989 (if we're being generous with the definition of "comedy"), Annie Hall smashed through the fourth wall in order to bring modernism to an awards group that traditionally likes to keep one foot stuck in the past.
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‘The Silence of the Lambs’ (1991)
Before Jonathan Demme's adaptation of Thomas Harris' novel, the idea of a horror movie winning Best Picture felt like the Toxic Avenger winning Miss America — there wasn't much in the Academy's history to suggest they would ever crown a movie this violent and misanthropic, particularly one that wasn't shrouded in the fog of war. Of course, when Hannibal Lecter escapes from his cell, he likes to make a show of it: Not only was this the first pure horror movie to so much as score a nomination since The Exorcist in 1973, it was also only the third film in Oscar history to walk away with all five of the top prizes.
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‘American Beauty’ (1999)
It's hard to believe now, but once upon a time it took a certain boldness to call attention to a movie about a modern middle-aged white man going through an existential crisis. The only Best Picture winner ever inspired by the sight of a plastic bag dancing in the wind, Sam Mendes' highly polarizing — and endlessly mocked — satire of suburban malaise broke one of the Academy's longest streaks of sweeping historical dramas (Shakespeare in Love, Titanic, The English Patient, etc.). Playing like a faux-existential Douglas Sirk film for the minivan era, the film's focus on "how we live now" made it the odd duck of a category full of seemingly irresistible Oscarbait like The Cider House Rules and The Green Mile.
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‘Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King’ (2003)
On one hand, Peter Jackson's trilogy of Tolkien adaptations was such a critical and commercial sensation that a Best Picture trophy seemed inevitable for its final installment. On the other hand, this is effectively the last three-and-a-half hours of a 558-minute movie about a band of hairy little people trying to return a piece of jewelry. While its Oscar victory may have been preordained, The Return of the King was nevertheless the first fantasy film to win Best Picture, its triumph eradicating myth that the Academy Awards were too stuffy to recognize the merits of a film in which Elijah Wood rides a giant eagle over an erupting volcano.
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‘The Departed’ (2006)
It's unlikely that anyone involved ever imagined that this remake of a Hong Kong gangster movie would be the film that won Scorsese his Oscar (especially after Gangs of New York swung for the fences and came up short), but the master's pulpy crime saga managed to get the job done. Too frequently diminished as a tribute to Scorsese's entire body of work, the Academy's decision to honor The Departed was a harsh course-correction to the Crash debacle of 2005. It was also the rare Best Picture that refused to play nice or pretend that it didn't enjoy busting heads.
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‘Slumdog Millionaire’ (2008)
It's always a bit of a surprise when any Academy Award goes to a person of color; it's a monumental shock when the Oscar for Best Picture went to a movie that was full of them. 2008 marked the first time that Hollywood's top prize had been given to a movie with an almost exclusively non-white cast (The Last Emperor is an arguable exception; Gandhi is not), but Slumdog Millionaire also signaled a critical shift in a number of other respects. A love story that arrived on the heels of decidedly unromantic winners like No Country for Old Men, Danny Boyle's populist Indian fairy tale was as warm and frivolous as previous awardees were bleak and borderline nihilistic.
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‘The Hurt Locker’ (2009)
The only Best Picture awarded to a film about an ongoing war since Casablanca in 1943 (and what a hard-nosed look at WWII that was), The Hurt Locker was dumped into the summer movie season before topping a newly expanded field of 10 nominees to claim Oscar gold. Kathryn Bigelow’s tense and refreshingly uncontroversial Iraq War saga managed to explode a category that ran the gamut from sci-fi spectacles (Avatar and District 9), an unflinching inner-city drama (Precious), and a movie about a young woman learning a valuable lesson about the price of having sex with Peter Sarsgaard (An Education).
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‘The Artist’ (2011)
History will remember February 26th, 2012 as the day when the Oscars officially became a crap shoot. The last (and most visionary) of Harvey Weinstein’s legendary Academy Awards heists, The Artist was an outside-the-box pick that few people saw, and even fewer saw coming. The first “silent” film to win Best Picture since 1929 and the first black-and-white film to win Best Picture since 1960, Michael Hazanavicius’ love letter to old Hollywood triumphed over competition from Alexander Payne, Terrence Malick, Woody Allen, and Steven Spielberg. Quickly brushed under the rug, the French movie nevertheless cemented this as an era in which almost any kind of movie can take home the business’ biggest prize.