Academy Award For Best Picture - History

History

At the 1st Academy Awards ceremony (for 1927 and 1928), there was no Best Picture award. Instead, there were two separate awards, one called Most Outstanding Production, won by the epic Wings, and one called Most Artistic Quality of Production, won by the art film Sunrise. The awards were intended to honor different and equally important aspects of superior filmmaking, and in fact the judges and the studio bosses who sought to influence their decisions paid more attention to the latter - MGM head Louis B. Mayer, who had disliked the realism of King Vidor's The Crowd, another of the nominees (the third was Merian C. Cooper and Ernest B. Schoedsack's Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness) pressured the judges not to honor his own studio's film, and to select Sunrise instead. The next year, the Academy instituted a single award called Best Production, and decided retroactively that the award won by Wings had been the equivalent of that award, with the result that Wings is often listed as the winner of a sole Best Picture award for the first year. The title of the award was eventually changed to Best Picture for the 1931 awards.

From 1944 to 2008, the Academy restricted nominations to five Best Picture nominees per year. As of the 84th Academy Awards ceremony (for 2011), there have been 494 films nominated for the Best Picture award. Invariably, the Academy Awards for Best Picture and Best Director have been very closely linked throughout their history. Of the 84 films that have been awarded Best Picture, 62 have also been awarded Best Director. Only three films have won Best Picture without their directors being nominated (though only one since the early 1930s): Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32), and Driving Miss Daisy (1989). The only two Best Director winners to win for films which did not receive a Best Picture nomination are likewise in the early years: Lewis Milestone (1927/28) and Frank Lloyd (1928/29).

On June 24, 2009, AMPAS announced that the number of films nominated in the Best Picture award category would increase from five to ten, starting with the 82nd Academy Awards (2009). The expansion was a throwback to the Academy's early years in the 1930s and 1940s, when anywhere between eight and 12 films were shortlisted (or longlisted). "Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going to allow Academy voters to recognize and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize," AMPAS President Sid Ganis said in a press conference. "I can't wait to see what that list of 10 looks like when the nominees are announced in February." At the same time, the voting system was switched from first-past-the-post to Alternative Vote (also known as Instant Run-off Vote). Two years after this change, the Academy adjusted the rule again so the number of films nominated per year were instead between 5 and 10 provided that the film earned 5% of first-place votes during the nomination process. Academy Executive Bruce Davis cited "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."

One point of contention is the lack of consideration of non-English language films for categories other than Best Foreign Language Film. Very few foreign language films have been nominated for any other categories, regardless of artistic merit. To date, only eight foreign language films (and three partly foreign language films) have been nominated for Best Picture: Grand Illusion (French, 1938); Z (French, 1969); The Emigrants (Swedish, 1972); Cries and Whispers (Swedish, 1973); Il Postino (Italian/Spanish, 1995); Life Is Beautiful (Italian, 1998); Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (Mandarin Chinese, 2000); and Letters from Iwo Jima (Japanese, 2006), which was ineligible for the Best Foreign Language Oscar because it was an American production. The only partly foreign language films to win Best Picture are The Godfather Part II (English/Sicilian, 1974), The Last Emperor (English/Mandarin, 1987) and Slumdog Millionaire (English/Hindi, 2008).

Another point of contention is the recent bias toward 2-plus hour films, before The Artist won, Crash was the shortest film to win Best Picture in the past 20 years, which clocks in at 112 minutes. Furthermore, no animated film has won the award (Disney's Beauty and the Beast and Disney-Pixar's Up and Toy Story 3 were nominated); no science fiction film has won despite a number of successful nominees; and only two comedies (Shakespeare in Love, 1998; and The Artist, 2011) have won in the last 30 years. Also to date, there has yet to be a documentary nominated for Best Picture, the closest being Chang: A Drama of the Wilderness which was nominated for Unique and Artistic Production in the first year of the ceremony's inception.

To date, twelve films exclusively financed outside the United States have won Best Picture; eleven of which were financed, in part or in whole, by the United Kingdom. Those films were, in chronological order: Hamlet, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, Tom Jones, A Man for All Seasons, Oliver!, Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, The Last Emperor, Slumdog Millionaire and The King's Speech. The twelfth film, The Artist, was financed by France.

No Best Picture winner has been lost, though a few such as All Quiet on the Western Front and Lawrence of Arabia exist only in a form altered from their original, award-winning release form, usually due to editing for reissue (and subsequently partly restored by archivists). Other winners and nominees such as Tom Jones and Star Wars are widely available only in subsequently altered versions. The 1928 film The Patriot is the only Best Picture nominee that is lost; The Racket was believed lost for many years but a print existed in producer Howard Hughes' archives and it has since been shown on Turner Classic Movies.

The Artist (with the exception of a single scene of dialogue) was the first silent film since Wings to win Best Picture, although a part-silent version of All Quiet on the Western Front was created for foreign-language release and survives. The Artist was also the first silent nominee (other than the silent version of a nominated talkie) since The Patriot, as well as the first Best Picture winner shot entirely in black-and-white since 1960's The Apartment. (Schindler's List, the 1993 winner, was predominantly black-and-white but contained some brief color sequences.)