With days to go until the 97th Academy Awards, wild uncertainty still rules over who will become the next Best Picture Oscar winner. Anora seems to have the most buzz, but Conclave’s big wins at the BAFTAs and Screen’s Actor Guild Awards can’t be ignored. There’s also The Brutalist lurking in the back as a potential classic epic cinema choice for this award. Let’s also not forget Emilia Perez, which may return to the award-season champ status it previously had before Karla Sofia Gascon’s old tweets resurfaced. Anything can happen in this category, which means that we’re bound to experience a surprise Best Picture winner this year.
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Of course, the 97th Academy Awards won’t be the first ceremony where the Best Picture victor inspired gasps and retroactive reflection on how certain titles came out of nowhere to secure the big Oscar prize. In the 21st century alone, five especially surprising Best Picture victors have occurred. They’ve gone down in history as tremendously unexpected award-season champs for a multitude of reasons, with these titles inspiring everything from repulsion to joy in their unexpected Best Picture wins.
CODA
2021 was a weird year for cinema, as domestic movie theaters opened back up and theatrical film studios sporadically began re-committing to regularly releasing films on the big screen again. To reflect how weird this year was, the 94th Academy Awards (held in 2022 to reward 2021’s cinema) featured a Best Picture showdown between two streaming movies. The Power of the Dog (from Netflix) and CODA (from Apple TV+) were the frontrunners for this category. Though Dog had way more nominations than the latter film, CODA beat out all expectations to secure a Best Picture win. The first (and, so far, only) streaming film to score this Oscar, CODA also managed to win Best Picture even with only three overall Oscar nods (including Picture) to its name. A fittingly unexpected win for an upside-down year of cinema.
Green Book
When Movie 43 landed in theaters in January 2013 to some of the worst reviews in history, who would have imagined that one of its masterminds (Peter Farrelly) would’ve been helming a Best Picture winner by the end of the decade? One of the minds behind Hall Pass helmed Green Book, which defeated that year’s perceived Best Picture frontrunners like Roma and Black Panther. Though Green Book had no Best Director Oscar nomination to its name (usually a requirement for a Best Picture winner), its crowdpleaser status and momentum in other categories (namely Best Original Screenplay and Best Supporting Actor) led to it being that year’s reigning Oscar champ. Who knows, maybe the Oscar voters were also big Movie 43 fans.
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Spotlight
Some surprise Best Picture Oscar winners inspire grumbles from the general public, chiefly over perceptions that more conventional Oscar contenders beat out more unorthodox potential winners like Brokeback Mountain or Roma. Spotlight, though, was one surprise everyone cheered for. After all, this title was the ultimate underdog, being a tiny indie title distributed by Open Road Films rather than having lots of Netflix or Fox Searchlight money informing its For Your Consideration campaign. Before Oscar night, the favorites to win Best Picture at the 88th Academy Awards were The Revenant (which took home Best Director that year) and The Big Short.
Outlets like Vox, very understandably, perceived Spotlight as having won too few Oscar precursor awards to have Best Picture Oscar momentum. In the end, though, Spotlight managed to beat out its costlier major studio brethren, all while winning only one other award (Best Original Screenplay) at the ceremony. This was a surprise underdog victory everyone could get behind.
Moonlight
Given that all the buzz leading up to the 89th Academy Awards was that the Best Picture race would come down to La La Land and Moonlight, the possibility of this Barry Jenkins indie winning that Oscar wasn’t especially ludicrous. Plus, Moonlight was one of the great triumphs of 2016 cinema, and winning here would’ve been a joyful surprise. What made Moonlight a more chaotic surprise, though, was the now infamous moment where the wrong envelope got presented and La La Land was briefly crowned the Best Picture winner. A boondoggle that defined that year’s Oscars and has cast a shadow over every other subsequent ceremony, Moonlight’s Best Picture win redefined the definition of a “surprise victor” in this category.
Crash
If anyone remembers Crash today, it’s because it beat out Brokeback Mountain for a Best Picture Oscar that many thought was all sewn up for that Ang Lee feature. Instead, this Paul Haggis directorial effort took home the prize, which inspired a deluge of controversy. For one thing, the lack of openly queer Best Picture Oscar winners (Moonlight would become only the first Best Picture victor with an explicitly queer protagonist over a decade later) led to allegations that discomfort over Brokeback‘s gay romance led to Crash winning. Crash’s own problematic approaches to topics like race, police brutality, and class, meanwhile, have only gotten worse with age and exacerbated frustration over its surprise Best Picture win.
What do you think was the most surprising Best Picture winner? Let us know in the comments below!
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